Getting old… and losing your touch

Sure, you could say I’m in a slump lately. It’s the bump and grind of blue collar life and it ain’t getting prettier. Perhaps ill blame it on my age. This month spells out the completion of my quarter century.

Here’s the formula; maybe I have too much time to think. I’m in the truck, and within the first hour I’m spitting out stuff about how open and free the morning highway is, and all this imagery starts up with my dad and I in our early morning house moves. That was a long time ago, damn. We would get up at 6 and drink down some bitter Dunkin Donuts coffee and wreck our bodies for the rest of the day loading up our earthly belongings into that rented U-haul. It’s was always some shitty truck with gray tape across the faded vinyl and absolutely no horn. We must have done this together half a dozen times, and I don’t think he knows it, but those are some of my favorite memories of us. Sure, the moving was ball raking stuff, but at the end of the day we moved a goddamn mountain together, and that’s something to be proud of.

The creative phase can go on all day and I’m left at the end of the shift with nine pure hours of associative free form material about my life and relationships. It’s a daunting thing though, perhaps you don’t understand. It’s the mental effort of passing a grapefruit out your nostril. You need to do it in pieces, not just have one lump sum of citrus and mucous come popping out of you. It’s too much cathartic shit for one little day.

My notebook is something the cat likes to sleep on or paw at. I haven’t gone to a pub or taken a walk or kissed a girl in months. Wordplay is something used for little more than insulting obnoxious co-workers. On more than one occasion I have substituted the dizzy caress of bum wine for cuddling a lover to sleep.

Maybe it’s all just part of getting old, cranky and apathetic; but ill just call it a slump for now, until I break my hip. Maybe it’s the Feng-Shui of having a job you like and some goddamn town you can stand that evades me. Ah, fuck it, lets have some poetry!

Here’s to my readers, you know who you are. Daddy loves each and every one of ya…

We can't live without an enemy...

It is a mere coincidence that her face resembles yours,
In the clefts and pitches of pearl skin,
From the distance even,
That of half a parking lot.

It was an illusion that her eyes,
That beamed with assumption and confidence,
Found me steady in my tracks,
And revealed me for who I am.

It was a toss up on what bus to take,
Yet I picked the one where your soft voice sat behind me,
Helping me smile aloofly all of a sudden,
In the ways I will myself to suffer heroically.

I scribble your name with deep black chalk,
On the hallways and in the elevator shaft,
Ill do it all while I’m sleeping,
So I can believe all the waking day in my stalker.

Ill shut tight my eyes,
And the old woman’s Spanish chatter,
Reminds me of your bedroom coo,
In the way it pitches like a sinking tugboat.

I will put on that old movie soundtrack,
That we used to hum to in the car,
But out of respect and fear of ourselves,
Remained silent for her long song about failed lovers.

It’s a matter of chance that your name appears,
More frequently than I might imagine,
In a novel or an article,
As I sob pitifully to myself.

My stage is a congress of torpid memories,
And I play them all like a one man band,
Wiping my egoists tears into the crook of my arm,
And dreaming that I’m waiting for the search party.

It was a conflict of interests,
Yet a well timed event,
That we each uttered ‘I love you’,
In something like unison.

I’m lucky that carrying your picture around,
Grants me so much self importance,
So that at any moment of the work day,
I can feel my gut plunge like a water slide.

I’m fortunate that I can recall every detail of those months,
Because it makes for good bait,
As I look for ways to bring you up in conversation,
The cancerous trophy.

See here? I might be overheard saying,
And it was me pointing back on my life,
And instead of now having a hope or a dream,
Just pointing an excited finger at a blank portrait of you.

Lovely Red Herrings

Im so proud of my dearest Pash; she has been awarded a top honor in her class, and she owes it all to her devotion to the party. She is lovely... She can make a grown man cry...

Bombshell in Furs

I oft wonder how this feisty little commie bombshell found her way into my life, but together we most certainly are. Our days are filled with tummy rubs, agility training runs and quiet evenings on which we both work on our respective manuscripts and/or manifestos.

Things for me to ask, and you to answer…

- If babies didn’t cry, would it still be fun to spank them?

- Why is sex more fun when it’s in a public place,
instead of at home by your self?

- What did Helen Keller name her cat?

- Why are all the people on street signs black?

- What if people on airplanes wore barf hats?

- Why doesn’t Oprah just read the books she likes and just shut the fuck up?

- Why would you not vote for Christopher Walken?
http://www.walken2008.com/index.html

Plastic Faces and Rubber Hands

Colette looked particularly exhausted this evening, and with good reason. The hospital was overstuffed with the sick and infirm. Every isle revealed another atrocity in the making, a headline or piece of legislation in progress. Every bed was a fine example of a textbook ailment that stretched over a human face and frail body. This is her world just as much as burgers and fry sacks became the world of her little sister; and in all of this she found refuge in standing above those broken bodies and proclaiming her will to survive. She did not consider it a virtue to attend these fallen victims of living; instead a triumph.

