my tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth and i can feel the heartbeat of the knife in my pocket. the whiskey thunders through my veins like a disease and threatens my brain. the architecture of my brain has become Brutalist. lately i have been bleeding from strange places and all i listen to is a female singer-songwriter who is prone to write songs about winter.
a week ago i told Lucas that i loved him and he stared at me as though i had become glass and shattered. i have never seen someone so horrified and it's not that i'm so ugly. i am ugly like an overripe fruit. on the same day, the season turned into summer like a depressed, irritable person shifting their weight to one side. i abruptly vomited and he held me up while gobbets of myself drooled from either side of my mouth. his look of horror had melted down slightly, like plastic, or wax, subjected to an intense heat.
'are you OK?' he asked, solicitously. i watched a long strand of my saliva fall to the back of his hand, like a raindrop in slow motion.
my voice had fallen away from me, had slunk out of my throat like a lover caught cheating. i shook my head from side to side and vomited again.
'should I take you to the hospital?'
his eyes were so concerned. there is a sheen of sympathy on his face, like sweat after a long run. his voice is tired and weary. he's had enough of me, i can tell. i've had enough of me.
i smelled of day-old garbage. banana peels, orange rinds. coffee grounds and sour milk. i started to cry and mucus clogged the back of my throat. one of my shoelaces came undone and lay on the sidewalk like a dead worm.
the only thing that will make me feel better is to kill him. i considered a bullet. i considered poison, the weird white lace of dusty arsenic. i considered a bomb. in the end, only a knife would do. i've kept it in my pocket, folded like the legs of a cricket, for so long. it's never had a use. it gets warm in my hands when i grip it.
'HAVE YOU CONSIDERED JESUS?' a poster on the telephone pole is yelling at me.
'no,' i tell it simply, lying, as i pass by. one hand is in my pocket. the other one swings haplessly by my side. my friend the female singer-songwriter is singing in my ear a song about skinny trees bent over by the weight of the gray sky. her voice is like a skein of yarn, unspooling, looping itself in thick coils on the floor of my skull.
i quit smoking in November but i want a cigarette right now more than anything.
Lucas lives in a five-story building on the other side of town. i can see the brick of it in my head. there is an obnoxious seagull that is following me. i know it is the same one because it has a cock-sure look to its beady eye. this started a week ago. i ran at it to scare it off, yelling like a madman. it just stared at me, and then took off, flying up into the sky where i couldn't reach it. i'd like to rip its feathers out, one by one, and then burn them, one by one, with a lighter. i think it knows what my plan is. it's eyeing my pocket. i've named it Lucas.
the other side of town is over a railroad track which acts like a tourniquet, cutting off the bloodflow. all of the houses are drained white, blanched. there is no color on this side of town, except for the trees in fall. Lucas lives in number three-A. his apartment building is full of beautiful people who never need to wash their hair to look good. the kind of people you stare at on the street. clothes were made for them. i am in love with a number of them, but none so strongly as Lucas. he wears an impossibly russet-colored shirt almost constantly, with the sleeves rolled up to his forearms. he always seems to have a hooded sweatshirt on, even in summer. when he wears a white t-shirt, his skin turns ruddy. his eyes are brown and his hair is brown and straight and touched with weird brushstrokes of tarnished gold. he is the kind of guy who wears one pair of sneakers and always has. they are grass-stained and battered and their color is blue, as though they are out of breath and slightly cyanotic. he can't seem to keep the laces tied.
the sun sneaks out of a cloud and lances me right in the eye. i blanch away from it and Lucas-the-gull caws loudly like he's laughing. i wish i had a slingshot and a small explosive. 'fucking bird,' i mutter, and spit to one side. my stomach is lurching around like a drunken giant inside of me. i have to inhale, a shuddery breath that feels serrated, like a knife sawing deeply into a plank of wood.
i am pink on the inside, like a badly-cooked piece of meat. i don't ever want to see the inside of myself on the outside ever again. my tongue has unloosened from the roof of my mouth like the cuff on a shirt and barely feels attached to the floor of my mouth either. if i open my jaw it will slide right out of me and fall to the ground, wriggling around desperately, like a snail without its shell.
my heart is aching. actually aching. it seems to beat like a tired drummer, desultorily hitting the snare, arrhythmically and out of time.
if i don't stop i will follow through. i can feel my knife warming up through my jeans. Lucas' building appears slowly, like a scene from a movie, and i push open the front door. it is not locked. headlines are cartwheeling through my head. TWENTY-YEAR OLD BARISTA SLAIN IN APARTMENT. LUNATIC IMPRISONED. SENTENCED TO DEATH. JURY. JUDGE. EXECUTED. "HE WAS SO QUIET."
i turn around in the dark lobby and see Lucas-the-gull performing a small promenade outside, bobbing his head up and down, knowingly. he looses a garbled cackle.
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fiction. Show all posts
Saturday, March 16, 2013
Thursday, July 15, 2010
Elena
She collected him. His moods, his tics. Hoping that by this accrual of fragments, she would have all of him, would come to know him as her favorite protagonist. In this way he became real to her, and then, slowly, became distasteful. She had gone through myriads of him, always the same patterns, the same path walked down to dirt & scuff. She tested him with poetry, would savagely grind against him over a choppy sea of sheets, whispering Verlaine into his ear:
Pour toi, j’ai fait, pour toi, cette chanson,
Cruelle et caline -
&: he would draw away from her, like a ferry tugging out of its slip, harbour & islandward. She would stand on the pier, stone-eyed & silent
or: she would subtly inflame him with embarrassment, until he became a wizened cinder, one ember of pure hate winking furiously & impotently in her direction.
the latter, occurring with more frequency than the former.
there were, of course, variables to her algorithms: there had been the liar, the pervert, the honey-tongued rake, et alis.
after some time, their names gracefully faded from her recollection, and so, in conversation, replaced them with colors - most often, the color of the shirt she last remembered him in. (took an inordinate amount of pleasure in assigning the hue “Buff” to one ex-flame who commonly went sans shirt)
(now), she was largely alone. read books. he had gone weeks before, and though his name was Theo, she already knew him as Red. a pile leaned like a familiar lover to her right. from bottom to top: Lautreamont, Barthes, Nin, Rousseau, de Sade, Bachelard, Flaubert, Proust (Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff), Pound, Nabokov, Pynchon, Auster, Albee, Woolf - &, placed deliberately at the top like a capstone, Justine, Durrell.
she dreamed of violence. of monsters with no faces & yet, possessing maws agape with wicked fangs. they existed around her with no interest in attacking or devouring. she was ineffectual, had no import or bearing. a distant lighthouse faltered & extinguished, plunging her (in the ocean, treading water) into utter black.
the second drink went down faster than the first. she saw him across the bar in a t-shirt whose color she was unable to discern - some shade of Gray - (she had, already, Gray-with-an-A & a Grey-with-an-E.) his eyes were fastened to a paperback. in front of him, a sweating pint of beer and an empty shotglass with a thimble of amber pooling in the bottom. she decided he was Shale. craned her neck (over her Tequila Sunrise) to see the title of the book. the letters swam in her vision like guppies in a bowl. there were multifold creases, cracks, in the spine of the book - she rises inside of herself, throat arid with expectation, but cannot make it out. he coughs, lightly, and turns a page as if the book is porcelain. she slams herself back down into her seat, spraying her desire with the pesticide of negative thought and horrible outcome. “Another crayon in the box,” she sighs, and chortles morbidly behind a hand at the image it conjures.
“What’s that?” the bartender is someone she knows - it’s good-old-Randy, of the churl’s smile & the fool’s mad grin. she supposes he’s an attractive guy. ruddy. rangy. going to seed a bit in the middle as a result of a fondness for malty, thick beers.
“Another crayon,” she repeats, absently, twining a strand of hair around her finger.
Randy’s put something on the bar in front of her that rattles like candy. At first, she thinks it is candy. “I think we lost Black awhile ago, and Green’s just a stub. Keep ‘em here for Deb’s kid.” He scratches his beard. “Don’t know what you’d need ‘em for.”
She blinks, and stares him full in the face. Laughter trickles out of the corners of her mouth and she sucks on the straw until the Sunrise fades noticeably in the pint glass. “Randy, you’re a peach. Got any paper?”
They spend the next half-hour scribbling contentedly, with no real images or goals in mind, her with Cobalt Blue, he with Burnt Sienna. She drinks another Sunrise away.
o
ELENA HARRIS
152 CHURCH ST
5C
CITY, STATE
ZIPCODE
No return address. She turns the envelope over & over in her hands as if trying to ascertain its contents by touch alone. She is unsuccessful - for the most part. It is a letter, and it has been written by one Elaine Harris, now deceased. The letter contains a great deal of hand-wringing & apology, as well as funeral instructions. It is the last missive from a mother who feels the Kublerian-Ross finality of regret & is straining for some sort of redemption from her daughter. Despite the commonality of their surname, Elena has never heard of Elaine. Her mother’s first name is Linda.
The telephone rings and, at the same time, a small bird flies directly into the window directly to Elena’s right. This is the first time this has ever happened, and she is startled, dropping the letter from Elaine Harris to the floor. A small smear of blood on the glass pane is hesitantly extending a downward pseudopod like a recalcitrant explorer. The window is nailed shut, she cannot open it to clean it. The bird is nowhere to be seen. She picks up the letter anew and sits heavily on the couch; opting for the stifling silence rather than turning on music, as is her usual habit upon entering the apartment. It is sweltering on the fifth floor, though she would never live on the ground floor - prefers vastly to have a sense of omniscience by looking down on things, to be able to look out and over and up. The evening is a great nothing stretching out ahead of her. She has no plans. A sigh leaves her body involuntarily, sneaks out & away before she can catch the errant breath. She unzips her bag and pulls out the day’s acquisition: it is Derrida, and a battered, bruised copy of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, in a translation she does not already have. (She has two, and they sit next to one another on her bookshelf)
At that very moment, S. calls.
