poem

i saw you walking down the hall
i wondered how you got that tall
did you brush by to touch my skin
all i let go did you take in?

i took a step you stepped away
i gave you room you told me stay
i brought you water, you didn't drink
i thought about what i should think


i got so thrilled i locked the door
you were the monster i looked for
i got a knife, you held my hand
i couldn't look, i turned and ran

you didn't chase me, i fell down
you left me still upon the ground
when i returned you closed your eyes
i can't say i was so surprised

you told me not to speak a word
you kissed away all my concerns
and now i wonder where you've gone
i never learned to sing your song.

Devotee of Foot.

Give it up.
Give up the idea that you were special, or important or noticeable.
Give up the notion that the world is ahead of the next thicket, that there is only one more hurdle, that it is really just a matter of time before you are discovered.
Give away the hope for a fresh start, a new beginning, stuff it in the salvos bin and tell the bell ringer his t-shirt says camp wood and it's pouring rain and who does he think he is expecting generosity from in a recession anyhow?
Give up trying and erasing and practicing and editing and rethinking and spell check and doubling back and posture and sucking in your gut and writing a budget and improving your stroke, meeting someone new, apologizing, being forgiven, scratching an itch give it up give it up give it all up.


In The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, which was originally titled A Solitary Soul, the main character, Edna Pontellier, is a lady of wealth and privilege. She falls in love with a younger man during a summer she, her husband, and her two young sons spend on Grand Isle. He goes away to forget her and the risk of ruin.
When she and her family return to their lavish home in new orleans, she slowly dispatches with all her proper wifely duties. Her husband goes away and business, and in his absence, she take up with another younger suitor, sends her children away to country for a visit, so she can move out of her house, and slowly withdraws further from her societal requirements.
At the end of the story, her summer lover returns, only to leave her before they can culminate their affection with a note that says simply, "good by i love you... because i love you good by."
She returns to Grand Isle, and drowns herself.

This book must have been patial inspiration for Less Than Zero. The thematic similarities are astonishing. Characters basing the weight of their purposes in life by their possessions, by their entertainments; whims creating deeper impacts than any clear decisive processes; people driven by their desires and follies; selfishness beyond comprehension; actions begetting actions and hurtling headlong into one's doom while the maw is propped open with pride; the greatest act of narcisissm of all: suicide.

On my side, I wear the words 'disappear here' forever burned into my skin.

Spring is a time of rebirth. It is a time for awakening. But these are dark days, and what do we awaken, when the earth is uncovered and the sleeping green allowed to fertilize and grow?
I wonder if it is not a better idea to burrow deeper, and hold onto something simple. The action of standing still, while wind may scream away your breath, rain pummel your eyelids, ground drift away like sand.

What if we need to sleep standing up?

A Blunt Instrument

Sometimes the feeling that I am standing stock still in the middle of an eight lane highway is overwhelming.
I remember in high school being simultaneously incarcerated in my routine and my fears of the unknown. I couldn't leave, I couldn't budge. I didn't feel like I ever effected any kind of change, and the seasons moved, the earth turned, the plants and my nails and my hair grew and I could keep time that way, but otherwise, the world marked its days with blood and guts and screams and fires and paint and songs and running and action action action!

I remember this feeling, when I hit nineteen or so, that finally the blocks were gone, and I was moving, really moving, leaving that gorgeous, billowing cloud of dust behind me, and making tracks. I felt like I was in the cars, driving the cars, and not only that, but I had a fucking destination, and after that, I had another place to go, and I always had something to do, and I almost had to rush, but there was a minute or so, here and there, where I could pause, take a breath, taste the air, and remind myself why I was burning burning burning through all the time in the world. Around then, I threw out every watch I owned.
I still don't carry one. My cell phone is a clock, and I hate it.

It feels as though my life has come to a screeching halt.
I recede.
I pull back.
I am sequestered in this immobile state where there is nothing else to do but watch the clock, and shuffle around, attempting to make progress. I feel so ineffectual sometimes, I want to destroy everything around me just to remind myself that what I do actually matters.

In floods the nihilism. I put the informers on the bedside table, and somewhere in the sweat-soaked night, I thumb through and let my own personal deity (Mr. B.E.E.) sing a song of succumbing.
Give up.
Put away your passion.
Take up the weapons of your immaterial life.
Realize your insignificance and take another
blood racing tablet.
Know this,
there is nothing in this life you will ever do
with more impact
than peeling an orange.
So soak your eyes in tears
cut your fingers to ribbons
take a bottle of what have you
and amp up your cause
so at least when you dig your fingernails
under the skin
you can pretend you're really hurting it.


When I rise, the sun is different. The street slaps back the soles of my shoes, and I feel the wriggling underneath the concrete. But is it just the plants growing? My nails? My hair?
The days melting like icicles, drip drip dripping away, and crashing to the ground another week. It lies in front of me, splintered on the sidewalk, reflecting light and refracting time. The sun passes behind a cloud and all the beauty of the crystalline ice is gone. Its just dirty fragments hurled against the ground.
I choke on it a little, but I eat the orange.