She would think to herself in the midst of her small breaks about the poor bodies she encounters every moment. She reflects to herself on the harsh lack of funding, on the old equipment and short supplies. This is all a conversation in her mind, and maybe more of just taking notes and recalling all the ways that people don’t have to suffer. Sometimes still she imagines this as her refuge from it all, the knowledge that her foresight can prevent some of the mess altogether.

Its back to the floor, and it seems a senile dementia patient just tried to walk out the front door. It would have worked flawlessly if he hadn’t been hit by the ambulance. Colette runs with the frantic crowd, them grabbing up any useful machinery in the passing; crutches, gurneys; a flash out the door to red white wailing lights and a still body below.

“Who was on his watch?” Screams a twisted face to a sea of white smocks.

Turn’s out nobody was on his watch; he slipped through the cracks, barely a chart on the wall. Is anybody to blame; we will have a revision committee to find some blame. You can bet your watch on that.

She watches a few minutes later, getting some cold water from the fountain, he’s wheeled in on a bed. Code red, I think he shattered his spine; thinks Colette, hating this place for another uncountable time tonight. It’s a place of uncomfortable beds and tragic moments exploding left and right.

She wanted to go to grad school to upgrade the nursing degree a bit. Hell, she could hand out pills and take the measurements, change any size diaper and initiate a code; but damn if she didn’t want to feel a little more helpful.

“Being here is like being part of a slow machine.” She once recounted to her mother on the telephone. “You abide by it’s pace, and it chugs along as people curl up and die all around you.”

“Well honey, the system works that way for a reason…”

That’s all mom could say? Wasn’t she listening when she talked about needle shortages and medicine rationing? Did mom forget the stories about botched watch schedules and now that old man that died from having his torso shattered by a white and red meat wagon?

No, it doesn’t have to be like this. She talked to herself and recounted enough grisly details to make her feel right again, justified.

Mom doesn’t know what people go through; she is a goddamn secretary. She keeps this talk up, building an inferno out of maternal misunderstanding until it becomes tiring enough to drown out her consciousness on the living room couch.

The watch says five in the morning and it’s some re-run of ER on the television that has been on for hours. George Clooney is checking up on a rather difficult patient with autism. This happens too; special needs and special circumstances. Sometimes an injured person in shock and with a mental deficiency can be a dangerous situation; it happens time and again. Sure the kid can handle a little abuse before he figures out what is going on, but now he is embarrassed, bleeding all over the checkup bed, looking dizzy and showing the blood pressure of a serious concussion, and nobody can get him down long enough to get an IV in him. MRI’s are out; he doesn’t like the dark.

The elderly come in by the dozens, though many in fact do not venture out again. Sometimes they come in just for some routine irrigation and a glucose check and end up leaving with heart failure. For the second, you do not use the front door. Sometimes its broken hips and femurs waiting to explode into gangrene, or it crippling arthritis, or a plethora of new cancers metastasizing from old worn blood.

Within a moment of introspection, Colette passed her eyes through the glass of the waiting room in survey of the timid faces. She sees beyond the needy looks and broken figures, instead her own face and family in a dense crowd of onlookers. It became difficult to discern them as the tears began.

Please eat; you beg the little old man who lays torpid in his elevated bed. His eyes fix with a glassy countenance on the television screen as it methodically scans the first five seconds of each channel. Some screens are just gray dust and static noise, but his eyes are unrelenting pivots. They were bloodshot; they reminded her of wet marbles trustingly flecked in gold.

A buzzer ignites in the uncomfortable silence between an immobile body and its keeper. Colette’s soft hand brushes over his forehead, wiping away the sweat from his straining with a light cotton cloth and then lifting a small sincere smile to his glaring face before rushing into the hallway.

She found the door open, and inside the harshly lit quarters dwelled a mass of plain clothed folk around the tiny bed. One grappled with a handful of deep rouge balloons that bounced gleefully at the low ceiling. Colette shoved her way through the bodies and found the six-year-old resident of the bed sitting with her bandaged legs crossed and a two tired cake upon her lap. Another push through the flanks of birthday goers and it’s the wide bed of a terminal leukemia patient. The monitors are stable; the morphine drip keeps his groggy body asleep even through the tremors of birthday songs. It wasn’t his buzzer; she is furious.

“Nurse?” one of the guests beckons her towards the celebration, ignorant of the dying boy in the periphery of the room. “We though we could buzz you for some plates or napkins?”

Collete’s first reaction pulled the curtain closed around the sick boy, his purple and punctured arm disappearing behind the zip of a white curtain. Her arm quickly found a guests elbow and spun his spindly figure around to meet her eyes. One push and he was out the door, the other side of the hallway and holding steadily the silver lift bar between the supply doors.

Instinct, and she looked back to the impenetrable cloth wall. Barely above a whisper she commanded every onlooker out the door along the path of her pointed finger. Her lip quivered and her voice shook as the giant cake was lifted out of a little girls lap and the relatives left with angry grunts and disappointed sighs. A few expensive gifts laid about the meal table, but it was again empty and quiet aside from the snobbish mother consoling her sobbing child and the automated breathing of the sick boy in the corner.

