Walk the path backwards
To the bus station where Jesus might have been crucified
I bought a souvenir
Lions with lambs
Adages on placards
And a cold steady stare
From the Bedouins that raise goats
And know
In the air something hangs
That I'll never find
Monday, September 28, 2009
Sunday, September 27, 2009
Friend Request (version 1)
I can’t even walk into the store of a cell phone service provider without feeling like my penis is hanging out or something. My hands won’t stop sweating in this bustling digital beehive, barely middle aged women in slacks and navy blue button-ups shuffling their awkward proportions back and forth between their postmodern-looking stations and some mysterious back room, leaving you alone in a chair that’s too high off the floor to sit in without your feet dangling like a little kid getting a root beer float at the counter of a drug store in the 1950s. Their impatient words escape from behind teeth as white and straight as a picket fence in a contrived homemaker’s imagination, their faces bright and overdone. Take away the gender neutral work apparel and they could be wives from the congregation of an overly evangelical church, faces perpetually wrenched upward into radiant, hollow smiles. I get the impression that they were all named after various scented candles, but I can’t bear to look at their name tags. They’re pinned too close to the breast and I’d feel disrespectful.
There is always a line of six to eight people, and there are only two chairs. The rest of us have to stand against the walls that are actually big windows and timidly jostle out of the way of the endless stream of individuals coming in just to pay their bills on the ATM-like machine to the right of the door. We are surrounded, and the only way I can get my legs to quit shaking is the more terrifying notion that someone could think I’m doing a pee dance.
“Can I help whoever is next?” The employee has dyed cinnamon cockatiel hair, and the top part of her work shirt is unbuttoned, revealing enough cleavage to make me stare at the cars passing outside and wish I was young enough for my grandmother to hold my hand and lead me across the street to the campus of the high school, like she used to. Every day I would run through that grass and pick the bark off of the dying maple tree there, watching the ants scuttle up its frail trunk.
She takes my information, punching things into her computer like I’m not even there, eyes wide and lit up by the blue light of the screen. The clicking of her shimmering, painted nails against the keys is almost enough to cover the drags of my irregular breathing.
“Ok, sir, what is it that we can help you with today?”
“Yeah. My-my phone. My phone is, uh, broken. Well, the-the keypad isn’t working. The numbers.” Stammering incoherently, I try to tell her how the numbers on my keypad have ceased working properly. They lag behind what I’m typing, registering at random. Then, that T9 thing takes my typos and auto-completes them into words I’m not trying to say. The button that lets me turn it off is completely broken, and the button that lets me initiate calls and choose the recipients of my text messages works without any detectable rhyme or reason.
The employee stares at the air over her shoulder for a moment, sorting out to herself exactly what it is I just tried to communicate to her. The subtext of her body language is blaring: Her shoulders want to go to a bar and her pursed lips say go home, you stupid faggot.
“Hmm. Ok, sir. Well, what I’m seeing here is that your phone is past the manufacturer’s warranty, and you don’t seem to have insurance. Unless you’d like to purchase a new phone today there’s nothing we can do for you, I’m afraid.”
“No. That’s ok. Thank you very much.”
I can never bring myself to get angry or argue in a place of business. Sometimes it’s that I’m too relieved that the experience is over, but mostly it’s that I’m worried that my fury would come off as silly or insincere rather than intimidating. Really, I can deal with my phone’s malfunctions. It’s not that big of a deal.
I wait until I’m outside to put my jacket on and zip it up so that maybe no one can see me miss the remaining arm hole and flail at the autumn wind, or take a few extra tries than a normal adult would to get the zipper to catch. The metallic whir of the passing cars sounds just like the elevator in my building. There’s nothing I need to do now, but I can’t bring myself to go back there. My therapist says these things get easier every day, but I’m still not ready.
It would surprise the few people who know me that I could even walk into a mall, let alone go there and visit Erin like I’ve done nearly every day since what happened with Lisa. Amongst the sprawling slalom of bodies strolling side-by-side, it’s surprisingly private. They sell my favorite banana flavored milk at the ice cream place, and there is always a table open in the food court within view of the smoothie kiosk.
The smoothie kiosk is where Erin works. She is about 19, I think, with hair the color of Coca Cola and a smile like my grandmother’s back porch. She is always very nice to the customers, that hair of hers spilling across her shoulders when she turns to re-tie her burlap colored apron and mix their order. It’s a genuine smile. A smile she doesn’t use her face to make, quite unlike the ladies at the cell phone store. Erin is pregnant, but not in the way that would make you think any less of her. I can’t decide if she knows who the father is or not, but I usually think she might be better off without him. Things must be so difficult for her already without having to depend on the type of boy who’d be so careless.
In my back pocket I keep a small notebook that I can pull out and write important things in. Flipping past Claire, Eloise, Margaret, all of the other obsolete predecessor names that belonged to Erin before, I finally come to her fresh page. I’ve set up everything I know about her in a format similar to Facebook: lists of the things she likes to do, her college major, the parts of herself that she so wants the world to see. Each time her name changes, those things change with it. I used to try to write diary entries in her name, but the flesh of illusion wore thin very quickly and I felt like a creep. Nobody lies to their diary. Mimicking things like Myspace makes it seem more concrete to me, makes me feel like there could be a real person out there just like my Erin. I could even meet her if I clicked in the right place. The mall is closing up, and the reality that I’ll have to go home settles in a powder of quiet panic. I pull out my phone to text Lisa wondering would it be imposing if I asked her to hang out with me for a while tonight. My phone stops halfway through, T9 word taking hold and sending “wounded immigrant possum dick” to my boss’ cell phone instead.
