This Old Banger

I had always thought typewriters were glamorous, not heavy and difficult things that smudge onto your fingers. I had thought them to tip tap like a soft and distant chatter while you compose your immortal verse, not chime and clank like a drawer of silverware. Between the wooden box that this thing is hinged into and the bulk of its steel frame... The ink thwaps halfheartedly onto my cheap paper, springing back to its position when my fingers still - the smell is like an old burnt coffee with a hint of stale winter air. God, why drag this all the way up the stairs of the water tower - was I going to watch the people push through the streets, or dodge careless drivers and write a poem about the rain? It was a silly notion, something I'm sure I saw in a movie about the solitary writer bringing his surroundings an examined new life while pouring his heart out.

I wrote a line about an older lady walking her great dane; it wasn't happening it now but I remember the sight in the park. I drove by, it was the last rainstorm and the dog was pulling her towards a puddle to get itself a drink.

Next I tried a little bit of rhyming, a couple of the letters got too close though and stuck together in mid air. I laughed a bit, pushing the old thing off my lap and looking into horizon like a bored fool, the sun still spitting a bit, a little glimmer of light at me from the purpled sky.

Then I heard the explosion.

We Agree to Nevermind

I've become adept at the cold reading, and yes, I can nearly pinpoint the breath you will use to say it; "I've never opened up my heart so much". I know that you are awake while I am typing this, while I am hunting and pecking in the glow of a screen, you wonder a half wonder what I am up to, but truly you aren't bothered by it. You don't know me; never took the time. I'm not really the boy that makes small talk and is quick to smile and dab your lip corner with a fresh napkin, in fact maybe we have both lost track. We imprint these tiny ideas from all of the bodies we have come into contact with, it becomes overwhelming - it is akin to playing the few bars Moonlit Sonata every time I warm up to the piano - these inner convulsions that propel us like serpents through another relationship. Muscle memory and learned patters that we dredge from our superstitious connection to true nudity. I admitted that it could be just an addiction, I hope that is only the first of a gradually simpler set of steps. The sex, the musk of it all, it was never worth a night out with butterflies and lost fading interest. I want to love you harder - but what if you have fat calves or you scream in bed like a epileptic - or if your old lover was successful and still plays an anchor in your life. What of you collect friends like cancelled stamps from nearby districts, a heave of self made individualists with that one beaten horse skill or mantra. What if your feet are thick like a babies hoof, and you always need to prop your bare toes on our furniture. What if you have a bland catch phrase like "in all reality" or "good times". What if your breasts hang like old dented cans in the moonlight beaming through your loft window. How can I make poetry with your body when I have to explain why people break my heart to you. When I have to explain the meaning of "multifaceted", or tell one more cold dead ear that I don't follow football, sorry. I sometimes convince myself that I simply need to meet extraordinary people. Then I glower at your wall of acclaims and degrees and plot my exit from your still careless arms. Love is a dying breath or a jump from an airplane, a last ditch effort to inject meaning into an explosive finality. I love, and then it goes slowly dark.

In Seven Years

"The hardest part for me, with language and making, is the first step of spilling ink onto a clean pale page. It's a metaphor, you dig? It's about taking the first step, hoping the rest will follow with momentum towards a certain velocity. The plunge? The risk? All of that contrite crap about self confidence and taking risks, gotta spend money to make money. Reverse that; I just hate introductions.

Set the stage, make the bed, first impressions, books and covers, love at first bite. This is real folks, no rehearsals, you have waited all this time and honing your craft, let it shine. Not time off for performance anxiety. Gotta be a verse factory to succeed. Eat nothing but post-modernism, breathe and shit pure literary gold.

This whole journal thing was supposed to fix that, supposed to put a priority on the stuff, a spotlight on a perfect little hobby that I could focus down into a tight beam of excellence."

It all started in a fervor; one day a few sentences to broadcast a lonesome heart that would be further bundled up in social anxiety as the months tick by. The next year another disparate lover might quench or begin another cycle of loathing and scathing paragraphs. One year it was about the strength of surviving cancer, and the next year it was about mulling the hot streets of Mexico. It's a nice little journal that speaks nothing. It's a couple hundred short stories that belong condensed in some foul after-dinner mint. It has all been and jumble and a ramble. It had days when it made me feel stronger, when I took it like a serious thing, and it was my megaphone on the mount; and I screamed curses at the damned. Then it became a thin paper tacked to a door that said "Lunch at Noon".

hearts to binary

I always forget how good it feels to build up an idea, to chew up the bitter husk of a concept and spit out a gleaming nut of wisdom. To punctuate in a few paragraphs of a tiny essay the wicked things that churn through a persons mind and body as they make their way through life. To experiment with the language in a way that we intend to become more exact and technical than dull impersonal words like love and caring, hope and fear. These are primitive words unimproved for hundreds if not thousands of languid years. We still call it fate when we feel powerlessly drawn to an outcome, a primal helplessness wrapped up in a sad meaningless word and thrown amidst a world of electrons and space rocks. It is a flagrant alien in a world that needed science to stop worshiping volcanoes and avoiding bacon. And when I am done chewing the though experiment it seems hard to write down a few pages of connected things. I never remember how it flows from finger to finger.

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.