Death followed everywhere, and through careful metaphors it even sat in the corner of the room as an inconsiderate birthday celebration was carried out. It garnished precious gifts for a coming of age six-year-old, and Colette had to wonder how that money might save a little boy of death from leukemia.

Night came quick tonight, and the nurses made their rounds closing the curtains for the front side of the building. The streetlights glared with such a sodium luminance from the parking lot that without the thick dark drapes, the throb of Incandescent might trouble the sleep of every facing window.

Colette went again to the room of the little old man, and though with a start, greeted her co-worker as she stood over his bed. Colette noticed the unsure look in her eyes, perhaps even a distended silence. She was barely to speak, when Emily’s eyes lifted to hers and confirmed her suspicions. “I think he has passed”.

Colette reached over again to touch the spongy forehead that she not an hour ago wiped of perspiration. It was now cold and moist flesh, loosely hung as the muscles began their atrophy and decline.

Her fingers sunk into some of the fascia of his face, her fingers tracing a path down the ridge of his nose and across the edge of a lip. Her hand brushed the eyes, closing one lid and leaving the other open to glare dryly at the overhead light.

Emily laughed uncomfortably, her hands in a knot in front of her. She wrung her fingers in a neurotic fashion, losing control of the situation. She almost pleaded out loud for Colette to quit her antics, but lacked the resolve and in possessing the curiosity for this lifeless body, she watched.

Fingers and limbs still flexed in the dead and in the subtle decline of flexibility they become rigid and freeze with every pose. Fingers curled back into the palm give strongly poised middle fingers. His gaping mouth shut by the pressure of a strong palm, only to pop open slowly and toss the top denture onto his bare chest. His eyes loll deeply into the back of the head, face contorted by small girlish hands both mortified and fascinated with a fledgling corpse.

Colette stayed the bathroom, scrubbing her hands and pulling invisible phantom flesh from the undersides of her nails. Hot water revived her face, her eyes raw from the stinging chlorine and the residue of soap.

On the phone her mother asked another unconvincing spate of questions unleashed for the name of small talk. Colette was daydreaming about the springy bones and dry eyes of corpses that now littered her sleep.

Each day was an exercise of staying alive and passing the baton. Sometimes you could sneak out of the fate of a sufferer by seeing what they did wrong in spite of their illness. Sometimes still, it was just a matter of time. Old blood and broken bones; teeth spilled out like a giant pearl pathway to heaven…

The Decline of Antiques in Western Society

Today I found a message in a bottle. It was wrapped in green and gray and tumbled down the wayside into approaching traffic. It was a burden along the hot tar; people watch from the sides of their glasses in hopes of hearing the satisfying crunch of it under wheels. They don’t know what I know.

I chase it down a rolling half block of roadside apartment buildings; nobody leaves their sets to inquire about the chatter of plastic down pavement. I keep up with a quiet pace of a drunk following his mistress home.

My hands are in my pockets as I see the opalescent bottle finally break into a rest upon the lip of a storm drain. I jog.

Now a hundred doors seem to open around me. Every piercing eye catches my limbs flailing in a running dance. A woman lugging an oxygen tank rears upon me with her morning paper in hand, startled by my fretful breaths. I ponder a hit from her tank…

I stop in the field of people, hands on my knees, my goal just out of sight.

Folks stand with jaws agape and eyes fixed, I’m paralyzed like in a dream. I see through open doors into homes and into lives. I realize that there will be no antiques left in the coming centuries aside from movie posters and photo albums. Photo albums that we buy of dead families to scour the past for what we are missing in the present. A timeless hobby.

I recollect myself and stalk the bottle like a curious cat. That bottle of opal green and gray with a hint of effervescent fluid and of which I am certain contains a message. I imagine these old fools are cheering me on. I grab its soft neck and twist like the murderer of chickens…

“Please play again.”

Feminists like Porn too!

Hey, I’ll be the first to admit it; occasionally I will pen a column with a title or subject matter that goes over like the proverbial turd in the punchbowl.

Jesus appears even on the main page, and if not being blamed for single handedly bumping off the Kennedy family, he is being pictured in the act of breastfeeding. The pope is revealed as a pathetic old man, god is demoted to a fictional yet self-righteous booze fiend, and the entire concept of religiousness is played off as a haughty psychological ailment akin to misogyny. Some people really attach themselves to this shit, so I guess I understand the complaints.

Within these pages, you can also peruse the nature of love and romance in accordance to yours truly. You may be supplied with a poem about a lover’s infidelity, the fallibility of modern romance, or a fresh page from the scrapbook of my personal bedroom anthologies. All those contents wherein might also be offensive to viewers squeamish about their bodily parts or who uphold some romantic ideal about modern love as anything other than a societal breeding strategy.

So do I hate love and religion?

I detest the marching of a million feet who protest for all of us to hear, that they understand the nature of love. This is absurd. Your love is found for money; and generally in some boorish hovel with an underage sex slave. Your concept of love is habitual co-dependence and ritualistic co-habitation with intent on negating certain daily cravings and to see to the bifurcation of household chores.