I’ve lived in this town for so long I don’t have to think while I drive. Tonight, though, I would give anything to have something to focus on other than my apartment. That drab little piece of shit I can’t even afford anymore, wedged in a corner on the third floor of the building. I’m trapped with the elderly, with the crocheted crosses on their doors and their four o’ clock dinners.
I feel like my lock should stick or something, like my apartment should hate me and want to oppress me into leaving it alone, but everything works fine. The landlord maintenances it regularly, the thermostat is responsive. I toss my keys and busted cell phone onto the nursing home couch in my living room. After I’ve taken off my shoes I step into the kitchen, where on my counter the CD sized strip of clay with a paw print pressed into it lays in a Ziploc bag. Across the top, in a semicircle around the print, is stamped the word “Bananas.”
When I brought her home as a puppy, after getting her acclimated to the apartment, she would sit on my lap on the couch and try to stuff her head into the cushions while growling softly and making snurdling noises. Every evening after Jeopardy I watched the news, and this one particular night there was a segment on how spiders have been known to lay eggs in the tips of bananas and that consumers should be careful. The information came as quite a shock, and I fell into a panic thinking I would forget to not eat the ends of bananas if I didn’t write it down immediately. After raiding the place and not finding the pen that I write in my little notebook with, I named her Bananas as a last resort.
There’s a little note card in the bag that has directions for baking the clay print to make it hard. Preheat the oven to 275 degrees Fahrenheit and place the clay onto a pan. Bake for fifteen minutes. I preheat the oven and carefully place the clay on a cookie sheet, set the timer.
I didn’t realize Bananas was sick. One day she stopped eating like normal, and started throwing up most of the food she did eat. The vet didn’t know what was wrong with her, either. It took several weeks of tests to figure out that she was born with kidneys that were too small for her body. There hadn’t been any noticeable problems in her first years because I had taken exemplary attentive care of her, but now we’d begun a crawl to the end that the nice woman in the white coat and dark grey slacks assured me was inevitable.
We started Bananas off with pills of some experimental drug that the vet felt very positive about, and medicine meant to bind the phosphorus in her bones. Instead of watching Jeopardy, I administered an IV of saline every evening to flush out the poison her little kidneys couldn’t manage. Aside from trundling around for about an hour with a slight hunchback from all the saline, not much was different. Bananas still pranced around when I came home, toenails clacking against the tile, rearing back on her hind legs to be picked up. She still hogged the center of the bed, even though she had a whole side to herself, and demanded fresh water every morning.
What few differences there were I accepted with as much grace as could be expected. I couldn’t walk her anymore, so we took frequent car rides. We’d drive through KFC to get chicken for me to hide her pills in, and she’d get a treat from the girl at the window, crunching benevolently and sprinkling crumbs all over the passenger seat. There were more naps in the afternoon, more potty breaks, and I’d carry her to the elevator and through the lobby.
The timer goes off and the clay is a dark, dirty orange. I pull out the sheet and let it cool on the counter for twenty minutes, like the note card says, then thread the tiny hole at the top with yellow yarn. My knees sinking into the couch cushions, I tenderly hang it from the nail between the only two decorations in my family room: a wooden Anglican crucifix and my framed and autographed vinyl copy of Modest Mouse’s Building Nothing Out of Something.
It took an entire month. First, the weekly tests that had been showing gradual decreases in her internal toxin levels began to plateau. Then they came back up. One daily IV turned to two, more and more food was left in her bowl each night. The phosphorus binder quit working. Summer waned, and she with it.
Then she was frail bones that didn’t eat or take pills. She’d sneeze and there would be a faint crackling sound as a few teeth would skip across the kitchen tile, sliding under the dishwasher. We didn’t watch TV at all. The end of the day was spent trying to get her to take her medicine. Huddled on the kitchen floor, Bananas in my arms, crying as I shoved a tablet of some fucking stranger’s experiment with hope to the back of her throat, gagging and writhing, and I’d put my hand over her muzzle to try to suffocate her into swallowing. She started hiding behind the couch. Nobody greeted me when I came home.
It gets to a point where even love isn’t worth it. After a violent seizure I took her to the vet, and we made the decision together. Lisa held my hand while the needle went in. I hurt her, squeezing hard to not cry in front of the doctor. I wrote a Myspace bulletin in my head about how brave I was being, and cycled through the flood of comments. Pages of support that I could read again and again and feel warm.
I grab my phone, slamming the buttons to make them work, texting Lisa saying I’m sorry, please just come over. “Ho snore please my convict” goes to my therapist’s cell.
Where are my keys? I need my fucking keys. The couch cushions are on the floor and I find them, cramming them into a jacket pocket and letting my door slam, leaving it unlocked. In the parking lot it takes me three tries to get into my car. I start hyperventilating when I pass Lisa’s house.