They lay in bed - S. & E. - letting their fingers traipse over one another. It is the bliss of post-coitus, and the world is white-gold all over. everything around them seems basted with the night, soaking it all in. The dark is liquid, pliable. She sighs, gathering air into herself and allowing it exit with a carefully moderated exhalation. He lights a cigarette and muses through the smoke. She isn’t paying attention, lolling like a primate in the glow, tongue hanging loose, body unhinged, splayed and akimbo on the queen-sized bed - that is, until he asks
“If I die, will you make sure they bury me with headphones on?”
She almost snorts her derision at the ridiculous nature of the question. His name is already Royal (after Royal Blue) even though the shirt he was wearing is crumpled on the floor. “I thought you said you wanted to be cremated.” He chewed the thought for a second, like a tough piece of gristle. “Well then make sure the photo they put in the funeral has me wearing headphones, okay? Music is important to me. I think I should be remembered with a symbol of listening to music. Or something. I don’t know.” He paused, as if immediately recriminate. “Am I making any sense at all?”
“You’re ruminating. It’s all right.”
“I’m not being too … self-involved?”
“No.”
“All right.” He sank contentedly back down into himself, resting his head more comfortably in the crooks of the arms folded behind his head. He seemed inordinately pleased with himself, like a cat in the birdcage, feathers sticking out of his mouth. She curled away from him, dissatisfaction staining her in the same way as wine stains teeth & tongue. He didn’t seem to notice.
o
She is discouraged. The world is this gigantic place she can only see one frame at a time, from the window of her screened-in porch. In grandiose moments, she refers to it as her solarium, replete with a moue of hand and mouth. she comes to smoke here in the early mornings, dredging herself out of sleep with a cup of english breakfast tea & a hand-rolled cigarette; curling on a settee found on the curb a block or so away. this morning, it is beginning to rain and it sounds dour to her. any other morning she would have elated in it, the insistent and tinny rhythm of the water on the roof and asphalt below, but this morning she is irritable and snappish, even at herself in the bathroom mirror. Her stomach is a weird sea of unease and her fingers are sticking to the cigarette. This is going to be a day where everything goes wrong, she decides, and stares down at the street below.
A man & a woman (call them Hannah and Brian … Livingston.) are hand-in-hand in leisurely promenade. Hannah is carrying a small purse, the color of which is offensively green, which offsets her offensively blonde hair. Brian is one of those perfectly cut-out specimens of masculinity, down to the tucked-in polo shirt and bermuda shorts. They go jogging together. They have separate lives but somehow always careen back into one another by evening. Hannah has dinner plans floating in her skull. She’ll cook that chicken breast in the freezer, season it with lemon & paprika, pan-fry it over some rotini and chop up some light vegetables. Some sort of vinaigrette. She knows Brian won’t be very hungry, but she knows she will be. A white wine for her - something of the chardonnay variety, and a Michelob Ultra for him.
Brian is thinking about his golf game, and the girl caddy with the brunette ponytail & white visor. Her name is Lola, and sometimes Brian finds himself humming the Kinks song of the same name as he’s teeing off. Watching and admiring her pert, round ass in her cream-colored miniskirt as she bends over to retrieve a ball. She has some Mexican blood in her.
Hannah is asking him a question. He hasn’t been paying attention, drifted, from her. He makes up a noncommittal answer and they pass out of sight, turning the corner.
She wrinkles her nose at them, unseen from her lofty perch, and turns away from the window. Dust catches in her throat and she gags involuntarily, swilling the last of the tea-gone-cold from the red & gold mug. This is going to be one of those days.
o
Around noon, the telephone rings. It’s an older-version cell phone, flip-phone, with no bells or whistles - the ring is seven long, impatient-sounding tones, in the style of an old receiver & cradle phone. She has to endure endless jokes & jibes at her expense when in mixed company, surrounded by a forest of people whose eyes are glued to their iPhones, or BlackBerries, or what-have-you. They make an alarming array of hoots and bleeps and she feels that the phones are having their own private conversation - moreso, even, than their owners. She has walked into a bar and seen the entirety of the clientele - all the way down the long bar to the bathrooms - with their faces turned down, illuminated by the eldritch blue of their devices. The tableau so chilled her that she immediately powered her own churlishly anachronistic telephone off and left it off until the next morning.
She doesn't answer it.
o
She waits with drink in hand for someone to leave, hovering near the first stool. There is a burly man occupying said seat, hands cupped around his pint of lager as if protecting it from possible spill. His hands are big enough to overlap around the backside of the glass. He wears a camouflaged trucker’s hat, sunglasses perched on the brim, a white t-shirt that’s seen better days, duck pants, and black workboots. Randy is tending the bar again, and it’s a busy night. She isn’t even entirely sure why she’s sojourned to the bar, with a half-full bottle of gin on the kitchen counter and a bottle of tonic in the fridge, but she’s here now and is determined to follow through.
(The day, as she had expected, was one disappointment after the next. She started to read, but found herself constantly distracted by minor irritants:
a strand of hair that wouldn’t lay quiescent (and so, deranged with a pair of dull scissors, chopped it right off), followed by
a persistent tickle in the rear of her throat, one that couldn’t even be dislodged by repeated coughing, followed by
the inability to find a comfortable position, even after re-arranging her body five major times and six minor times, while at the same time
scratching in vain the itch on the sinistral side of her lower scalp & consumed with the heat radiating from a tiny, cruel cut on the webbing between her dextral thumb & forefinger -
she had given up on comfort and threw herself out of the house without bothering to tuck her book under her arm)
The man in the camouflage hat shifted in his seat and emitted a rumbling belch, a low sound that he self-consciously muffled with the back of one hand before surreptitiously glancing around to see if anyone had taken offense. Elena was pleased despite herself at his furtiveness, declaring it an act of conscious chivalry, and when their gazes met, she smiled at him to communicate her approval. He nodded, somewhat awkwardly, and briefly touched the brim of his hat. She was again touched, and inclined her head in the same fashion.
Thunder, then, from somewhere in the stomach of the sky, and her neck twisted to give her vantage of the sidewalk and beyond. It had begun to rain, and unabashedly so, in heavy, full drops that splattered as they struck the concrete. When she turned back around, the man (she couldn’t call him White, she had one, and Whitey was out of the question … Camouflage wasn’t really a color so much as a color of colors - he had a dark beard, she could call him Blackbeard, but that’s breaking the rule - )
“Why don’t you have a seat,” he was saying gruffly, one hand attached to the underside of his chin, scratching.
She blinked at him. “Me?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
“Very kind of you,” she said, but did not sit down.
“I have to be goin’, in any case.” He clipped the end consonants from his words like someone clipping a cigar, and she found it delightful for the first time since Maroon had left her, well, marooned, for some Kentucky-fried up-and-coming country singer.
“Thank you.”
“I’m Jeff.” He extended his hand. She could see the topography of his palm was heavily callused, a square shape radiating evenly measured and distributed fingers. From her minute-long dalliance with chiromancy, she recalled that his Mount of Saturn seemed unusually prominent, but couldn’t remember what that entailed.
“Elena.” (She was going to have to come up with a color for him.)
“Really?”
She blinked again, and fell into her habit of re-assessing the physical situation. The empty chair sat between the two of them. His hand was still outstretched. She bit her lower lip & took it in her own. He had a firm grip, but not overly firm - but not so restrained as to display a concern for her fingers. In fact, it seemed he hadn’t really thought about it at all - he simply extended his hand and did what came naturally. They squeezed, shook, and disengaged. Elena was becoming more thrilled by the minute. “Oh - yes. Really,” she said, bewildered by her brain.
Jeff nodded. “Never met an Elena before.”
“First time for everything,” she came back, gamely. He smiled, an easy smile displaying two rows of teeth whiter than his shirt. He leaned in, one foot up on the bottom rung of the chair, folding his arms over his chest. That worried her - she’d read somewhere it was a defensive posture, but seconds after the thought traversed her mind, he unfolded them and stuck a hand in a pocket, letting the other rest on the back of the chair.
“Yep.”
The silence fell like doors being finally breached by a battering ram. They both reached for their drinks at the same time. On the jukebox, someone was playing “Baby, I’m Gonna Leave You.”
Thunder, once more. Over her shoulder, Elena heard someone telling a story
“Jacky told me they’ve been finding wolves around.”
“No way. Where? How many?”
“No one knows where they’re coming from. Jacky’s friend Victor’s brother works at the police station and he told Victor that they’ve had twenty-five calls in the past two nights about wolves in people’s front yards.”
“No shit.”
“I shit you not.”
“Have you seen any?”
“Not yet.” and she felt a chill.
Jeff was fishing his wallet from his back pocket, settling up with Randy. Elena pinkened in the cheeks, averted her eyes. “Be careful,” she heard herself saying.
“What’s that?” Jeff turned around.
“There’s wolves.”
He blinked. “Sorry?”
“I just … “ she was motioning over her shoulder when she realized confessing to eavesdropping wasn’t the most attractive trait - did she even want to seem attractive to him? - “I heard. Someone.”
“Wolves.”
“Yeah. In … in the streets.”