I do hate religion though. For anybody who wants to complain more about that; please make up another universal being and assign him the role of caring. I don’t care two inches of a bowel movement about how you came up with your inane ideas, or what life crisis made you weak enough to crack. Go peddle your wares elsewhere; or else look into the blinding light of my home-churned literature.

So yes, I would have to say that even with a small percent of stubborn and ideologically anal-retentive viewers, life is good. Some of you have even spent the time to tell me your human stories of life love and the absence of the afterlife. I encourage this practice, and with a few more of those excellent stories I’m pondering the task to bring in a guest writer to assist me in offending and humiliating the general consensus. Imagine a deep heartfelt conversation empowered by two lunatics instead of one…

So that’s my plan… More letters, more life, more heresy and deconstruction of society. Keep sending those letters folks, even if you’re one of the aforementioned complainers. It’s just good to know that I’m getting my job done…

my demands

My expectations from poetry,

Are that; from careful sonnets,

Exhumed from the living body,

There might be some tangible transaction,

Made to course between the tracts of time,

And the alien wastes of human understanding.

A Fortune in Love

I think it was an idea that we came up with to facilitate our drinking hobby; but somehow it got out of control. The little ruse that Love and I had going on the street corner telling fortunes; it was a big hit. People would gather all around that little table where she sometimes stood and lectured with raspy screams about the lines and meridians of our palms that miraculously affect our future. I hoped at first it was just a curiosity; that her immediate success had less to do with rattling of truisms about the nature of love than just her amusing act. She often proved me wrong…

 

How can I expect you to keep in the timeline when I move all over the place; that’s the question? Her life, her death; I can’t seem to keep these memories in check. Everybody remembers Love?

 

She is the drunken shapeless midget of a metaphor that I have had the fortune of making acquaintance with. She is sharp and witty, sly and spontaneous and more or less out of control. She is the life of the party and she will sign your suicide note: any questions?

 

So here we are, one spring morning. It’s warm enough for people to start flocking the streets again without their mighty winter trench coats; so they look like naked moles. Large sunglasses and bright new once washed jeans make it out into the open. I spot some sneakers with some autumn leaves still clung to the bottom from last year. Everybody is buying hotdogs like it’s their first time outside; feels like a mass prison release except nobody looks horny. Even the old guys on the benches aren’t grinding their hips to any passing lady, humping in mid air. Wait till the benches warm up.

 

 Love is duded up in this ridiculous outfit: long flowing scarves, some boas and whatever jewelry she had lying around the house.  She looks less like a gypsy mystic than she does a whorish washed up actress, but people eat them both up anyway.

 

She starts attracting people with some photo-copied flyers that have a picture of a hand with some question marks floating around that seem to ask “what mysteries are prevalent within your palm?” It’s funny because people start to walk up and throw down a buck or two just to see what this little girl has hiding up her sleeve. At first they pass her off as a gimmick. I started to collect the money from the seat behind the table while she would close her eyes and rub some schmucks hand and show him his fortune lines.

 

Every wrinkle, she says, tells a story about the fate of its owner. Its life’s blueprint, all built into us to be deciphered by those gifted at seeing it.

 

Well apparently she was saying some impressive stuff, because that one guy would run down the street and bring back five of his friends. This would add up until we were surrounded by clueless Bobs and Mikes that were being told various shit about their lifespan and their child rearing.

 

What was her secret? She was Love. Bob A. asks a question about his love life and Love shoots back the perfect answer. Who is my soul mate, they would generally ask. Love would give them the name of their girlfriend/boyfriend, husband/wife. They are sitting there wide-eyed. clenching their fists, hoping to god that she will give them the name of some Swedish bikini model they have never met; but instead their future is with the complacent obese wife at home.

 

Though the answers are depressingly simply, the novelty of naming with first try all of her customers significant others; that’s something I couldn’t figure out. I wouldn’t be surprised if its some power that comes with being a personification that is hell bent on destroying itself.

 

Who can blame her really? She is Love; hear her roar...

Margo

Margo crouches at the end of her bed; those two crooked mattresses stacked together. They are high enough to let her elbows prop and do the work of sorting through a leafy stack of frail pages. Scissors clip lightly at some of the sheets as they are lifted individually to the cool yellow light at the end of the room.

 

To describe the space would be to do so in terms that reflect the presence of heavy shadows in the sallow umber light. It is a small scentless room with a singly blank wall bearing switches and a mottled wood door. The remaining alabaster panels are clinging loosely, being aged and showing more as a bruised powder to the touch. Their subtle whiteness begets them as a matte texture; this is placed upon the still photograph of the particular evening.

 

Her clipping make a small pile aside an open and nearly blank notebook. A few stark letters of standard sizes stare up from between the baby blue lines. The rest is blank or indiscernible from narrations lofty angles.

 

Again, another quick set of squared snipping and a bit falls to the blankets. This is perhaps her favorite part, a stunning example of a single word in a sea of color. This moment, what falls and is seen amidst the red and green stripe and florations of the bedcover, the word “Faithful”.