I met Lisa four years ago, just after my mother died. At the funeral distant relatives I’d barely spoken to before told me to call them if I ever needed anything, vague acquaintances gave me one-armed hugs, murmuring about how if I needed to talk to someone they were there any time. I had a panic attack at the reception. On leave from work, I spent the next few days at my computer on a chat site that paired you up at random with another person online. Lisa was the first one to not log off upon learning that I was male and over the age of 15. Talking to her was like reading a story about a witty version of me that didn’t have to take a pill to leave his apartment in the morning. I stayed up all night telling her everything. When I explained about losing my mother, she wrote, “Aww I’m so sorry! Maybe you should get a dog or something so you aren’t all alone in that apartment. My puppy always keeps me company :D!”
We chatted two or three times a week, each of us learning about the other, becoming a more integral part of the other’s life. Eventually I knew everything about her. She was the sweetest, most honest person I had ever known. She used to have a boyfriend who would sit in his truck in her driveway all night to make sure she didn’t go anywhere and maxed out her credit cards so she couldn’t go back to college. She thought I was funny. I was in awe of her, and wished desperately that people as interesting as her lived around here. It took us nearly three years to figure out that, not only did we live in the same town, but Lisa lived a block from my building.
The pain in my chest comes while I’m passing the movie theaters, thinking about that first year after Lisa and I started speaking in person. I wasn’t afraid of her. My hands shook only a little. I didn’t compulsively check my fly. Everything felt like it was covered in syrup, and made my stomach turn like I was about to go down the first hill on a roller coaster.
I think maybe some food will help balance things out in my head, I just need to stay calm, so I turn down the road past the sprawling brick school near what used to be my grandmother’s house towards McDonald’s. This is where I asked her to move in with me.
I guess it never really occurred to me that the featureless building across the street from my old high school is an abortion clinic. Every summer, the lit up sign in front says in thick plastic letters “Guys what if she’s pregnant?” but when the 27th of August has come and gone it simply reads “Welcome Back Students” and lists a phone number underneath. I remember the silence in Lisa’s eyes following the question as we walked past the clinic and she said, “I was almost engaged once.”
“Really? What happened?”
She pointed to the sign, “Apparently one of those costs about as much as a ring.”
I can smell the McDonald’s before I see it, bright and putrid against a cod-liver-slathered parking lot. I want her to know that I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me. I can work around it. I pull up to the speaker, pushing against the impending anxiety attack, and try to text her one more time. “I need you, stay with me” turns into “I need to stop doing this giraffe” and fires off to mom’s old cell phone number.
An electronic voice says, “What do you want?”
There is always a line of six to eight people, and there are only two chairs. The rest of us have to stand against the walls that are actually big windows and timidly jostle out of the way of the endless stream of individuals coming in just to pay their bills on the ATM-like machine to the right of the door. We are surrounded, and the only way I can get my legs to quit shaking is the more terrifying notion that someone could think I’m doing a pee dance.
“Can I help whoever is next?” The employee has dyed cinnamon cockatiel hair, and the top part of her work shirt is unbuttoned, revealing enough cleavage to make me stare at the cars passing outside and wish I was young enough for my grandmother to hold my hand and lead me across the street to the campus of the high school, like she used to. Every day I would run through that grass and pick the bark off of the dying maple tree there, watching the ants scuttle up its frail trunk.
She takes my information, punching things into her computer like I’m not even there, eyes wide and lit up by the blue light of the screen. The clicking of her shimmering, painted nails against the keys is almost enough to cover the drags of my irregular breathing.
“Ok, sir, what is it that we can help you with today?”
“Yeah. My-my phone. My phone is, uh, broken. Well, the-the keypad isn’t working. The numbers.” Stammering incoherently, I try to tell her how the numbers on my keypad have ceased working properly. They lag behind what I’m typing, registering at random. Then, that T9 thing takes my typos and auto-completes them into words I’m not trying to say. The button that lets me turn it off is completely broken, and the button that lets me initiate calls and choose the recipients of my text messages works without any detectable rhyme or reason.
The employee stares at the air over her shoulder for a moment, sorting out to herself exactly what it is I just tried to communicate to her. The subtext of her body language is blaring: Her shoulders want to go to a bar and her pursed lips say go home, you stupid faggot.
“Hmm. Ok, sir. Well, what I’m seeing here is that your phone is past the manufacturer’s warranty, and you don’t seem to have insurance. Unless you’d like to purchase a new phone today there’s nothing we can do for you, I’m afraid.”
“No. That’s ok. Thank you very much.”
I can never bring myself to get angry or argue in a place of business. Sometimes it’s that I’m too relieved that the experience is over, but mostly it’s that I’m worried that my fury would come off as silly or insincere rather than intimidating. Really, I can deal with my phone’s malfunctions. It’s not that big of a deal.
I wait until I’m outside to put my jacket on and zip it up so that maybe no one can see me miss the remaining arm hole and flail at the autumn wind, or take a few extra tries than a normal adult would to get the zipper to catch. The metallic whir of the passing cars sounds just like the elevator in my building. There’s nothing I need to do now, but I can’t bring myself to go back there. My therapist says these things get easier every day, but I’m still not ready.