He laughed, quietly, and she knew instinctively he wasn’t laughing at her but at the absurdity of the statement. “I’ll be careful.”
“Okay. Good … then. Please do.”
Jeff tipped his hat to her again and exited. She watched him go, admiring his gait, which was slow without being ponderous, deliberate but without pretense. “Thanks for the seat,” she called out, as if to trip him up, but he just waved over a shoulder & the door closed behind him.
and finally, the electric herald of lightning, God’s Holy Camera making a Kodak moment out of the rain-slick streets.
(around the corner, in a garbage-strewn alley, a brindled gray wolf slavers over the corpse of a small cat)
o
she wakes up alone, on the couch in the living room, dazed. feels the hangover brooding like a hurricane just off the coast of her frontal lobe, tracking a slow & painstaking path down behind her face. her mouth is dry and her palms are clammy. she isn’t quite sure how she made it home - can’t remember much after the fifth drink. she remembers the rain ceasing. something about a pregnant mother.
her dreams were vivid and made little sense: she had somehow made friends with a ball bearing, which had sentience, moved of its own accord, and rolled tenderly up and down her body at night. it lived in a small cup on a porch just outside her home, and one day, the cup was thrown senselessly away. her heart tightened as she recalled the dream-moment she discovered, heavy inside of herself with knowing, the absence of the cup, the ball-bearing’s home. some vicious personage had thrown it into the yard, which turned into a salvage lot, which was also somehow a beach. she became obsessed with finding her friend, and years passed with her crawling on her belly through the short grass, the tall grass, picking through the twisted, rusted metal of the junkyard, eventually beaching herself by the indifferent waves. a grain of sand, blown by the wind, tickling up her bare arm - a startle of joy, ecstasy, seizing her by the insides, recalling the sensation of her friend - but an arrogant gust of sea-wind tosses it callously away -
She is wiping the tears from her eyes with the back of her right hand. The rain has stopped, but she can still hear fat, loner drops plunging from the trees’ broad leaves to the unforgiving asphalt below. Fog brushes its belly over the streets of the city. She hauls herself from the couch and prepares some tea. Goes through her morning ablutions, lost in a swirl of imagery. Stares at herself blankly in the bathroom mirror and doesn’t quite recognize the face looking back. She is expressionless but her eyes are red and the skin around them swollen as though needing the pinprick of a lancet.
Later, she sits down to breakfast, and a magazine from months ago.
Later still, she sits, smoking a damp cigarette made clumsily the night before, on her porch.
The possibilities of the day stretch out in front of her, coalescing in the same manner as the fog.
She is waiting for the sun to burn it away.
She is in the habit of making lists.
Pour toi, j’ai fait, pour toi, cette chanson,
Cruelle et caline -
&: he would draw away from her, like a ferry tugging out of its slip, harbour & islandward. She would stand on the pier, stone-eyed & silent
or: she would subtly inflame him with embarrassment, until he became a wizened cinder, one ember of pure hate winking furiously & impotently in her direction.
the latter, occurring with more frequency than the former.
there were, of course, variables to her algorithms: there had been the liar, the pervert, the honey-tongued rake, et alis.
after some time, their names gracefully faded from her recollection, and so, in conversation, replaced them with colors - most often, the color of the shirt she last remembered him in. (took an inordinate amount of pleasure in assigning the hue “Buff” to one ex-flame who commonly went sans shirt)
(now), she was largely alone. read books. he had gone weeks before, and though his name was Theo, she already knew him as Red. a pile leaned like a familiar lover to her right. from bottom to top: Lautreamont, Barthes, Nin, Rousseau, de Sade, Bachelard, Flaubert, Proust (Swann’s Way, trans. Moncrieff), Pound, Nabokov, Pynchon, Auster, Albee, Woolf - &, placed deliberately at the top like a capstone, Justine, Durrell.
she dreamed of violence. of monsters with no faces & yet, possessing maws agape with wicked fangs. they existed around her with no interest in attacking or devouring. she was ineffectual, had no import or bearing. a distant lighthouse faltered & extinguished, plunging her (in the ocean, treading water) into utter black.
the second drink went down faster than the first. she saw him across the bar in a t-shirt whose color she was unable to discern - some shade of Gray - (she had, already, Gray-with-an-A & a Grey-with-an-E.) his eyes were fastened to a paperback. in front of him, a sweating pint of beer and an empty shotglass with a thimble of amber pooling in the bottom. she decided he was Shale. craned her neck (over her Tequila Sunrise) to see the title of the book. the letters swam in her vision like guppies in a bowl. there were multifold creases, cracks, in the spine of the book - she rises inside of herself, throat arid with expectation, but cannot make it out. he coughs, lightly, and turns a page as if the book is porcelain. she slams herself back down into her seat, spraying her desire with the pesticide of negative thought and horrible outcome. “Another crayon in the box,” she sighs, and chortles morbidly behind a hand at the image it conjures.
“What’s that?” the bartender is someone she knows - it’s good-old-Randy, of the churl’s smile & the fool’s mad grin. she supposes he’s an attractive guy. ruddy. rangy. going to seed a bit in the middle as a result of a fondness for malty, thick beers.
“Another crayon,” she repeats, absently, twining a strand of hair around her finger.
Randy’s put something on the bar in front of her that rattles like candy. At first, she thinks it is candy. “I think we lost Black awhile ago, and Green’s just a stub. Keep ‘em here for Deb’s kid.” He scratches his beard. “Don’t know what you’d need ‘em for.”
She blinks, and stares him full in the face. Laughter trickles out of the corners of her mouth and she sucks on the straw until the Sunrise fades noticeably in the pint glass. “Randy, you’re a peach. Got any paper?”
They spend the next half-hour scribbling contentedly, with no real images or goals in mind, her with Cobalt Blue, he with Burnt Sienna. She drinks another Sunrise away.
o
ELENA HARRIS
152 CHURCH ST
5C
CITY, STATE
ZIPCODE
No return address. She turns the envelope over & over in her hands as if trying to ascertain its contents by touch alone. She is unsuccessful - for the most part. It is a letter, and it has been written by one Elaine Harris, now deceased. The letter contains a great deal of hand-wringing & apology, as well as funeral instructions. It is the last missive from a mother who feels the Kublerian-Ross finality of regret & is straining for some sort of redemption from her daughter. Despite the commonality of their surname, Elena has never heard of Elaine. Her mother’s first name is Linda.
The telephone rings and, at the same time, a small bird flies directly into the window directly to Elena’s right. This is the first time this has ever happened, and she is startled, dropping the letter from Elaine Harris to the floor. A small smear of blood on the glass pane is hesitantly extending a downward pseudopod like a recalcitrant explorer. The window is nailed shut, she cannot open it to clean it. The bird is nowhere to be seen. She picks up the letter anew and sits heavily on the couch; opting for the stifling silence rather than turning on music, as is her usual habit upon entering the apartment. It is sweltering on the fifth floor, though she would never live on the ground floor - prefers vastly to have a sense of omniscience by looking down on things, to be able to look out and over and up. The evening is a great nothing stretching out ahead of her. She has no plans. A sigh leaves her body involuntarily, sneaks out & away before she can catch the errant breath. She unzips her bag and pulls out the day’s acquisition: it is Derrida, and a battered, bruised copy of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, in a translation she does not already have. (She has two, and they sit next to one another on her bookshelf)
At that very moment, S. calls.
They lay in bed - S. & E. - letting their fingers traipse over one another. It is the bliss of post-coitus, and the world is white-gold all over. everything around them seems basted with the night, soaking it all in. The dark is liquid, pliable. She sighs, gathering air into herself and allowing it exit with a carefully moderated exhalation. He lights a cigarette and muses through the smoke. She isn’t paying attention, lolling like a primate in the glow, tongue hanging loose, body unhinged, splayed and akimbo on the queen-sized bed - that is, until he asks
“If I die, will you make sure they bury me with headphones on?”
She almost snorts her derision at the ridiculous nature of the question. His name is already Royal (after Royal Blue) even though the shirt he was wearing is crumpled on the floor. “I thought you said you wanted to be cremated.” He chewed the thought for a second, like a tough piece of gristle. “Well then make sure the photo they put in the funeral has me wearing headphones, okay? Music is important to me. I think I should be remembered with a symbol of listening to music. Or something. I don’t know.” He paused, as if immediately recriminate. “Am I making any sense at all?”
“You’re ruminating. It’s all right.”
“I’m not being too … self-involved?”
“No.”
“All right.” He sank contentedly back down into himself, resting his head more comfortably in the crooks of the arms folded behind his head. He seemed inordinately pleased with himself, like a cat in the birdcage, feathers sticking out of his mouth. She curled away from him, dissatisfaction staining her in the same way as wine stains teeth & tongue. He didn’t seem to notice.
o
She is discouraged. The world is this gigantic place she can only see one frame at a time, from the window of her screened-in porch. In grandiose moments, she refers to it as her solarium, replete with a moue of hand and mouth. she comes to smoke here in the early mornings, dredging herself out of sleep with a cup of english breakfast tea & a hand-rolled cigarette; curling on a settee found on the curb a block or so away. this morning, it is beginning to rain and it sounds dour to her. any other morning she would have elated in it, the insistent and tinny rhythm of the water on the roof and asphalt below, but this morning she is irritable and snappish, even at herself in the bathroom mirror. Her stomach is a weird sea of unease and her fingers are sticking to the cigarette. This is going to be a day where everything goes wrong, she decides, and stares down at the street below.