 

The leaves fall like some slow autumn, each wilting from the last pinch of sharp blade. Lifeless they fall, tip toeing the humid air, collecting en masse in a glow like candlelight.

 

Each cut catches a meaning, a profound human emotion, how simple for our narrator to ascertain. Each descriptor as forlorn as perhaps its writer. The local paper, there is a multitude of needy nomenclature. The section where people sell themselves. The part that asks you to explain why you are good enough for someone else to ask you into their lives.

 

She wields endless phrases from the personals pages, endless drastically intimate words. With a surgeons grace and a hunters prowess she separates each eye misting descriptor from it’s hiding place. With the final snip that huffs like an exhaled breath…

 

Attention accrues towards those papers in the periphery. Here we notice the building blocks of prose; of fine discreet poetry forming from the assemblage. Each word once a pitiful cry for help and plea from the lonely, now a verbal vase filled with the breath of a new growth surrogate.

 

She calls it “walks on the beach”; but the tender title does not carry on without burden. It is a poem about a faithless man who one day forgets his life and marriage promises as the result of an amnesia he suffers. One day the man leaves for work and never returns. She finds him after a month of searching, but he lives in a motel with a questionable woman. The wife then tries to bait him with back personal adds that she creates out of scraps of others, each day giving more clues to his past and identity until there is an adventure within him to find this mysterious woman who shares his love and perhaps last memory of “walks on the beach”.

 

I can tell what brews within this girl. It might be distrust, but I will call it honesty, and it is a truth that is paid to love. Can you blame a child of a broken home for distrusting sacred vows; nor could you this young woman of her own broken heart.

 

 

 

A Widows Walk

In the windows,
Widows crooned and nearly disappeared,
Hiding swollen eyes in yet to be finished baby blankets,
Ever the while,
Brushing but a stray hand over a cheek,
Like wiping a flake of falling skin,
But instead reveling in long past touch,
When he would reach from lidded eyes,
In a lovers shade of dark,
And press kisses to her forehead,
Kisses that were tears,
Each inside out.

Night became further night,
Now an uncomfortable strain of dark,
When shadows reflected objects behind them,
And the pulse stepped to the periphery,
And the garden shakes with a rumble of insects,
Each prying at tender stalks,
Corn bent lightly with the weight of dead eyed crickets,
Snakes treading endless circuits through stiff bladed grass,
Elk sleeping shyly,
Trembling at every insect sniffing,
The tender sides behind their ears,
And snorting soft nose tissues,
Exhaling what becomes hot morning fog.

The hot fog beads the windows,
That downward upon,
Belie a five stranded streak,
Much like the weight of a widow’s sigh,
As she all but trumpets her angst,
Mending broken old hearts,
With a nip of watered down grain alcohol.

It was those infernal ovens of night,
That sat between endless shades of sunset,
And an old mans yearning for the fertile soils,
That stretches the burden of blame,
To a careless and barren length,
With two dry hands finessing the twine,
And a lazy leg swaying the hammock.

Sunflowers made heavy cloven beats,
Upon windows long tainted,
By whorls of lonely dusts,
And low scratching branches,
Even a limb of lichen,
Brought surely up from the moist and sunless sill.

Was the fog any less for closed eyes,
As the widow crumpled to the mass of sensation,
That was the swaying of the vegetation,
The rutting of swine in dwarfed hemlock,
Muddy bricks collapsing under wind and rain,
Loose white laundry howling in the nightly tempest,
Each fallen leaf shuddering like breaking glass.

As the windows digress,
Into the hunt of night,
That bares its black teeth in stare,
Sating the whine of feral pups,
Reared in the background of pitch black absolute,
Runts reared on spongy wild mushroom,
That lightning starts their heart,
And their race to daylight.

And the widow pitched,
At a gasping lean,
At the front door splayed like a ribcage,
A trail of wet frightened animals,
Peeking through the bright white of lanterns,
Lapping heavy cream from black fire lit saucers.

Nuzzled pups feed,
Finches fall from posture and sink bellow their tiny legs,
A kitten lags skittishly,
With two front hands on the window ledge,
Only to be startled by a deafening thud,
By a lopping sunflower,
Beating pensively in a breeze.

The widow stood,
Motionless behind a stoic stance,
Merely to confront the facade of night,
That seemed so suddenly,
To take the face,
Of a million wilted loves,
Those gone in a trembling rush,
Much to the tone of this selfless dark…

A Few Favorite Things...

I do still remember,

How with a fury,

I would count each of the speckled tiles in your bedroom ceiling.

And trace them each violently with my retina,

As you answered your phone, hushed,

Saying, ill call you back later.

 

How could I say that my favorite thing, was dying,

That my tulip was wilting under the snow,

And if only my breath on your neck could keep you warm enough,

To remain coursing the veins in your petals.

 

How could I tell you,

Without piercing the moment,

That our world was falling apart.

 

How your photo album,

Pulled out as though I could sort it,

As you thumbed through each archived and guarded memory,

Adding spoken notes that disappeared with each turning page,

As they push me farther away.