It would surprise the few people who know me that I could even walk into a mall, let alone go there and visit Erin like I’ve done nearly every day since what happened with Lisa. Amongst the sprawling slalom of bodies strolling side-by-side, it’s surprisingly private. They sell my favorite banana flavored milk at the ice cream place, and there is always a table open in the food court within view of the smoothie kiosk.
The smoothie kiosk is where Erin works. She is about 19, I think, with hair the color of Coca Cola and a smile like my grandmother’s back porch. She is always very nice to the customers, that hair of hers spilling across her shoulders when she turns to re-tie her burlap colored apron and mix their order. It’s a genuine smile. A smile she doesn’t use her face to make, quite unlike the ladies at the cell phone store. Erin is pregnant, but not in the way that would make you think any less of her. I can’t decide if she knows who the father is or not, but I usually think she might be better off without him. Things must be so difficult for her already without having to depend on the type of boy who’d be so careless.
In my back pocket I keep a small notebook that I can pull out and write important things in. Flipping past Claire, Eloise, Margaret, all of the other obsolete predecessor names that belonged to Erin before, I finally come to her fresh page. I’ve set up everything I know about her in a format similar to Facebook: lists of the things she likes to do, her college major, the parts of herself that she so wants the world to see. Each time her name changes, those things change with it. I used to try to write diary entries in her name, but the flesh of illusion wore thin very quickly and I felt like a creep. Nobody lies to their diary. Mimicking things like Myspace makes it seem more concrete to me, makes me feel like there could be a real person out there just like my Erin. I could even meet her if I clicked in the right place. The mall is closing up, and the reality that I’ll have to go home settles in a powder of quiet panic. I pull out my phone to text Lisa wondering would it be imposing if I asked her to hang out with me for a while tonight. My phone stops halfway through, T9 word taking hold and sending “wounded immigrant possum dick” to my boss’ cell phone instead.
I’ve lived in this town for so long I don’t have to think while I drive. Tonight, though, I would give anything to have something to focus on other than my apartment. That drab little piece of shit I can’t even afford anymore, wedged in a corner on the third floor of the building. I’m trapped with the elderly, with the crocheted crosses on their doors and their four o’ clock dinners.
I feel like my lock should stick or something, like my apartment should hate me and want to oppress me into leaving it alone, but everything works fine. The landlord maintenances it regularly, the thermostat is responsive. I toss my keys and busted cell phone onto the nursing home couch in my living room. After I’ve taken off my shoes I step into the kitchen, where on my counter the CD sized strip of clay with a paw print pressed into it lays in a Ziploc bag. Across the top, in a semicircle around the print, is stamped the word “Bananas.”
When I brought her home as a puppy, after getting her acclimated to the apartment, she would sit on my lap on the couch and try to stuff her head into the cushions while growling softly and making snurdling noises. Every evening after Jeopardy I watched the news, and this one particular night there was a segment on how spiders have been known to lay eggs in the tips of bananas and that consumers should be careful. The information came as quite a shock, and I fell into a panic thinking I would forget to not eat the ends of bananas if I didn’t write it down immediately. After raiding the place and not finding the pen that I write in my little notebook with, I named her Bananas as a last resort.
There’s a little note card in the bag that has directions for baking the clay print to make it hard. Preheat the oven to 275 degrees Fahrenheit and place the clay onto a pan. Bake for fifteen minutes. I preheat the oven and carefully place the clay on a cookie sheet, set the timer.
I didn’t realize Bananas was sick. One day she stopped eating like normal, and started throwing up most of the food she did eat. The vet didn’t know what was wrong with her, either. It took several weeks of tests to figure out that she was born with kidneys that were too small for her body. There hadn’t been any noticeable problems in her first years because I had taken exemplary attentive care of her, but now we’d begun a crawl to the end that the nice woman in the white coat and dark grey slacks assured me was inevitable.
We started Bananas off with pills of some experimental drug that the vet felt very positive about, and medicine meant to bind the phosphorus in her bones. Instead of watching Jeopardy, I administered an IV of saline every evening to flush out the poison her little kidneys couldn’t manage. Aside from trundling around for about an hour with a slight hunchback from all the saline, not much was different. Bananas still pranced around when I came home, toenails clacking against the tile, rearing back on her hind legs to be picked up. She still hogged the center of the bed, even though she had a whole side to herself, and demanded fresh water every morning.
What few differences there were I accepted with as much grace as could be expected. I couldn’t walk her anymore, so we took frequent car rides. We’d drive through KFC to get chicken for me to hide her pills in, and she’d get a treat from the girl at the window, crunching benevolently and sprinkling crumbs all over the passenger seat. There were more naps in the afternoon, more potty breaks, and I’d carry her to the elevator and through the lobby.
The timer goes off and the clay is a dark, dirty orange. I pull out the sheet and let it cool on the counter for twenty minutes, like the note card says, then thread the tiny hole at the top with yellow yarn. My knees sinking into the couch cushions, I tenderly hang it from the nail between the only two decorations in my family room: a wooden Anglican crucifix and my framed and autographed vinyl copy of Modest Mouse’s Building Nothing Out of Something.
It took an entire month. First, the weekly tests that had been showing gradual decreases in her internal toxin levels began to plateau. Then they came back up. One daily IV turned to two, more and more food was left in her bowl each night. The phosphorus binder quit working. Summer waned, and she with it.