This is not an exit

Once upon a time.
A snow covered graveyard, deserted and abandoned in the frigid weather.
A bar on a blizzarding sunday night.
There are bodies and darkness and songs and shrieks and blood.
Once upon a time it was New England and the light filtered through its own sadness so effectively people didn't realize they were stooping until one morning they realized they could smell the frost in the earth at their feet.
It is winter, which always makes me think of survival, desperation, just getting by.
I do internal inventories, place this month against its older sister from last year. Where were we? What did we feel? How did we sleep?
I am plagued by dreams. Rich, wildly colored, multi-layered emotional dreams about purgatory, demon women with black and green hair named for towns in maine, planes and abandoning those I care about, and kissing, which in dreams is such a bizarre experience anyway, meaningless and confusing and angry and elating all in a moment.
A small apartment bathroom at one in the morning full of honey scented candles, droplets of red wax on the white porcelein, water so hot it makes you a little dizzy, a half finished glass of red wine, a book about monsters, a head teeming with ideas, a tired, useless body in need of drowning.
Bob finished reading american psycho last night, and the examination of the book again, has led to more dreams; a museum of disembowelment, a wife, a cabaret full of velvet light and velvet piano music.
My laptop is dying. Like many things, its life is coming to an end, and I race it to its destination, writing furiously, saving the last four years of my creativity to discs which, when tested, turn out to be blank, transferring files to email to send away, to send back to myself. I am so scared of losing all the work I've done since college. Not that I have any illusions of it being remotely good, I just can't stand the idea of losing all those possibilities.
My skin is so dry my knuckles split if I make a fist.
I tumble around rooms, streets, houses, days, the sunlight alternates between dazzling white and pewter. I feel a swelling in my chest, hope is there, and I cannot stop it.
A man stepped into a position yesterday who may in fact be able to put a tourniquet on the gaping wound of this country.
People smile.
People shovel. Shit. Snow.
Shrug and shovel.
Put their shoulders to it, and sniff the ground and say, maybe, maybe I need to do this so something grows to meet me the next time I'm flung down this low.
There is so much I want in this year.
What is dangerous is the thought that we might actually do it.

Morning Muse-ly

It is December, and the snow and the cold won’t come.

Outside in the morning, I walk the dog away from the parking lot behind our apartment building, half guiding her to the graveyard two blocks away where she likes to shit.

For some reason, walking into the morning air, again disappointingly dry and just not quite warm, elation sneaks up behind my ankles and cocks my stride confident as I tread the familiar concrete. There is nothing beautiful about this neighborhood. It’s the kind of place where corner stores and barber shops shoot up like cold sores, and fester with pairs of men in their vicinity having conversations so loudly and gesticulating so extravagantly one thinks they believe people are interested in what they have to say.

I pass a couple of such men, hoisting up their belts and readjusting their pot bellies over the buckles, windbreakers fluttering in the breeze. An abandoned lot behind the used car emporium is being worked on by a misdirected construction crew. Every day they appear to be doing something industrious and inconvenient to traffic, but there never seems to be anything built when the dust clears, just a few more mutilated dunkin donuts cups caught in the exposed scrap of the foundation.

I glance at my wild hair in the window of the dance studio. A few weeks ago, it froze stiff by the time I got this far, but, today, the water from my shower evaporates slowly leaving it to get snarled by the wind.

The cemetery is an oasis in this paved wasteland. The fallen leaves of autumn are thick and soft on the ground beyond the wrought iron gates. Many of the stones are dated before the nineteen hundreds, and each bears the ashen complexion of aged rock. A few are practically torn out of the earth and a couple like flat beside their foundations, and I wonder if anybody actually attempts to manage the appearance of the place. I doubt it. I never see another person here, and the latest date on a stone is sometime in the nineteen twenties, so I imagine it’s all but forgotten by everybody except me and my dog.

She gets about three yards inside the gate, and squats beside one of the upended stones. Most of the trees in the cemetery were hacked down at some point to keep the place tidy, but their stumps are all overgrown with lichen and vines now. There’s only one untouched tree, and it’s very tall and scraggly. Somewhere in the uppermost branches there’s a squawk and I peer up to see the silhouette of a massive crow against the muted sunlight and the gray sky. It sounds a little like it’s throwing up when it caws, but the picture: Crow. Tree. Cemetary. It’s all just a little too perfect, so I gaze back down at Cass, who is snuffling under a pile of leaves, her squatting business concluded.

A few days ago she found a half eaten hank of fried chicken someplace near here, and began proudly trotting it back toward the house. I must have been off in my head, dreaming, because I didn’t notice until we were crossing the street back toward the apartment, and it took the rest of the walk to get her to drop it.