A man & a woman (call them Hannah and Brian … Livingston.) are hand-in-hand in leisurely promenade. Hannah is carrying a small purse, the color of which is offensively green, which offsets her offensively blonde hair. Brian is one of those perfectly cut-out specimens of masculinity, down to the tucked-in polo shirt and bermuda shorts. They go jogging together. They have separate lives but somehow always careen back into one another by evening. Hannah has dinner plans floating in her skull. She’ll cook that chicken breast in the freezer, season it with lemon & paprika, pan-fry it over some rotini and chop up some light vegetables. Some sort of vinaigrette. She knows Brian won’t be very hungry, but she knows she will be. A white wine for her - something of the chardonnay variety, and a Michelob Ultra for him.
Brian is thinking about his golf game, and the girl caddy with the brunette ponytail & white visor. Her name is Lola, and sometimes Brian finds himself humming the Kinks song of the same name as he’s teeing off. Watching and admiring her pert, round ass in her cream-colored miniskirt as she bends over to retrieve a ball. She has some Mexican blood in her.
Hannah is asking him a question. He hasn’t been paying attention, drifted, from her. He makes up a noncommittal answer and they pass out of sight, turning the corner.
She wrinkles her nose at them, unseen from her lofty perch, and turns away from the window. Dust catches in her throat and she gags involuntarily, swilling the last of the tea-gone-cold from the red & gold mug. This is going to be one of those days.
o
Around noon, the telephone rings. It’s an older-version cell phone, flip-phone, with no bells or whistles - the ring is seven long, impatient-sounding tones, in the style of an old receiver & cradle phone. She has to endure endless jokes & jibes at her expense when in mixed company, surrounded by a forest of people whose eyes are glued to their iPhones, or BlackBerries, or what-have-you. They make an alarming array of hoots and bleeps and she feels that the phones are having their own private conversation - moreso, even, than their owners. She has walked into a bar and seen the entirety of the clientele - all the way down the long bar to the bathrooms - with their faces turned down, illuminated by the eldritch blue of their devices. The tableau so chilled her that she immediately powered her own churlishly anachronistic telephone off and left it off until the next morning.
She doesn't answer it.
o
She waits with drink in hand for someone to leave, hovering near the first stool. There is a burly man occupying said seat, hands cupped around his pint of lager as if protecting it from possible spill. His hands are big enough to overlap around the backside of the glass. He wears a camouflaged trucker’s hat, sunglasses perched on the brim, a white t-shirt that’s seen better days, duck pants, and black workboots. Randy is tending the bar again, and it’s a busy night. She isn’t even entirely sure why she’s sojourned to the bar, with a half-full bottle of gin on the kitchen counter and a bottle of tonic in the fridge, but she’s here now and is determined to follow through.
(The day, as she had expected, was one disappointment after the next. She started to read, but found herself constantly distracted by minor irritants:
a strand of hair that wouldn’t lay quiescent (and so, deranged with a pair of dull scissors, chopped it right off), followed by
a persistent tickle in the rear of her throat, one that couldn’t even be dislodged by repeated coughing, followed by
the inability to find a comfortable position, even after re-arranging her body five major times and six minor times, while at the same time
scratching in vain the itch on the sinistral side of her lower scalp & consumed with the heat radiating from a tiny, cruel cut on the webbing between her dextral thumb & forefinger -
she had given up on comfort and threw herself out of the house without bothering to tuck her book under her arm)
The man in the camouflage hat shifted in his seat and emitted a rumbling belch, a low sound that he self-consciously muffled with the back of one hand before surreptitiously glancing around to see if anyone had taken offense. Elena was pleased despite herself at his furtiveness, declaring it an act of conscious chivalry, and when their gazes met, she smiled at him to communicate her approval. He nodded, somewhat awkwardly, and briefly touched the brim of his hat. She was again touched, and inclined her head in the same fashion.
Thunder, then, from somewhere in the stomach of the sky, and her neck twisted to give her vantage of the sidewalk and beyond. It had begun to rain, and unabashedly so, in heavy, full drops that splattered as they struck the concrete. When she turned back around, the man (she couldn’t call him White, she had one, and Whitey was out of the question … Camouflage wasn’t really a color so much as a color of colors - he had a dark beard, she could call him Blackbeard, but that’s breaking the rule - )
“Why don’t you have a seat,” he was saying gruffly, one hand attached to the underside of his chin, scratching.
She blinked at him. “Me?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
“Very kind of you,” she said, but did not sit down.
“I have to be goin’, in any case.” He clipped the end consonants from his words like someone clipping a cigar, and she found it delightful for the first time since Maroon had left her, well, marooned, for some Kentucky-fried up-and-coming country singer.
“Thank you.”
“I’m Jeff.” He extended his hand. She could see the topography of his palm was heavily callused, a square shape radiating evenly measured and distributed fingers. From her minute-long dalliance with chiromancy, she recalled that his Mount of Saturn seemed unusually prominent, but couldn’t remember what that entailed.
“Elena.” (She was going to have to come up with a color for him.)
“Really?”
She blinked again, and fell into her habit of re-assessing the physical situation. The empty chair sat between the two of them. His hand was still outstretched. She bit her lower lip & took it in her own. He had a firm grip, but not overly firm - but not so restrained as to display a concern for her fingers. In fact, it seemed he hadn’t really thought about it at all - he simply extended his hand and did what came naturally. They squeezed, shook, and disengaged. Elena was becoming more thrilled by the minute. “Oh - yes. Really,” she said, bewildered by her brain.
Jeff nodded. “Never met an Elena before.”
“First time for everything,” she came back, gamely. He smiled, an easy smile displaying two rows of teeth whiter than his shirt. He leaned in, one foot up on the bottom rung of the chair, folding his arms over his chest. That worried her - she’d read somewhere it was a defensive posture, but seconds after the thought traversed her mind, he unfolded them and stuck a hand in a pocket, letting the other rest on the back of the chair.
“Yep.”
The silence fell like doors being finally breached by a battering ram. They both reached for their drinks at the same time. On the jukebox, someone was playing “Baby, I’m Gonna Leave You.”
Thunder, once more. Over her shoulder, Elena heard someone telling a story
“Jacky told me they’ve been finding wolves around.”
“No way. Where? How many?”
“No one knows where they’re coming from. Jacky’s friend Victor’s brother works at the police station and he told Victor that they’ve had twenty-five calls in the past two nights about wolves in people’s front yards.”
“No shit.”
“I shit you not.”
“Have you seen any?”
“Not yet.” and she felt a chill.
Jeff was fishing his wallet from his back pocket, settling up with Randy. Elena pinkened in the cheeks, averted her eyes. “Be careful,” she heard herself saying.
“What’s that?” Jeff turned around.
“There’s wolves.”
He blinked. “Sorry?”
“I just … “ she was motioning over her shoulder when she realized confessing to eavesdropping wasn’t the most attractive trait - did she even want to seem attractive to him? - “I heard. Someone.”
“Wolves.”
“Yeah. In … in the streets.”
He laughed, quietly, and she knew instinctively he wasn’t laughing at her but at the absurdity of the statement. “I’ll be careful.”
“Okay. Good … then. Please do.”
Jeff tipped his hat to her again and exited. She watched him go, admiring his gait, which was slow without being ponderous, deliberate but without pretense. “Thanks for the seat,” she called out, as if to trip him up, but he just waved over a shoulder & the door closed behind him.
and finally, the electric herald of lightning, God’s Holy Camera making a Kodak moment out of the rain-slick streets.
(around the corner, in a garbage-strewn alley, a brindled gray wolf slavers over the corpse of a small cat)
o
she wakes up alone, on the couch in the living room, dazed. feels the hangover brooding like a hurricane just off the coast of her frontal lobe, tracking a slow & painstaking path down behind her face. her mouth is dry and her palms are clammy. she isn’t quite sure how she made it home - can’t remember much after the fifth drink. she remembers the rain ceasing. something about a pregnant mother.
her dreams were vivid and made little sense: she had somehow made friends with a ball bearing, which had sentience, moved of its own accord, and rolled tenderly up and down her body at night. it lived in a small cup on a porch just outside her home, and one day, the cup was thrown senselessly away. her heart tightened as she recalled the dream-moment she discovered, heavy inside of herself with knowing, the absence of the cup, the ball-bearing’s home. some vicious personage had thrown it into the yard, which turned into a salvage lot, which was also somehow a beach. she became obsessed with finding her friend, and years passed with her crawling on her belly through the short grass, the tall grass, picking through the twisted, rusted metal of the junkyard, eventually beaching herself by the indifferent waves. a grain of sand, blown by the wind, tickling up her bare arm - a startle of joy, ecstasy, seizing her by the insides, recalling the sensation of her friend - but an arrogant gust of sea-wind tosses it callously away -
She is wiping the tears from her eyes with the back of her right hand. The rain has stopped, but she can still hear fat, loner drops plunging from the trees’ broad leaves to the unforgiving asphalt below. Fog brushes its belly over the streets of the city. She hauls herself from the couch and prepares some tea. Goes through her morning ablutions, lost in a swirl of imagery. Stares at herself blankly in the bathroom mirror and doesn’t quite recognize the face looking back. She is expressionless but her eyes are red and the skin around them swollen as though needing the pinprick of a lancet.
Later, she sits down to breakfast, and a magazine from months ago.
Later still, she sits, smoking a damp cigarette made clumsily the night before, on her porch.
The possibilities of the day stretch out in front of her, coalescing in the same manner as the fog.
She is waiting for the sun to burn it away.