Then she was frail bones that didn’t eat or take pills. She’d sneeze and there would be a faint crackling sound as a few teeth would skip across the kitchen tile, sliding under the dishwasher. We didn’t watch TV at all. The end of the day was spent trying to get her to take her medicine. Huddled on the kitchen floor, Bananas in my arms, crying as I shoved a tablet of some fucking stranger’s experiment with hope to the back of her throat, gagging and writhing, and I’d put my hand over her muzzle to try to suffocate her into swallowing. She started hiding behind the couch. Nobody greeted me when I came home.
It gets to a point where even love isn’t worth it. After a violent seizure I took her to the vet, and we made the decision together. Lisa held my hand while the needle went in. I hurt her, squeezing hard to not cry in front of the doctor. I wrote a Myspace bulletin in my head about how brave I was being, and cycled through the flood of comments. Pages of support that I could read again and again and feel warm.
I grab my phone, slamming the buttons to make them work, texting Lisa saying I’m sorry, please just come over. “Ho snore please my convict” goes to my therapist’s cell.
Where are my keys? I need my fucking keys. The couch cushions are on the floor and I find them, cramming them into a jacket pocket and letting my door slam, leaving it unlocked. In the parking lot it takes me three tries to get into my car. I start hyperventilating when I pass Lisa’s house.
I met Lisa four years ago, just after my mother died. At the funeral distant relatives I’d barely spoken to before told me to call them if I ever needed anything, vague acquaintances gave me one-armed hugs, murmuring about how if I needed to talk to someone they were there any time. I had a panic attack at the reception. On leave from work, I spent the next few days at my computer on a chat site that paired you up at random with another person online. Lisa was the first one to not log off upon learning that I was male and over the age of 15. Talking to her was like reading a story about a witty version of me that didn’t have to take a pill to leave his apartment in the morning. I stayed up all night telling her everything. When I explained about losing my mother, she wrote, “Aww I’m so sorry! Maybe you should get a dog or something so you aren’t all alone in that apartment. My puppy always keeps me company :D!”
We chatted two or three times a week, each of us learning about the other, becoming a more integral part of the other’s life. Eventually I knew everything about her. She was the sweetest, most honest person I had ever known. She used to have a boyfriend who would sit in his truck in her driveway all night to make sure she didn’t go anywhere and maxed out her credit cards so she couldn’t go back to college. She thought I was funny. I was in awe of her, and wished desperately that people as interesting as her lived around here. It took us nearly three years to figure out that, not only did we live in the same town, but Lisa lived a block from my building.
The pain in my chest comes while I’m passing the movie theaters, thinking about that first year after Lisa and I started speaking in person. I wasn’t afraid of her. My hands shook only a little. I didn’t compulsively check my fly. Everything felt like it was covered in syrup, and made my stomach turn like I was about to go down the first hill on a roller coaster.
I think maybe some food will help balance things out in my head, I just need to stay calm, so I turn down the road past the sprawling brick school near what used to be my grandmother’s house towards McDonald’s. This is where I asked her to move in with me.
I guess it never really occurred to me that the featureless building across the street from my old high school is an abortion clinic. Every summer, the lit up sign in front says in thick plastic letters “Guys what if she’s pregnant?” but when the 27th of August has come and gone it simply reads “Welcome Back Students” and lists a phone number underneath. I remember the silence in Lisa’s eyes following the question as we walked past the clinic and she said, “I was almost engaged once.”
“Really? What happened?”
She pointed to the sign, “Apparently one of those costs about as much as a ring.”
I can smell the McDonald’s before I see it, bright and putrid against a cod-liver-slathered parking lot. I want her to know that I don’t care. It doesn’t bother me. I can work around it. I pull up to the speaker, pushing against the impending anxiety attack, and try to text her one more time. “I need you, stay with me” turns into “I need to stop doing this giraffe” and fires off to mom’s old cell phone number.
An electronic voice says, “What do you want?”
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Beset
Pleased to the core
The disease of the whores in our homes
Our homes revolving doors
Stability resides on the floor
But I slither on the ceiling
Afraid of feeling anything other than high
My mind is a fucked apart dead thing unless I’m having fun
My feel-good adage rolls off our tongues
With the weight of an anvil that falls like envelopes
Postmarked for now
Our destination is the ground
Without sound they fall in pendulum motion
To rest in silence
Where is home?
I lost it
I made it look like an accident
How was I supposed to stay?
It was supposed to be my place
But I filled it with my guilt
There was too much to fit in my purse
So I packed it in every crevice
Every prom dress
Every “feel better”
Every love letter
Then spun around
And walked out
My existence, my experience
Dripping behind me
One of us is dying
Maybe both
Rendered by choice
Ruptured by ignorance
Raped by truth
Bleeding love that pools in bills on the carpet
Essence lost to substance
“I can’t live to know”
“I can’t feel that anymore”
I need a drink with my friends
Achieve my cherubim balance
Held up by slanted bookends
My path prescribed
All I need is a glass of water so that I may take my contentedness
And slip into dreams
Before I turn back to God or home
And be forced to salvage my own wreckage
Why should I?
Someday someone will go back there.