It makes me wonder what kind of a life this graveyard leads after dark. I like to wonder if teenagers come here and dare each other to tell stories, kiss under the tree, scream when the crow screeches, and scamper off into the night. It’s not that kind of neighborhood though. If anybody comes, it’s probably teenage boys, or boys in their early twenties, who drink beer and eat fried chicken and then push over the sad tombstones who witness their mortality and fallibility as men. I hate these imaginary vandals, and I take a little comfort in knowing that the graveyard has the last laugh. Someday, it’s their own stone they’ll tackle to the earth.

Melenchronic Thrombosis of the Pocket

As this year draws ever nearer to the end, and the encroaching winter seems to pity the inhabitants of the east coast by holding off her true power for yet another day, I find I am locked in a constant epic battle between wild lush optimism and isolating despair.

There’s something about fall that calls for self examination, and winter for self extermination. Perhaps it is the hibernation mentality.

I can feel the light meter of the world slowly being wound lower. The blacks and whites and colors are all creeping with grey. The shadows and light are seeping into one another and it becomes difficult to differentiate.

Why is it I become so dolorous, so melancholic this time of year, though perhaps, I never really came out of it in 2008. I spent the entire year holding my breath underwater, petrified of the inevitable moment my lungs gave up and I took the long scorching suck of seawater held only for me.

Yesterday at a Wal-Mart in New York, when an employee began to unlock the doors to their store at four in the morning, the materialistic lemmings desire to hurl themselves to the conglomerate evil maw of the holiday season overwhelmed them, and the crowd broke the doors of the store down and trampled the employee to death.

TO DEATH.

Are we the first country in history to have a SHOPPING MARTYR?

A man who gave his life for the CRAZY CRAZY CRAZY HOLIDAY DEALS TODAY ONLY AT 4AM! How do you explain that to a family? How do you reassure a mother or a daughter or a wife or a husband that their beloved died because this country’s economic circumstances made this Black Friday a Black and Blue and Blood spattered one?

I have spent the last year of my life balanced on the scythe of abject poverty. I have racked up credit card debt for items like groceries and deworming my cat. I don’t recall the last time I bought a new piece of clothing. I eat so poorly I delighted in the array of vegetables my parents served at Thanksgiving, because I couldn’t remember the last time I ate a vegetable that wasn’t a pickle or a stewed tomato slice stolen at work and smashed to oblivion between two pieces of bread. I cannot regret more the quantity of time and energy I’ve wasted on the entire money bullshit problem. And you couldn’t pay me to go near a store on Black Friday.

Where are the priorities really?

I am so tired of being miserable because I can’t afford x or y. There is so much free and beautiful in the world, so much joy and passion and pleasure to be had merely in the company of friends. To relish my walk with Cass in the morning through the graveyard up the street from the apartment costs me nothing. An oasis of history, a perspective on mortality, a daily sobering stroll through the passages and markers of those who have fallen before me and cried their last tears over the finicky nature of life, while my dog defecates delicately under a copse of maple and birch.

This morning, while walking, my mind wandered to the cemetery somewhere in New York, where a man is being returned to the earth,

ashes to ashes,

dust to dust,

coins to coins,

in god we trust…

Fury.

What true ugliness, what true darkness, what real greasy film of grey creeping over the landscape is not winter, but cruelty flushing the pallor of a population of faces.

Self preservation, preparation for the “hard months ahead”. When they come.

When it is my day to breathe my last and give my earthly shell back to the mother from whence it came, I would rather die owing a million dollars to the faceless, evil companies of the world, if there could be a heart inside a million bodies I touched in some way.

mane of consciousness

October and its tar-clad lions drive a chariot of cornstalks and birch limbs with pumpkin wheels and tall wild torches burning eyes and streaked locks of mane through the night.
You stand aimless in a dark lane dark like an underwater cave. And suddenly in the blurry, fuzzy, all consuming blackness there glitters the vehicle and her minions -time drawn by her burning clocks.
These torches roaring toward you faster and faster, brighter and hotter and so huge the tinder of your lungs flares up like newspaper curling and frying with scream after scream composed of dust storms and dry heat and bleached bones whiter than the cotton filament of pain, the smitten heart of lightening, the unfaithful, blind eye of the candle.
And then, just as sudden as it came upon us, the chariot draws on.
The pressure, the heat, the fear of death bigger than any chasm in the tender, foolish earthen skin, leaves off, and the absence of it is almost more than a body can bear.

The lane is dark and silent, and relentlessly empty.

What comes after is a kindness of nature.
The pity of soft, warm rain to rinse upturned cheeks and wrecked, cracked eyes.
A hoarse sigh through peeling lips and the moment of desperate panic is passed for now. One returns completely to the present, to the body and its myriad levels of destruction.
A glass of water like a dream and a promise.

In the aftermath, there is preparation, and the nights grow so long they stain the days with their coal dust skies. The rain does not let up, and it becomes the solace of routine. One begins to carry an umbrella, forgets why the sky was welcome to crash down on one's head long ago. The solemn songs of the encroaching cold call from steeple to weathervane, garret to gable, and yet there is some forgiveness still. There is a little longer to stand in the veiled night and examine the moon.