 

On the plane there was a lot of time to think,

To cogitate the mess I was hurdling to the middle of,

How I should have stuck to my guns,

And stayed home wondering instead,

How your room looked with me in the mirror,

With my arm draped delicately around you.

 

I made it just in time,

For the biopsy and then,

A quick game of jealousy,

Before the talk came of irradiating your body.

 

How could I expect from myself,

Anything but a calm whisper,

To describe what I love,

And how it was dying.

 

And how you took my hand when the plane landed,

Like you had forgotten your lover already,

And ready for me to meet your mom,

My other hand is open to shake,

The same mom I forever avoided,

By asking you not to swallow all your pills at once.

 

When nights later we came close to making love,

But you had tears in your eyes,

Because it was to soon to be with me again,

You were still thinking about him,

Or you wanted to avoid confusion,

As warm limbs seem so similar in a dark room.

 

And we walked that big bridge,

Over a half frozen river,

You will admit that you were petrified,

And part in jest and part in suicidal mood,

You said it might be best to throw you over.

 

You wore faux brown fur,

And the rims of your glasses,

Were as cold as your lips,

And the tip of your trembling nose,

 

We could steal out into the night,

Or see the sights by the complacent daylight of winter,

Watch freezing rain accumulate on the dinner steps,

As we munch cherry pie,

And meatloaf.

 

I avoided your eyes,

Through three flights of museum,

Seeing all the work of dead Andy Worhol,

With a floor for JFK,

 

I made poetry in the antique shop that your mother frequents,

Where she took us to see sculptures,

And an enclave of old lamps and wall hangings,

Where you picked out a table,

That for months you said belonged in our home together.

 

Every site was shouted out,

Like a tour bus driver,

As I took second seat,

And sat with hands folded,

Posture designed to look calm,

And misconceive everyone around me.

 

Every moment in your city,

Like a tumor of my very own,

A reminder of where I am not needed,

When we pass by the brick towers,

And I imagine he is looking down waving,

From the cozy apartment,

Where he took you away.

 

It’s not your fault that the city is vile,

And that each time you neglect your phone,

I want to look inside,

Out of pure animal jealousy.

 

The human species possesses several strange breeding strategies…

 

And I do remember,

Each dimple and dot in the ceiling,

As we slowly fell in love again,

And back out to something more like resentment.

 

I still remember,

How you sleep when you’re angry,

How you hug when you’re genuinely glad to see me.

How you pretend to love,

How you use.

 

I told you that day on the telephone,

That it wasn’t a good way to say goodbye,

By trying your act all over again.

 

I remember the note you wrote,

Saying all the right things about why we should be together,

So long after the fact,

So long after your lover.

 

I remember eighteen long miles,

In the evening ride home,

With your head in my lap,

The occasional smile up.

 

I remember less as the sub tropical sun bleaches my mind,

And as the cocktail of depression and dystopia wear on,

Yet I will always remember,

That my favorite things die.

Send Help

The frightening thing, is that when I revisit old notebooks and dusty abandoned computer files, I feel like I'm peeking into someone elses life. I was there a month ago typing out those lines, but as I read them again and prepare them for finished work, I have the feeling that I’m stealing. It looks alien to me, every letter posed like a challenge that only the myself of yesterday would dare spell out.

So little to re-write. The conclusions flow in effortlessly, and provide a dramatic uptake that I had forgone that month ago. I have the answers to the rhetoric that was posited thirty plus days ago.

I try to start everything with a quote, a line that ties together the philosophy of the piece with the same simplicity it takes to scream “help” in a fire. But sometimes it’s like a voice from another throat.

Maybe its a voice made raspy from smoke inhalation; but it gets harder to tell. What am I trying to say about the state of literature and the written word you say? I'm trying to convey the fleet footed nature of an idea left to sit. I'm attempting to get it through all of our heads that things dissapear when we sleep, so our cause is hopeless until we scratch out our plan on the calloused skin of the earth.

Ill probably forget all of this tommorow… Ill have only the few family snapshots on my wall to remind me of what I am doing here. The bills here have my name on them; that should be enough to form a solid identity before I step out the door and into the open wilderness of city life.

Regards,

Johny Manic

P.S. – Send help

Borrowing Time… prologue

It was not uncommon for me to listen well into the long hours of the sleepless night; because Tara had something to tell. She had a story from the deep, thick heart of the street; a tale about barely surviving that captivated me. She would remind me in those long evenings spent in thought; about how we all have this select amount of time to tell our stories before someone puts the lights out.

I used to think that maybe she was more neurotic than need be, that she is still running from the poverty of childhood and fear of displacement. It’s not difficult to be made paranoid by a society that lets a little girl slip through the cracks. It’s not hard to be scared in a world that buys and sells human commodities much like a flayed fish at market.

The more I heard and the more I walked with her in a life we rebuilt for ourselves, I learned I couldn’t be more wrong.