The disease of the whores in our homes
Our homes revolving doors
Stability resides on the floor
But I slither on the ceiling
Afraid of feeling anything other than high
My mind is a fucked apart dead thing unless I’m having fun
My feel-good adage rolls off our tongues
With the weight of an anvil that falls like envelopes
Postmarked for now
Our destination is the ground
Without sound they fall in pendulum motion
To rest in silence
Where is home?
I lost it
I made it look like an accident
How was I supposed to stay?
It was supposed to be my place
But I filled it with my guilt
There was too much to fit in my purse
So I packed it in every crevice
Every prom dress
Every “feel better”
Every love letter
Then spun around
And walked out
My existence, my experience
Dripping behind me
One of us is dying
Maybe both
Rendered by choice
Ruptured by ignorance
Raped by truth
Bleeding love that pools in bills on the carpet
Essence lost to substance
“I can’t live to know”
“I can’t feel that anymore”
I need a drink with my friends
Achieve my cherubim balance
Held up by slanted bookends
My path prescribed
All I need is a glass of water so that I may take my contentedness
And slip into dreams
Before I turn back to God or home
And be forced to salvage my own wreckage
Why should I?
Someday someone will go back there.
A Neologism for Progress
Where do you go when empowerment has become the new stereotype?
The removal of exclusion
Assimilation and extermination of partitions
Shape shifts into a suicide mission against accommodation
You’re your own person now so you’ve got your clearance
To guide your moral compass with magnetic interference
And in your elation you missed
What you’ve become
Everyone can feel the crisis unfold
We’re ten years old and on the playground
Trying to balance the teeter totter
But it’s not built like a scale
And always we’ll fail to be truly equal
One of us that much higher
We wait until that one falls
And we’ll laugh as they bleed in the mulch
Then stand against the wall
Knowing next recess we’ll be the ones who’ll sit that tall
So burn your bras with tired psychology
But gender roles are dictated by
Physiology
Personality
The reality of all of us
And nothing more
But we’ll listen in the schools
And to the card castle fools playing by playground rules
Do you have to have labels for everything?
I understand
You were sick of being a slave
In your kitchen of a cage
Domestically depraved
Holding the unmarked page of history to your chest
With poignant rage repressed in your objectified breasts
So you stepped up to the plate
For the dawn of a new age
Hearts limitlessly heavy
Possess the momentum to beat faster
So brave and so righteous
Your chains fell like robes
Your voices cracked plaster
Femininity parted the sea
Your head says you’re free
But there’s just a new master.
The removal of exclusion
Assimilation and extermination of partitions
Shape shifts into a suicide mission against accommodation
You’re your own person now so you’ve got your clearance
To guide your moral compass with magnetic interference
And in your elation you missed
What you’ve become
Everyone can feel the crisis unfold
We’re ten years old and on the playground
Trying to balance the teeter totter
But it’s not built like a scale
And always we’ll fail to be truly equal
One of us that much higher
We wait until that one falls
And we’ll laugh as they bleed in the mulch
Then stand against the wall
Knowing next recess we’ll be the ones who’ll sit that tall
So burn your bras with tired psychology
But gender roles are dictated by
Physiology
Personality
The reality of all of us
And nothing more
But we’ll listen in the schools
And to the card castle fools playing by playground rules
Do you have to have labels for everything?
I understand
You were sick of being a slave
In your kitchen of a cage
Domestically depraved
Holding the unmarked page of history to your chest
With poignant rage repressed in your objectified breasts
So you stepped up to the plate
For the dawn of a new age
Hearts limitlessly heavy
Possess the momentum to beat faster
So brave and so righteous
Your chains fell like robes
Your voices cracked plaster
Femininity parted the sea
Your head says you’re free
But there’s just a new master.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Between Silences
Between silences
Words come out of her
They sound like
“I have to go to the bathroom
I’ll be right back”
Between silences
Her bare feet impress the carpet
And her bones and muscles shift under the smooth taut tarp of her skin
My plate rings from fork stabs
A door clicks shut
Between silences
I wonder what is taking so long
Foggily stirring my noodles
I tap my foot
Her plate is pristine
Between silences
The exchange is made
She trades what is inside
For what she wants to be
But as always ends up empty
Between silences
Dresses are donned
Happiness is hurried
Makeup is morose
Tranquility is a tourniquet
Between silences
I hear the ever fainter creaks
Of her stepping on the scale
Pounds are the lightest of all that is falling
The refrigerator humming and the beat of sorting mail
Between silences
My perfect portrait purges and shrinks
Clocks rewind forward
Fear speaks without sound
And my love for her is unheard
Between silences
Words come out of her
They sound like
“I have to go to the bathroom
I’ll be right back”
Between silences
Her bare feet impress the carpet
And her bones and muscles shift under the smooth taut tarp of her skin
My plate rings from fork stabs
A door clicks shut
Between silences
I wonder what is taking so long
Foggily stirring my noodles
I tap my foot
Her plate is pristine
Between silences
The exchange is made
She trades what is inside
For what she wants to be
But as always ends up empty
Between silences
Dresses are donned
Happiness is hurried
Makeup is morose
Tranquility is a tourniquet
Between silences
I hear the ever fainter creaks
Of her stepping on the scale
Pounds are the lightest of all that is falling
The refrigerator humming and the beat of sorting mail
Between silences
My perfect portrait purges and shrinks
Clocks rewind forward
Fear speaks without sound
And my love for her is unheard
Between silences
A Funeral in July
She was Hispanic
He was his panic
And she loved him
Because he knew to be afraid
When she walked away
She could be who she pleased
A grown woman
Who no longer prayed on her knees
But wished she could know longer
What made them weak
And keep it
Place it within his voice when he speaks
A funeral in July
A sunny warm welcome release
A eulogy given by a diary clasp and tire tracks
They all just say wonderful things about him
With that hope resting under their feet
His first bicycle still leans in the shed out back
But who brought the pasta salad?