She is in the habit of making lists.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
an aubade
i never liked it when you laughed. you had a horrible way of snorting that you weren’t ashamed of but which i was, for you. you said you didn’t mind, you thought it was cute. when you sang and went suddenly off-pitch i cringed and my eyes watered. these were things i could not control. i wrote about them in a journal that i kept online. i try to remember the things about you that i like but i keep coming back to the ones i don’t. you leave your clothes on the floor in the bathroom when you’re done with your shower & you always throw the empty tins of cat food in the sink. you’re in a rush on your way to work. you don’t like to talk in the morning but when you come home in the late afternoon you’re bursting with conversation like an overripe tomato, squirting rumor and the daily happenstances like juice. all i want to do is get high and listen to music, because the last thing in the world that i ever want to do is talk about work when i return from it. i learned to do this from my parents, who kept the two worlds of work & home disparate from one another and said it was for my benefit. it worked up until my mother got fired for blowing the whistle, which is the night she locked herself in her bedroom but i could still hear her crying.
you hate your hair and always want to cut it really short. you know i like it long. you confide to me that the day we break up is the day you cut it all off. i make some vague allusion to samson & delilah and you tease me with that term of endearment you know i hate.
we’ve been together now for long enough that we live together. you leave the top off of the jar of honey and sometimes i think you do it on purpose. i hate the feeling of sticky things and protest most uses of tape or glue. i prefer staples and paperclips, you like rubber cement & adhesive. i’ve tried to read into this but you say it isn’t true and giggle behind one hand whenever i bring it up.
we get high together and sometimes when silence falls i enter into the loquela and i start aiming questions at myself about you. i watch how you shift in the chair and chew at a fingernail, then jerk your head to the side when you hear someone on the street outside passing by loudly. our cat mimics you and flees the room with wide, panicked eyes. the way you sit, twisted on top of one leg, hand straddling the armrest as if ready to heave yourself out of the chair at a moment’s notice. i remark on it and you laugh uncomfortably, resettling in a different position. sometimes when i make my observations you look hurt - your eyes darken & you go somewhere just inside of yourself for a small while. you always make the effort to return, though, and smile sunnily as though it never happened.
i worry about you when you’re drinking. you can hold your liquor but any one thing can happen and send you flying, teetering, in a flurry of expressive nonsense punctuated by wild gesticulations and the occasional snorting laugh. you like to hug when you’re drunk, and it’s all right by me but i fear sometimes my irritation is on display. i’m not a very good liar, and you still don’t know this after all this time.
and then we’re someone, the two of us: we get referred to as a singularity, a meiotic cell stuck in metaphase. our hands are fastened together like old baucis & philemon’s trees, firmly, forever, and, like all men, i get nervous at the notion of eternity.
o
i’m changing my name & you’re all for it, enthusiastic & gung-ho. you even fight those little skirmishes for me when friends neglect to heed the shift in nomenclature, standing up like a stormcloud & reminding. there is usually a form of apology or honest recrimination: names are a hard thing for people to remember. once you are who you are, there’s no sideways motion. this morning i was reading about the sun & how it works when it began to rain, and you came in with a mug of coffee and the cat innocently obstructing your path. i could smell the tequila on your breath before you came into the room. i said something about how i felt like i experienced differential rotation even though i was matter and not plasma. you took me seriously for once & we talked about coronal ejections & the magnetic shield of the Earth; of the heliopause & its termination shock; and of the silent, electric whispers of the solar wind. we fell quiet & you laid your head on my shoulder. you have scars on your arm: raised, perfect cicatrices laid like railroad ties near up to the inside of your elbow. a tattoo does not hide them, as was your self-confessed intention, and instead draws attention to them. i kind of love seeing the reaction on strangers’ faces when they notice your handiwork.
sometimes i imagine you like a museum that i am leading a tour of. we are in the bar and you are by my side, drinking with great haste through a plastic straw a very stiff pint of something with bourbon. i am nursing a beer and watching you throw yourself to the conversational wolves again.
o
lately you drink bourbon and i drink gin. we go to the same bar every night, or every other night. you get drunk a lot lately and it makes you amorous. we clamber into bed and fall all over one another, unable to manage our breathing. there’s a lot of quick, flurried laughter that abates once we busy our mouths with each other's lips and tongue. in the hours toward the morning you tell me how you laughed at your aunt’s funeral and how your family hated you.
you think i’m overly aggressive sometimes. you say i can be an asshole and i like it. you like it too. you wear a goofy grin and punch me lightly in the shoulder by way of both admonishment and flirtation. i have conversations with other girls who are bombed on red bull & vodka, who teeter on their heels and ask for a light. explosions of chatter while they twitter on their iPhones and BlackBerries. take pictures of their martinis and post them on their FaceBook. i am making fun of them and they are too wasted to recognize it. you don’t approve, but you don’t disapprove.
& there is always something missing between the two of us. you think it’s dissatisfaction & i think it’s boredom. this town is too small to hold our interest. we make plans to go away, to leave for a proper city. we have been doing this for months now. sometimes you tell our friends that we’re leaving and they express polite surprise but know we’ll do otherwise.
a terrible thing happens somewhere in the world & you are heartsick at it. you volunteer to help in the relief effort and urge me to do the same. this, i fear, is the change that could wreck us. i do not have your level of empathy, but i respect it. i idle in circuitous forms of conversation regarding the terrible thing, i hypothesize on it. i do not have direct conversations regarding the facts, and beg off when it surfaces in the stream of conversation. it is the same with politics and religion. when pressed, i invoke an old scrivener’s paradigm: i would prefer not to. you make your disgusted face at me and ask my opinion: should you go? you explain you’ve never felt so strongly about something in your life - ever. i accept and understand, and everything tells me to tell you to go, go because you know it’s going to make you feel good about yourself and who couldn’t do with a little of that these days, right? but i don’t say that, i don’t tell you those things, i just shrug and say that it’s up to you. it’s your decision.
but it’s your decision too, you say, and your voice feels like an invisible fingertip pressing on my forehead. don’t you want me to stay?
of course i do, i am replying. of course i do.
then i will, you sigh.
you end up going, two weeks later. you leave a note on my pillow, like a movie. it’s brimming with apologies, thorny with your moral agony, and finally resolves itself with a firm dictum of stated intent. you’ve signed it with a heavy hand. at the terminus of the last looping L, the ballpoint of your pen (never pencil) has pierced the thin paper. it looks like you were writing it on your thigh.
you have a terrible habit of misspelling “enviroment”.
o
you are writing a screenplay about it, you are endlessly typing away in the next room. the weird plastic chatter of your laptop’s keyboard. i am watching the rockford files and drinking a Narragansett. while you were gone i had a fling with an old girlfriend and i am fat with the guilt of it. you are absorbed with the clippings of newspapers, your journal entries, the photographs. you talk about it constantly, what it was like, and all of our friends listen. some of us have heard it more than twice now. we allow it but it is wearing on us. or perhaps it is only me.
i lie in bed. you are typing. i pull out my laptop and type, too. to drown out the sound of you with my sound.
you are tired all the time now. you’ve cut coffee out of your diet and i hear constant remarks on how ‘subdued’ you seem. your sleep is at awkward hours, and never for very long. the bulb on the desk lamp has burnt out and been replaced. it was an old bulb. you come to bed at sunrise and seem physically wracked. some nights you sit on the edge of the bed and stare out the window at the world outside blinking its eyes and stretching.
you don’t talk about it anymore. you close the door when you go into the other room and i do not hear the sound of your keys. i go to the bar alone more than i used to. my friends urge me to ask you about it, to talk it through. i don’t know how to tell them i don’t know what to say. the cat and i have become better friends. it used to hate me.
o
you’ve finished your script. it’s terrible. i tell you otherwise. you tell all of our friends that you’ve finished and they congratulate you but when you continue talking about it they go slightly blank and have to maintain their smiles. you don’t know what to do next. i recommend a book i’ve just read and you say you don’t want to read anything right now. you take up painting for awhile. our house is filled with easels and canvases. they’re all violently blue - all you’ve bought for oils are deep prussian and viridian, cadmium white. you are uncontrollably painting the ocean, over and over, from near-benthic to littoral. i am surprised at how good they are. you leave your palette to one side, still smeared with the mix of hues. one morning over breakfast you tell me you’ve been dreaming of the ocean. you don’t know what it means and i tell you it doesn’t matter what it means, it matters how it makes you feel. you confess that it scares you.
reports are still coming in about the terrible thing, and you refuse to listen or hear about it. you shut off the television or walk out of the room or leave the table. you are unhappy inside, and it’s beginning to show.
o
i am talking to you across the kitchen table. you are pretending to be listening to NPR. the cat is nowhere to be found. the television and the radio are both on. i am talking to you about dinner plans. you tell me to stop and i do, but suddenly you start yelling. you snap in a million places. you are white-fisted fury & froth. i am afraid you might hit me and a part of me wants you to. i let you roil for as long as you need to. the bells in the Polish church down the street are ringing for Saturday Mass.
you hate your hair and always want to cut it really short. you know i like it long. you confide to me that the day we break up is the day you cut it all off. i make some vague allusion to samson & delilah and you tease me with that term of endearment you know i hate.
we’ve been together now for long enough that we live together. you leave the top off of the jar of honey and sometimes i think you do it on purpose. i hate the feeling of sticky things and protest most uses of tape or glue. i prefer staples and paperclips, you like rubber cement & adhesive. i’ve tried to read into this but you say it isn’t true and giggle behind one hand whenever i bring it up.