She is dead on right… We are borrowing time baby, and there is no way to repay the grace it has given us. My fingers pounce at the opportunity to get this all down at the end of the day; I’m fevered by the reality of life. I rest when my body forgets to do all other things. My sleep is now a pattern of images that draws sharp parallels between the snapshots of my waking life and the yearning of my subconscious. I watch all the characters that play major stage in my life somehow united and joining hands in lifting us out of this farce.

When I first saw Tara on that dirty wood bench in the pouring rain, eating a tuna sandwich out of tin foil; I would have never expected her sharp response to life. I saw gleaming eyes through wet fallen hair, and not her will to survive.

If only things were so evident when looking upon the fellow faces in our cities. Would I know that within Stuart Pica was such an unfailing desire to stand upon his own two feet that he would begin to overturn an ageless prejudice? Would I in lesser times see Tara in the rain and not value the sacrifices she made to survive? Would I fail to find these bitter truths in myself? Would I alone discover the facts that turn me against my dirty city and its treachery of whim if it weren’t for each of them?

Tara is as right as ever. We are living on borrowed time; and as she sometimes points out, borrowed space too. We try not to burden ourselves with the thought anymore, but the fact remains. Someday, someone is going to come with the bill; so there’s no better time to start running than now…

Yonder Emily

A stroll through downtown shows the shops boarded up and the little taco stands with sandbags at their doors and white snowflakes of tape on their windows. The tape is to contain the mess after the windows implode. I don’t buy it.

The hurricane is coming; I hear it is building up great speed. Emily sits outside the barren coast and premeditates an onslaught.

The rain ended hours ago; amidst the klaxons and foghorns. The television overlays warning for six passing tornadoes were in vain, but they did so as the windows leaked grainy rainwater on the sill.

Emily was headed right towards our crowded Wal~Mart’s and other places of inevitable safe haven. For a moment out little city was blotted out by a larger and more reckless cloud; a cloud that destroyed not so much out of greed but obedience to low pressure.

The winds blew above a whisper or the sharp exhale of a lover; but in the end it was only the cat that was annoyed for having to give up his windowsill for the afternoon.

Tomorrow is a big day though. Tomorrow I am going to urinate in a cup to assure my brethren that I am clean and free. I will piss to the rim of that opaque jar and send it off to be sniffed by noses trained in the art of detecting narcotics and opiates. This will be my key to a new future, and for that I am glad. My ambitions are wearing off just like this sour hurricane…

My Walls

You might not know this, but I am not a person that takes it one day at a time. I will not invoke Latin to seize hold of this auspicious day. In fact, opportunities can be too fleet for my tired and timid fingers.

I have an envelope of small black and white pictures of that one person I wanted to share the rest of my life with. Sometimes it's enough just to hold them under my thumbs when I get that strangled feeling that I will never be loved again.

When I talk to my little daughter, I can hear my voice in her anger. She deals with so much. I also hear her resent growing like a tumor, and I lay with open eyes at night wishing I could do a damn thing from thousands of miles away.

You might not know it, but every city is populated with the same basic people. They are the folks you seen in public and who only intercede in minor ways. They share facial features and mannerism, its frightening to hear the public talk.

I’m afraid that I was a burden to my parents...

Sometimes I meet a person exactly like the girl in the tight white envelope. You weren't that unique. Anybody can learn to hurt.

Sometimes I think about how hard it is for a guy to disappear. You gotta start over on occasion, just declare bankruptcy and get yourself a new face on the other side of the sea. It should be a joy, but there is a big national record with your ass print on file.

Someday she will find me, I know she will, just for her own ego.

She will say; how was life all this long time without me (because we could have been beautiful); and my careful reply would intone the years we have spent apart since I abandoned her with her baggage and dirty secret. I would say, I never went a moment without you; but thank you for never hurting me again.

I repeat my mantra; I will not desire the undesirable.

in Sleep...

In my dreams, though peppered with other logistical fallacies, I’m rarely a hero…

Given the probabilities of an endless horizon, I choose a cluttered cityscape a flood with pieces of people. These are selective tracks of friends and family, reduced to their simplest. They are definable and simple, with motives and an unfaultable consciousness.

In my sleep I build a world that I can’t control.

Machines build impossible things, jutting their impossible beginnings into my comfort zone. Walking will always turn into running will always turn into fear…

The brakes of cars will never work; can only be steered by leaning, or with the cigarette lighter.

I can jump a flight of stairs…

It can feel like I’m floating, flying; even when I run too fast.

I never wake up with a concrete realization. I wake up playing word games, dizzy and confused.

When I was upset for a while, I would play a game where I would read words and break them off into fragments of letters to see if they were odd words or even words. I could do this well into my sleep. It was my OCD.

When I was a child, I had a clothes hamper that was a clown, and you would stuff your dirty clothes into his fabric belly and make him bigger… He would chase me down the steep wooden stairs. That’s when I learned about jumping stairs.

In my dreams, nobody has anything important to say. They don’t even turn into zombies. They are just mad at me.

I always dream in close ups…

I remember an entire city that doesn’t exist, but that I have been silently exploring since I was a child. It has homes and parks, secret basement and a maze of forests, all found in the same place I had left them.