Towards the end
He saw the faces of the deceased
In everything he was trying to keep
We all know adults don’t exist
But that’s what we all choose to be
Living in debt
Like God isn’t free
And the Devil never sleeps
She was Hispanic
He was his panic
And she buried him
In a fifteen thousand dollar shoebox
In this city’s backyard
He was his panic
And she loved him
Because he knew to be afraid
When she walked away
She could be who she pleased
A grown woman
Who no longer prayed on her knees
But wished she could know longer
What made them weak
And keep it
Place it within his voice when he speaks
A funeral in July
A sunny warm welcome release
A eulogy given by a diary clasp and tire tracks
They all just say wonderful things about him
With that hope resting under their feet
His first bicycle still leans in the shed out back
But who brought the pasta salad?
Towards the end
He saw the faces of the deceased
In everything he was trying to keep
We all know adults don’t exist
But that’s what we all choose to be
Living in debt
Like God isn’t free
And the Devil never sleeps
She was Hispanic
He was his panic
And she buried him
In a fifteen thousand dollar shoebox
In this city’s backyard
A Fake
Why teach?
No one’s listening
They’re just waiting for words
So they can decide whether they’re going to be Dr. House
Or that kid in the back
And they’ll carry all the books they want everyone to know they read
They want to be suffragette mini boss goddesses
Rustic visionaries with minds like your favorite cigarettes
Quirky concierges of a lap dog ingenuity
That licks their empty embroidered palms
As they regurgitate their ornate subversive gospel
So fucking rad, I tell you!
Basking in our awe
Perpetually pregnant with innovative perspectives
Like they fucked every book in the library
(But with more reverb)
They chuck abstractions and proofs
Into the dark
Over their shoulders
And we’ll gather the crumbs
Of our vicarious individuality
So terribly special are we
Who have those to teach us what is special
They’ll assemble a punch drunk canon
Of high brow assertions of guilt
And we’ll get all Pentecostal
Whenever Ben Gibbard falls asleep on a synthesizer
When they humbly walk on our heads
Having read less of the Bible than Christians, even
We’ll try to peak at the letters they are writing
To a God they tell us is too dormant to be real
(Actually I think they just hate the idea
Of someone else being smart enough
To fuck with them)
They’ll tell us to think that we shouldn’t let anyone tell us what to think
And we’ll fall soothingly asleep
Little birds in a bed sheet dark
You can’t teach an old dog nuclear secrets
What does that even mean?
I don’t know
Buy this shirt?
No one’s listening
They’re just waiting for words
So they can decide whether they’re going to be Dr. House
Or that kid in the back
And they’ll carry all the books they want everyone to know they read
They want to be suffragette mini boss goddesses
Rustic visionaries with minds like your favorite cigarettes
Quirky concierges of a lap dog ingenuity
That licks their empty embroidered palms
As they regurgitate their ornate subversive gospel
So fucking rad, I tell you!
Basking in our awe
Perpetually pregnant with innovative perspectives
Like they fucked every book in the library
(But with more reverb)
They chuck abstractions and proofs
Into the dark
Over their shoulders
And we’ll gather the crumbs
Of our vicarious individuality
So terribly special are we
Who have those to teach us what is special
They’ll assemble a punch drunk canon
Of high brow assertions of guilt
And we’ll get all Pentecostal
Whenever Ben Gibbard falls asleep on a synthesizer
When they humbly walk on our heads
Having read less of the Bible than Christians, even
We’ll try to peak at the letters they are writing
To a God they tell us is too dormant to be real
(Actually I think they just hate the idea
Of someone else being smart enough
To fuck with them)
They’ll tell us to think that we shouldn’t let anyone tell us what to think
And we’ll fall soothingly asleep
Little birds in a bed sheet dark
You can’t teach an old dog nuclear secrets
What does that even mean?
I don’t know
Buy this shirt?
Feats Worse Than Death
I accept the seventh drink someone hands me because, at this point, I realize that I just want to live in a movie, and tonight’s as good a night as any for one of my more memorable scenes. Everything already looks so perfect. Colors seem darker, and blur together when I move my head. All the lights are spherical, adorned with fuzzy halos like a holiday scene in a worn out VHS tape from the 80s. Everybody is laughing. Everything is ambiguously endearing.
When I wake up tomorrow, I will remember all of this. But my ownership of these memories will leave with the alcohol in my bloodstream. In the morning, each slurred and euphoric scene will be detached; will belong to someone else’s life. Not mine. It will be like looking through the sloppily filmed home videos of a stranger. No, I don’t know who that scrawny, shirtless guy wearing the army green fishing hat is. You’re right, he is trying to recite the pledge of allegiance and standing way too close to that girl. How embarrassing. Voila. A movie. This is what I’m aiming for.