we get high together and sometimes when silence falls i enter into the loquela and i start aiming questions at myself about you. i watch how you shift in the chair and chew at a fingernail, then jerk your head to the side when you hear someone on the street outside passing by loudly. our cat mimics you and flees the room with wide, panicked eyes. the way you sit, twisted on top of one leg, hand straddling the armrest as if ready to heave yourself out of the chair at a moment’s notice. i remark on it and you laugh uncomfortably, resettling in a different position. sometimes when i make my observations you look hurt - your eyes darken & you go somewhere just inside of yourself for a small while. you always make the effort to return, though, and smile sunnily as though it never happened.
i worry about you when you’re drinking. you can hold your liquor but any one thing can happen and send you flying, teetering, in a flurry of expressive nonsense punctuated by wild gesticulations and the occasional snorting laugh. you like to hug when you’re drunk, and it’s all right by me but i fear sometimes my irritation is on display. i’m not a very good liar, and you still don’t know this after all this time.
and then we’re someone, the two of us: we get referred to as a singularity, a meiotic cell stuck in metaphase. our hands are fastened together like old baucis & philemon’s trees, firmly, forever, and, like all men, i get nervous at the notion of eternity.
o
i’m changing my name & you’re all for it, enthusiastic & gung-ho. you even fight those little skirmishes for me when friends neglect to heed the shift in nomenclature, standing up like a stormcloud & reminding. there is usually a form of apology or honest recrimination: names are a hard thing for people to remember. once you are who you are, there’s no sideways motion. this morning i was reading about the sun & how it works when it began to rain, and you came in with a mug of coffee and the cat innocently obstructing your path. i could smell the tequila on your breath before you came into the room. i said something about how i felt like i experienced differential rotation even though i was matter and not plasma. you took me seriously for once & we talked about coronal ejections & the magnetic shield of the Earth; of the heliopause & its termination shock; and of the silent, electric whispers of the solar wind. we fell quiet & you laid your head on my shoulder. you have scars on your arm: raised, perfect cicatrices laid like railroad ties near up to the inside of your elbow. a tattoo does not hide them, as was your self-confessed intention, and instead draws attention to them. i kind of love seeing the reaction on strangers’ faces when they notice your handiwork.
sometimes i imagine you like a museum that i am leading a tour of. we are in the bar and you are by my side, drinking with great haste through a plastic straw a very stiff pint of something with bourbon. i am nursing a beer and watching you throw yourself to the conversational wolves again.
o
lately you drink bourbon and i drink gin. we go to the same bar every night, or every other night. you get drunk a lot lately and it makes you amorous. we clamber into bed and fall all over one another, unable to manage our breathing. there’s a lot of quick, flurried laughter that abates once we busy our mouths with each other's lips and tongue. in the hours toward the morning you tell me how you laughed at your aunt’s funeral and how your family hated you.
you think i’m overly aggressive sometimes. you say i can be an asshole and i like it. you like it too. you wear a goofy grin and punch me lightly in the shoulder by way of both admonishment and flirtation. i have conversations with other girls who are bombed on red bull & vodka, who teeter on their heels and ask for a light. explosions of chatter while they twitter on their iPhones and BlackBerries. take pictures of their martinis and post them on their FaceBook. i am making fun of them and they are too wasted to recognize it. you don’t approve, but you don’t disapprove.
& there is always something missing between the two of us. you think it’s dissatisfaction & i think it’s boredom. this town is too small to hold our interest. we make plans to go away, to leave for a proper city. we have been doing this for months now. sometimes you tell our friends that we’re leaving and they express polite surprise but know we’ll do otherwise.
a terrible thing happens somewhere in the world & you are heartsick at it. you volunteer to help in the relief effort and urge me to do the same. this, i fear, is the change that could wreck us. i do not have your level of empathy, but i respect it. i idle in circuitous forms of conversation regarding the terrible thing, i hypothesize on it. i do not have direct conversations regarding the facts, and beg off when it surfaces in the stream of conversation. it is the same with politics and religion. when pressed, i invoke an old scrivener’s paradigm: i would prefer not to. you make your disgusted face at me and ask my opinion: should you go? you explain you’ve never felt so strongly about something in your life - ever. i accept and understand, and everything tells me to tell you to go, go because you know it’s going to make you feel good about yourself and who couldn’t do with a little of that these days, right? but i don’t say that, i don’t tell you those things, i just shrug and say that it’s up to you. it’s your decision.
but it’s your decision too, you say, and your voice feels like an invisible fingertip pressing on my forehead. don’t you want me to stay?
of course i do, i am replying. of course i do.
then i will, you sigh.
you end up going, two weeks later. you leave a note on my pillow, like a movie. it’s brimming with apologies, thorny with your moral agony, and finally resolves itself with a firm dictum of stated intent. you’ve signed it with a heavy hand. at the terminus of the last looping L, the ballpoint of your pen (never pencil) has pierced the thin paper. it looks like you were writing it on your thigh.
you have a terrible habit of misspelling “enviroment”.
o
you are writing a screenplay about it, you are endlessly typing away in the next room. the weird plastic chatter of your laptop’s keyboard. i am watching the rockford files and drinking a Narragansett. while you were gone i had a fling with an old girlfriend and i am fat with the guilt of it. you are absorbed with the clippings of newspapers, your journal entries, the photographs. you talk about it constantly, what it was like, and all of our friends listen. some of us have heard it more than twice now. we allow it but it is wearing on us. or perhaps it is only me.
i lie in bed. you are typing. i pull out my laptop and type, too. to drown out the sound of you with my sound.
you are tired all the time now. you’ve cut coffee out of your diet and i hear constant remarks on how ‘subdued’ you seem. your sleep is at awkward hours, and never for very long. the bulb on the desk lamp has burnt out and been replaced. it was an old bulb. you come to bed at sunrise and seem physically wracked. some nights you sit on the edge of the bed and stare out the window at the world outside blinking its eyes and stretching.
you don’t talk about it anymore. you close the door when you go into the other room and i do not hear the sound of your keys. i go to the bar alone more than i used to. my friends urge me to ask you about it, to talk it through. i don’t know how to tell them i don’t know what to say. the cat and i have become better friends. it used to hate me.
o
you’ve finished your script. it’s terrible. i tell you otherwise. you tell all of our friends that you’ve finished and they congratulate you but when you continue talking about it they go slightly blank and have to maintain their smiles. you don’t know what to do next. i recommend a book i’ve just read and you say you don’t want to read anything right now. you take up painting for awhile. our house is filled with easels and canvases. they’re all violently blue - all you’ve bought for oils are deep prussian and viridian, cadmium white. you are uncontrollably painting the ocean, over and over, from near-benthic to littoral. i am surprised at how good they are. you leave your palette to one side, still smeared with the mix of hues. one morning over breakfast you tell me you’ve been dreaming of the ocean. you don’t know what it means and i tell you it doesn’t matter what it means, it matters how it makes you feel. you confess that it scares you.
reports are still coming in about the terrible thing, and you refuse to listen or hear about it. you shut off the television or walk out of the room or leave the table. you are unhappy inside, and it’s beginning to show.
o
i am talking to you across the kitchen table. you are pretending to be listening to NPR. the cat is nowhere to be found. the television and the radio are both on. i am talking to you about dinner plans. you tell me to stop and i do, but suddenly you start yelling. you snap in a million places. you are white-fisted fury & froth. i am afraid you might hit me and a part of me wants you to. i let you roil for as long as you need to. the bells in the Polish church down the street are ringing for Saturday Mass.
Friday, April 18, 2008
snapdragons
i buried my aunt in the middle of a high-pressure system: the fog turned the graveside grieving to silhouettes, shifting from side to side like ships in the harbour. the oak tree's branches: tentacles - menacing, suspicious. i barely knew the wizened, made-up corpse in the coffin, and it seemed she didn't know many others. i was one of five listing shadows grouped wetly around the gaping hole in the ground.
later, in the dim pub, whisky turning warm in my fist, he stared at the girl next to me without listening to my pseudo-drunken babble. his eyes were intent. he nodded absently. i knew who it was without turning.
& she: she was a knife between the ribs. all glint and silver, dangerous-looking smile. severe bone structure. tiny fists, always either a) deep in the pockets of her track jacket or b) clenched. her name was Lily. she smoked like a factory, constantly issuing clouds of thick smoke. i began to think it was an intentional veil, to obscure her features, to render herself somewhat anonymous.
we would get high in her car: she'd inherited it from her dead grandfather: a lumbering, maroon town car - complete with a benevolently wide backseat, which we made frequent use of, mostly to the sound of whichever radio station she flicked the dial to. i can remember more than one occasion when her drunken fingers propelled us into static; (that weird gray hyperspace) and insist upon remaining there, guiding my fingers towards her equator. outside: a different kind of noise - thunderstorm, quaky & insecure, rattling the night with its petulance. behind us, in stoic indifference, the cemetery, its occupants silent in their earthy rooms, headstones illuminated starkly with each white blast of lightning.
i remember more nights than i do days. Lily occupied my hours - or, rather, i filled my hours with her. her drink: Citron and soda, and just a splash of soda. a lime, which she consumed before taking a sip, crushing the juice from its flesh with her teeth. her jaw: something i loved about her the most. lips closed, she was a Venus fly-trap, nodding demurely in the neon light before zeroing in suddenly on her prey. then: her hand on my elbow, eyes electric, muscles tensed with need. her urgent, hissed whisper in my ear, sound torn on her teeth: i need you. now. & i would oblige her, stepping through the door of the ladies' room & into a stall, rummaging in my pocket where i kept her craving. a few white snorts later, we returned & she was gone again, her white-blonde hair bobbing in the midst of the undulating crowd.
i sat at the bar, drinking cheap beer & nodding absently to the pounding music, or watching a captioned television. the news was on: it was the month of wildfires, snarls of orange and red marched across the wildland like a confident army. a lesbian couple tore my eyes from the tv - they stumbled into the bar as if caught in dream. maybe tripping - acid, psilocybin. both. they were prone to physically affirming their love for one another. lips, ears, cheekbones - later, drunker, hipbones, fingertips, eyelids. always smiling. i lost them periodically to the crowd and turned back to the wildfires.
i've nearly forgotten about him & his disappearance, even about what he left behind. i am too obsessed with Lily - she crowds my memory in photographic form, still shots of her carmine lips, of her ignited eyes, of her thumbs in the waistband of her thong, inching it down over her hipbones - her weakness for the Stones' "Under My Thumb"...