I forget to wear my clothes a lot; they don’t disappear in public; I usually just get on the bus without them. The police always ask me to put them back on. Public Safety!

My perfect companion is always this big gray cat, never a sexy girl. The cat might be a girl, but we haven’t really talked about it. She helps me through… Her and I meditate; but it’s done with wide-open eyes in a live green field or from the bough of a tree.

When I was 8, I dreamt about finding my fathers skeleton at the bottom of our pond and wondering how he became that so fast. My tummy hurt. I told mom, and as she cried she carried him back to the house and put his bleached bones next to her in bed. I sat with my hands crossed on the blankets over his legs. I was trembling… I woke up and checked on them. I snuck down stair and through the open door I could see the tight tan skin of my fathers face. That is when I swore I would never let him die.

I would dip little sticks in cement to make them look like gray match sticks. I would dream they were fireworks…

One time when my father was angry and left for a while, I took his broken shoestring and put it in a can. I dreamt that night that he would come back and I would give his the shoe string and tell him that I was thinking of him always. He came back the next day and I was overjoyed. I still have that shoestring; I still think about you…

I dreamt that when I moved out of my parent’s house, I would be leaving for college and would pack up everything I needed in the back of my truck and give everyone big hugs. I was 16, and lived with my fiancée instead.

Sometimes I have dreams that I just walk into work and tell everybody how they make me feel, I get to swear and then storm off. Sometimes I just do it in real life.

I’ve dreamt about what its like to die.

I would hang batteries off of my little radio antenna. I would dream about Martian signals.

I’ve had dreams that take me through the whole process of committing a crime and being sentenced to prison. Up to this date, I have always woken up a free man. It’s just then, when I lift my hands and touch my face that I cry; without fail, I always cry…

Rains Upon the Plain…

When it rains in this burned ochre valley,
Everything is quiet,
By that I mean,
Every beast and alley cat is petrified,
At dew drops beating the ground,
And agitating the tall gray grass.

Snakes close their eyes,
And still themselves with trepidation,
Wondering the beat of these foreign foot falls,
As though it were predating,
And the pond frogs look skyward,
Their song in elastic pause.

The grackle eschews the downfall,
Yet uses the falling gush,
To clean his legs,
One by one,
As he shuffles his feathers,
By the safety of my aluminum door.

Children freeze motionless in their lawns,
Ice cream in hand,
Each child with a different sherbet shade,
But the rain drops that glitter their faces harmlessly,
Eat away at their colorful cones,
And puddles bright vermilion and ivory on the driveway.

The cat and I watch,
Enslaved from the corners of our eyes,
Watching upturned insects struggling in the liquid muds,
All the while pondering death…

Ha! Prepare for new "Blog Daily Doses"...

Well, for the record, there is nothing more beautiful in this petulant little world than persistence; so that’s just what I’m gonna do. Instead of being a piss on the party kind of guy and posting these 12 page monstrosities every two weeks, ill take a hint and lighten up a bit, work the daily post routine and even try to show my personal side. What will this accomplish? Well, it will be a more formidable essay into my existence and a much better opportunity for me to bitch… For those of you that give a shit; good for you…

Today I would like to tell a story about a dear friend of mine named Chastity. She is a darling girl from the distant and northern USA, and though I consider her a close friend and a like mind, she is doing something unbecoming today that I will point out and harass her for.

Chastity is going to, that’s right, Ozzfest.

For those of you who have lived in buried busses for the last thirty years, Ozzfest is the rather annual opportunity for mediocre heavy metal-ish type bands to propagate their following and to spew forth their product in an overpriced forum. This year will see the likes of Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden and Mudvayne among many others much to my chagrin. You might know these bands from hit singles often talked about and relished in pop culture satires such as “Wayne’s World” and “Joe Dirt”. Appalachia greatly awaits your rhythmic strumming sections and bass ass lyrics that bring to mind the travails of a young man trapped in a magnetic field; his body forced to emulate iron to survive.

If you are unfamiliar with these groups, or have fallen out of the loop; please feel free to walk by your local Hot Topic Outlet and engorge your senses. You will find a myriad of band appropriate t-shirts, patches and bumper stickers that will appease your quest for knowledge.

Well, good for you nonetheless dear Chastity. You ARE getting out of the house for a little while and you are being social. Plus you are doing something a bit more spontaneous than eating celery. I have a few friends that have bad taste in music too, yet I don’t shun them entirely. Mind you, they know there is a time and a place to talk about such things. You still have a higher place in my book; knowing that you hesitated for even just one moment. First instincts count for a lot you know!

Anyhow, I’ll miss you for this day; and strangely I will hang close to my monitor for stories about the whole trip. Your fierce insights into this event will be enough to quell my anger; cause it’s damn good to have one of US on the inside!

So keep rocking that classic crap rock, and wish my girl here some fun! Nice people will send her money and items to help her purge her lovely brain after all of this is over. No, I’m not kidding… Send her some nice DVD’s or something. Anything…