Across the room, I watch a guy a little younger than me, I’d guess about fifteen, light up a cigarette with one of his friends. It’s clearly his first time. He chokes immediately, and amidst the sputtering and watering eyes tries to play it off like none of it had to do with the smoke. He just choked on his spit. Don’t worry, he can handle it.
I used to find lung cancer to be quite the novel concept. There’s just something about the notion that a person’s stupid habits will someday eat them slowly from the inside. I mean, if I was God I couldn’t have come up with a better design, but I’m not, so all I can do is wonder why the real God didn’t. It was an awfully harsh punishment for my grandfather’s single vice.
Mom thinks I’m still in shock, and that’s why I couldn’t cry or anything at the viewing or the funeral. Apparently shock and relief are easy to mix up. I don’t see how I could be shocked that the man died; it’s a day we’ve all known was coming for months. Like Christmas, only shitty. The real shock was seeing what he turned into before he passed.
Drink eight tastes like a snickerdoodle that’s trying to break into my car. I don’t know what is in it exactly, but Leanne made it for me, so I have to drink it. I’m going for those brownie points. Tonight is the big night, that awkward stage of a friendship where said relationship’s potential for upward mobility is decided. I’m going to ask Leanne on a date. I’m going to do it right, too.
Unfortunately, planning is no longer an option. The planning mechanism in my brain has been confounded by the simpler things. Walking feels like perusing over an expert level USA Today crossword, and proves to be as difficult a task to complete correctly. Every motor function is now a brilliant feat. People keep telling me that comprehensilation is not a word. I feel brave.
Why the hell a microphone is lying idly around at a house party without a DJ would be beyond me even in my soberest state, but God must be on my side. It’s one of those cordless numbers, so all I have to do is flick a switch to turn it on. I switch it on, and before I can say a word my face is flooded with indescribable warmth and luminescence. This is it! I was supposed to do this. I am exactly where I’m meant to be and Leanne is going to say yes and this is the moment that turns everything around, that makes it all worth it.
I’m not sure where the PA is, so I speak robustly into the mic. Not everyone turns to me, of course, but a great deal of people do. Leanne does. I confess it all. Everything. I tell them about granddad and the uncle who isn’t dealing with it very well. I tell them about how I might actually still be in shock, and that I ordered all the seasons of the Dick Van Dyke Show on DVD. I tell Leanne how I feel about her, exactly as I’d imagined.
Everything I say is lost against the wall of their confused laughter. I feel blinded now, instead of warm. Why are they laughing? Nervously, I look down and fiddle with the microphone. Around the edges, towards the top, where you speak into it, something is written. I’m too drunk to see it clearly, but it comes into focus when I bring it close to my face. It says “MAG-LITE.”
The realization reaches me in stages. I can’t hear the throng’s laughter anymore. Suddenly, it’s as if I’m in the room alone, and all I can hear is my grandfather breathing that last night sprawled across his bed. Oxygen and wires to other things I didn’t understand, everywhere. Rhythmic, and heaving, like an animal. His head tipped back, mouth agape, two rows of black teeth on display. A corpse that just kept re-inflating itself.
Everyone gets quiet when I smash the big green bottle of that licorice tasting stuff. Leanne actually gasps. I don’t know what to do, so I start telling jokes. I like my women like I like my movies: silent, I say. The room gets quieter than before. I may have forgotten to mention that Leanne is a feminist protestor, and all of her like-minded friends are here. I…I can’t come up with new jokes, so fuck it, we’ll just keep this’n, I slur. I scan the crowd. I like my women like I like my hot fries: taste good stale after I ignore them on the floor for a weekend, I tell them, I like my women like I like my neighbor: He’s ok. I mean, he’s a solid dude. I grip that flashlight as tight as I can and pace like a televangelist, all hunched over as I spit, I like my women like I like a good drink: refreshing, but after three or four they’re all the same. I have warped my relationship with the crowd to the point that terms like “onlookers” or “mob” feel more appropriate. I cadence my presentation by yorking all over my shoes.
I wake up on an unfamiliar bathroom floor knowing full well that I’ve ruined everything. Judging by how sloshed I still am, it can’t have been long since I passed out. I rise up to my knees, preparing to vomit into the toilet, but change my mind. I put the lid down and let it go all over the soft fabric lid cover. I turn over the trash can and throw up all over the bottom of it. He was just lying there that night, motionless while we all stood around him saying our goodbyes. My mom patted his head and my uncle kept rubbing his feet, the only normal part of him left. The rest had shriveled into a boney sack. My grandfather would have fit in black and white pictures from the Holocaust. I stand up so that I can heave again, this time into the curtains. He looked like a wrecked kite, crumpled and feeble. His eyes were glazed. There was no grandpa in there anymore. Every now and again he would nod and gurgle. I open the shower curtain and wretch into the tub. Everything is backwards anyway. I didn’t get to see him actually die. I had to leave, had to get outside, make sure it was all still out there. My uncle told me he’d go with me. He rubbed my grandfather’s foot one last time, smiling, and said, sweetly, I’m going to walk him out now. I love you. No partying while I’m gone.
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