...his scowl, his sneer, carved into his face like a living cicatrix, contorting or relaxing depending on how much of himself he'd filled with alcohol. his jealous gaze, his uncomprehending glare, from across the room, from across the street, even when i couldn't see him, felt his eyes on the nape of my neck, burrowing into my skin as though seeking out the answer in my brain stem. his casual disappearance, those "ghostings" late at nights, mid-party. he abhorred the gluey procession of goodbyes & goodnights, near pathologically.
he left his notebooks in a scattered pile by his rumpled bed, each of them the same, hardcover black, unlined pages, filled with both sketches & wandering, abstract prose. this was a side of him he'd never let anyone see; kept it locked up like a bastard child he was ashamed of, but of whom he kept clandestine photographs. perhaps some of those drunken nights where i observed a creased furrow in his brow were dedicated to that secret, that jealously guarded Eden of his thoughts.
what was i, then, that hazy morning choked with humidity, with Lily at her job, meandering to his apartment red-eyed with marijuana & lack of sleep? some crazed Theseus at the entrance to his labyrinth?
later, in the dim pub, whisky turning warm in my fist, he stared at the girl next to me without listening to my pseudo-drunken babble. his eyes were intent. he nodded absently. i knew who it was without turning.
& she: she was a knife between the ribs. all glint and silver, dangerous-looking smile. severe bone structure. tiny fists, always either a) deep in the pockets of her track jacket or b) clenched. her name was Lily. she smoked like a factory, constantly issuing clouds of thick smoke. i began to think it was an intentional veil, to obscure her features, to render herself somewhat anonymous.
we would get high in her car: she'd inherited it from her dead grandfather: a lumbering, maroon town car - complete with a benevolently wide backseat, which we made frequent use of, mostly to the sound of whichever radio station she flicked the dial to. i can remember more than one occasion when her drunken fingers propelled us into static; (that weird gray hyperspace) and insist upon remaining there, guiding my fingers towards her equator. outside: a different kind of noise - thunderstorm, quaky & insecure, rattling the night with its petulance. behind us, in stoic indifference, the cemetery, its occupants silent in their earthy rooms, headstones illuminated starkly with each white blast of lightning.
i remember more nights than i do days. Lily occupied my hours - or, rather, i filled my hours with her. her drink: Citron and soda, and just a splash of soda. a lime, which she consumed before taking a sip, crushing the juice from its flesh with her teeth. her jaw: something i loved about her the most. lips closed, she was a Venus fly-trap, nodding demurely in the neon light before zeroing in suddenly on her prey. then: her hand on my elbow, eyes electric, muscles tensed with need. her urgent, hissed whisper in my ear, sound torn on her teeth: i need you. now. & i would oblige her, stepping through the door of the ladies' room & into a stall, rummaging in my pocket where i kept her craving. a few white snorts later, we returned & she was gone again, her white-blonde hair bobbing in the midst of the undulating crowd.
i sat at the bar, drinking cheap beer & nodding absently to the pounding music, or watching a captioned television. the news was on: it was the month of wildfires, snarls of orange and red marched across the wildland like a confident army. a lesbian couple tore my eyes from the tv - they stumbled into the bar as if caught in dream. maybe tripping - acid, psilocybin. both. they were prone to physically affirming their love for one another. lips, ears, cheekbones - later, drunker, hipbones, fingertips, eyelids. always smiling. i lost them periodically to the crowd and turned back to the wildfires.
i've nearly forgotten about him & his disappearance, even about what he left behind. i am too obsessed with Lily - she crowds my memory in photographic form, still shots of her carmine lips, of her ignited eyes, of her thumbs in the waistband of her thong, inching it down over her hipbones - her weakness for the Stones' "Under My Thumb"...
...his scowl, his sneer, carved into his face like a living cicatrix, contorting or relaxing depending on how much of himself he'd filled with alcohol. his jealous gaze, his uncomprehending glare, from across the room, from across the street, even when i couldn't see him, felt his eyes on the nape of my neck, burrowing into my skin as though seeking out the answer in my brain stem. his casual disappearance, those "ghostings" late at nights, mid-party. he abhorred the gluey procession of goodbyes & goodnights, near pathologically.
he left his notebooks in a scattered pile by his rumpled bed, each of them the same, hardcover black, unlined pages, filled with both sketches & wandering, abstract prose. this was a side of him he'd never let anyone see; kept it locked up like a bastard child he was ashamed of, but of whom he kept clandestine photographs. perhaps some of those drunken nights where i observed a creased furrow in his brow were dedicated to that secret, that jealously guarded Eden of his thoughts.
what was i, then, that hazy morning choked with humidity, with Lily at her job, meandering to his apartment red-eyed with marijuana & lack of sleep? some crazed Theseus at the entrance to his labyrinth?
Friday, March 21, 2008
the apparatus.
i woke up in an apartment with four white walls & a red door. there was a lightbulb and a refrigerator. one electrical outlet on the wall, which i plugged into and hummed in harmony with the fridge to while away the night. i discovered alcohol and bent my head into many bottles. the walls were stained in weird places. i had four boxes with my belongings, which i had labelled EAST, WEST, NORTH and SOUTH. in the NORTH, i had my meagre library. in the WEST, i had my clothing. in the EAST, records and notebooks. in the SOUTH - miscellaneous, odds and ends. screwdrivers.
i stayed there for many years, blinking in the blue light of the neon from the restaurant i lived above. it sizzled & hummed, a bug-zapper determined to lure airplane-sized insects. cars on the street. a bare mattress. a typewriter, which i never used.
time passed, and the books i had disappeared through the influence of ghosts. i never noticed until i was searching for it. a mild sense of disappointment settled on me, grew on me like moss. idleness became a trenchant disease, solitude an unbearable prison. as we age, us shadows start to thin, and we need to seek out others of our kind so as to be reassured.
i constructed an apparatus of language in an attempt to contact, to seek out, those others of my kind. first, the schematic for such an endeavour took years. i am only now half-way through the plans of it. by the time i am old and paper-thin, i will have put the final attachment on the machine. my one wish is to be able to press "CALL" before i expire.
i stayed there for many years, blinking in the blue light of the neon from the restaurant i lived above. it sizzled & hummed, a bug-zapper determined to lure airplane-sized insects. cars on the street. a bare mattress. a typewriter, which i never used.
time passed, and the books i had disappeared through the influence of ghosts. i never noticed until i was searching for it. a mild sense of disappointment settled on me, grew on me like moss. idleness became a trenchant disease, solitude an unbearable prison. as we age, us shadows start to thin, and we need to seek out others of our kind so as to be reassured.
i constructed an apparatus of language in an attempt to contact, to seek out, those others of my kind. first, the schematic for such an endeavour took years. i am only now half-way through the plans of it. by the time i am old and paper-thin, i will have put the final attachment on the machine. my one wish is to be able to press "CALL" before i expire.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
shadow tells his story.
i know it has something to do with my dad. at the core of it, i know in my twisting, febrile gut, that it has everything to do with that man. i feel like entropy, like the negative side of someone else, and in so birthing me he saw his own shadow slide out of his wife's womb. my mother tried to love me like a three-dimensional kid, but i was just too elusive. at nighttime, i would disappear entirely, into my room behind a locked door, staring at a bright light, wishing myself to exist.
i spent most of my time thinking about Love, love and what it means. my mother said "i love you" to me and i discovered i did not, in fact, Love her back. i did not feel about her as i did my departed father, who had himself turned into a shadow and fled. i reasoned in the sheets that love opened the door to reciprocation; in fact, demanded it, and so my mother was eagerly knocking by Loving, but i was disgusted by the urgent rhythm of her rapping, chose to remain silent inside. eventually, she'd go away.
winter came, and i nearly froze to death.
i came to know a ghost who had the same name as me, but i cannot say we were ever friends. eventually, the ghost left and another came. sometimes two at a time. they never stayed for long, although whether i drove them off or if they left of their own accord i have never discovered. i took to reading, a passive, greedy voyeur of the lives of others. i had to stop to go to school and dinner. i started choking on the food during dinner because i chewed so rapidly. this, of course, in order to escape the thick silence of the dinner table. agonizing. it was high noon for a shadow like me, squirming and agonizing in a black puddle directly under their feet.
one night the house burned down and i was set free. i wandered like a dust devil on the sides of highways. travelled. saw nothing.
i never tried to find my father. he existed, out there, somewhere. i pictured him old and balding, ugly. aviators, since that's all he ever wore in every Polaroid i ever saw of him. a goofy, doughy face. the unpleasant roundness of having let-himself-go around the middle. caved-in shoulders. a hole in the side of his head. for a time, he moved into his parents' house, which happened to be the house next to my family's house, distant only for a small swath of pine and birch trees. in the winter: small flashes of the siding through the bare boughs. that was as close as he got to my memories. i pictured small, run-down apartments, everything always dingy, dull, drab. off-yellow walls. a beaten, defeated refrigerator. maybe an old pack of cigarettes - where else do i get this filthy habit? - maybe a typewriter. the curtains are pulled - heavy, yellow muslin. the sunlight barely filters through it. dust in the air, mixed with small dots that glint or gleam.
i came to a small harbour town just past the millenium and decided to hunker down, head against the blast. winter came, and i almost froze to death again. summer was a kind thaw - even the spring, though blustery and brusque in its manner, was a relief against the unforgiving chills of winter. i found some more ghosts hidden in the corners of this town. they were so talkative i could barely stand it. sometimes they talked when their mouths weren't moving - but i could still hear them.
then, one day, the streets filled up with them - everywhere, passing to and fro - so many that i thought i was the one in the wrong.
i still am not convinced.
i spent most of my time thinking about Love, love and what it means. my mother said "i love you" to me and i discovered i did not, in fact, Love her back. i did not feel about her as i did my departed father, who had himself turned into a shadow and fled. i reasoned in the sheets that love opened the door to reciprocation; in fact, demanded it, and so my mother was eagerly knocking by Loving, but i was disgusted by the urgent rhythm of her rapping, chose to remain silent inside. eventually, she'd go away.
winter came, and i nearly froze to death.
i came to know a ghost who had the same name as me, but i cannot say we were ever friends. eventually, the ghost left and another came. sometimes two at a time. they never stayed for long, although whether i drove them off or if they left of their own accord i have never discovered. i took to reading, a passive, greedy voyeur of the lives of others. i had to stop to go to school and dinner. i started choking on the food during dinner because i chewed so rapidly. this, of course, in order to escape the thick silence of the dinner table. agonizing. it was high noon for a shadow like me, squirming and agonizing in a black puddle directly under their feet.
one night the house burned down and i was set free. i wandered like a dust devil on the sides of highways. travelled. saw nothing.
i never tried to find my father. he existed, out there, somewhere. i pictured him old and balding, ugly. aviators, since that's all he ever wore in every Polaroid i ever saw of him. a goofy, doughy face. the unpleasant roundness of having let-himself-go around the middle. caved-in shoulders. a hole in the side of his head. for a time, he moved into his parents' house, which happened to be the house next to my family's house, distant only for a small swath of pine and birch trees. in the winter: small flashes of the siding through the bare boughs. that was as close as he got to my memories. i pictured small, run-down apartments, everything always dingy, dull, drab. off-yellow walls. a beaten, defeated refrigerator. maybe an old pack of cigarettes - where else do i get this filthy habit? - maybe a typewriter. the curtains are pulled - heavy, yellow muslin. the sunlight barely filters through it. dust in the air, mixed with small dots that glint or gleam.
i came to a small harbour town just past the millenium and decided to hunker down, head against the blast. winter came, and i almost froze to death again. summer was a kind thaw - even the spring, though blustery and brusque in its manner, was a relief against the unforgiving chills of winter. i found some more ghosts hidden in the corners of this town. they were so talkative i could barely stand it. sometimes they talked when their mouths weren't moving - but i could still hear them.
then, one day, the streets filled up with them - everywhere, passing to and fro - so many that i thought i was the one in the wrong.
i still am not convinced.
Friday, March 7, 2008
last night, too much to drink
back to camel lights? marlboros make my lungs hurt. i need to quit smoking.
THERAPIST
...I think, I think that you're...searching for something, and ... whenever you don't find it, you get frustrated and turn to using. or abusing."
ME
... it's funny ...
THERAPIST
What's funny?
ME
the prefix "ab" on the word "using" is the only thing making the word negative. the prefix "ab" means, away from. Away from using? Ab-use. Use away from.
THERAPIST
What does "using" mean, then?
ME
When you ... damn, it really is one of those words. When you.. um, are acquiring? No. Taking... Using .. see? damn. When you ... are trying to achieve something, when you're ...okay. Let's say: When you need to get to a goal, and something aids you. No - see, that's not it either.
(pause)
I don't know.
THERAPIST
So when you "ab"-use something, you're taking that thing's function and using it away from the goal.
ME
But... what is the goal?
THERAPIST
It's something different for everyone, isn't it.
********static*********
my dreams last night: the color red, predominant. red tongues, red walls. red dress on the red-eyed woman. firestone jewelry, glittering white fire. fire leaping out of the totaled car, leaping licking flames against the black skin of night - the girl with blood sliding like a hand down her face, half in, half out of the metal wreck. her dress had fallen over her body and i could see her cunt, now just another gory slash in the company of so many others. like a child with a pair of scissors snipping idly at a piece of paper. you know, to make a snowflake.
a party, a veritable gala. huge chandelier. big old house with a lot of people crammed into its foyer. the wings lay empty, almost eerily so. what would it sound like if there had been no house built there. in the middle of the forest.
someone at the party jumps off a cliff and splashes soundlessly into the sea. then they all start doing it. from my view on the third floor: penguins, hustling themselves off of an ice floe. the house inches closer to the edge, picks itself up and shuffles towards them in ashamed lemming-fashion. i run out of the room and try to escape before it hurls itself to the pitch-dark sea. i am successful, though by only a stuttering toe-hold on the edge of the cliff as it plunges down to the waves behind me. it's one of those instances when i feel that logically, i should have plunged with it, but because it is a dream, i allow myself to suspend logic and continue on living. most of the time in dream, i am a camera behind my own head. i am a brilliant cinematographer in my dreams: i work all the angles.
**************
plaid shirt to work tonight? warmish weather. maybe rain tomorrow. wash away the dirty snow. ryan says: "one more blizzard before spring, i guarantee it." he "grew-up-around-here." i said we should put a wager on what date the huge snowdrift in front of the museum would melt by. i was joking. there was no bet. but now i'll be watching.
big band of green and pink coming westward, crawling in on the edges of the radar like moss, vanishing, and doing it all over again. i am watching for green grass. i am on the lookout for that first warm day. the sun and the birds. the surrender of winter, snow plunging heedlessly from roofs and impacting the ground in huge heavy splashes. the thaw's begun, i'm waiting for the capitulation.
sometimes i feel inordinately crazed, of a sudden, spasming with fury, frenzy, and desperation - like a dog that's been poked one too many times with a stick. then i settle down and realize it's nothing.
such big words from such a little mongrel.
such dramatics, such histrionics, from such a little man.
it's a wonder people like me. i am unable to see how.
cigarette.
THERAPIST
...I think, I think that you're...searching for something, and ... whenever you don't find it, you get frustrated and turn to using. or abusing."
ME
... it's funny ...
THERAPIST
What's funny?
ME
the prefix "ab" on the word "using" is the only thing making the word negative. the prefix "ab" means, away from. Away from using? Ab-use. Use away from.
THERAPIST
What does "using" mean, then?
ME
When you ... damn, it really is one of those words. When you.. um, are acquiring? No. Taking... Using .. see? damn. When you ... are trying to achieve something, when you're ...okay. Let's say: When you need to get to a goal, and something aids you. No - see, that's not it either.
(pause)
I don't know.
THERAPIST
So when you "ab"-use something, you're taking that thing's function and using it away from the goal.
ME
But... what is the goal?
THERAPIST
It's something different for everyone, isn't it.
********static*********
my dreams last night: the color red, predominant. red tongues, red walls. red dress on the red-eyed woman. firestone jewelry, glittering white fire. fire leaping out of the totaled car, leaping licking flames against the black skin of night - the girl with blood sliding like a hand down her face, half in, half out of the metal wreck. her dress had fallen over her body and i could see her cunt, now just another gory slash in the company of so many others. like a child with a pair of scissors snipping idly at a piece of paper. you know, to make a snowflake.
a party, a veritable gala. huge chandelier. big old house with a lot of people crammed into its foyer. the wings lay empty, almost eerily so. what would it sound like if there had been no house built there. in the middle of the forest.
someone at the party jumps off a cliff and splashes soundlessly into the sea. then they all start doing it. from my view on the third floor: penguins, hustling themselves off of an ice floe. the house inches closer to the edge, picks itself up and shuffles towards them in ashamed lemming-fashion. i run out of the room and try to escape before it hurls itself to the pitch-dark sea. i am successful, though by only a stuttering toe-hold on the edge of the cliff as it plunges down to the waves behind me. it's one of those instances when i feel that logically, i should have plunged with it, but because it is a dream, i allow myself to suspend logic and continue on living. most of the time in dream, i am a camera behind my own head. i am a brilliant cinematographer in my dreams: i work all the angles.
**************
plaid shirt to work tonight? warmish weather. maybe rain tomorrow. wash away the dirty snow. ryan says: "one more blizzard before spring, i guarantee it." he "grew-up-around-here." i said we should put a wager on what date the huge snowdrift in front of the museum would melt by. i was joking. there was no bet. but now i'll be watching.
big band of green and pink coming westward, crawling in on the edges of the radar like moss, vanishing, and doing it all over again. i am watching for green grass. i am on the lookout for that first warm day. the sun and the birds. the surrender of winter, snow plunging heedlessly from roofs and impacting the ground in huge heavy splashes. the thaw's begun, i'm waiting for the capitulation.
sometimes i feel inordinately crazed, of a sudden, spasming with fury, frenzy, and desperation - like a dog that's been poked one too many times with a stick. then i settle down and realize it's nothing.
such big words from such a little mongrel.
such dramatics, such histrionics, from such a little man.
it's a wonder people like me. i am unable to see how.
cigarette.
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