Showing posts with label Relationships. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Relationships. Show all posts

25 September, 2013

Gator People Live in The River: Moth Slammin'

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. -- Hannah Arendt

 
The problem with performing is that it's addictive.

In spite of a marathon day working at the Writing Center, Amanda and I made it to Headliner's for the monthly Moth StorySlam. This month's topic: TRUST. I'd been mulling over a story -- one I have written about here regarding my pocket knife, traveling by bus, and life in our ever burgeoning Police State -- and I think I told it fairly well. I like being on stage, whether I'm telling a story or reading poetry or trying to pick a song on some stringed instrument. It's a free space. It's a public space. It can sometimes be an extremely lonely space.

The evening's highlight, however, was when Amanda took the stage and killed it... beating out a mexican cyclist, a cross-dresser, a dick joke, and me.

People who know me know I am patently non-competitive, except for when I get suckered into a game of Monolopy (It brings out the lingering shred of a petty capitalist that I've been starving out of existence for some time now.) Art culture is itself competitive, and writers are some of the more spiteful bunch, beat out only by the visual arts because of it's cold commodification of the soul. Generally you are given or assigned a role as leader or as follower. I decided some years ago that I would do neither and go my own way. Sometimes I cross paths with other art folk. Mostly I stick to comfortable bars, cozy coffee shops, and anything that sounds like fun. If I'm happy and I'm having fun I figure I have at least half a leg up on the folks who would hold my happiness for ransom at the cost of a paycheck and a weak promise of retirement.

Last night was fun. It was fun because even though I was too mentally tired to be nervous, I got on stage and told a story I wanted to tell. It was especially fun because I got to leave on the arm of the best storyteller in the room.

And it reinforeced for me that even though art culture is a shark tank, I don't have to be a shark to be happy. All I have to do is be happy, whether I'm on stage or off.


02 November, 2012

Carlinville Intermezzo: The Story Of R

The train station in Carlinville, Illinois is nothing more than a ventilated brick box. Cement floor, a single bench, no heat for the winter and not even a fan for warmer weather. I got there around 11:30 in the morning. The train to Chicago wasn't going to arrive until 3:30 that afternoon. The sky was cloudy, the temperature cold, and it was spitting a particularly unforgiving rain that made me grateful for I didn't have to walk the miles from Litchfield.

Nothing about Carlinville impressed me enough to get wet wandering around to explore it. I noticed one clearly No-Tell-Motel on the way into town. (The sign listed a price differential between single and double beds, and the ambiance suggested that there should have also been a price differential for hourly and nightly rates.) I also took note of several bars, none of which looked trustworthy enough to carry my pack into. Other than the rail, which rolled by a deserted grain elevator, there was very little left to describe. Like every other town that grew up along Route 66, it was impacted by completion of the I-55 corridor. And it was clearly impacted again by changes in the railroad industry.

I was alone in the brick box for about 20 minutes before he hurried in and asked if I had a cigarette. And if I was slightly inclined to dig deeper into Carlinville -- named, according to an optimistically written Wikipedia page, after a former Governor -- talking to R would have changed my mind.

He assured me that if I was looking to get laid, that all I had to do was walk down the street.

"Ah," I said. "So they're trying to fish outside of the gene pool?"

"Gene pool. Yeah, man You got that right!"

A man on the run from something has a distinct body language. Jerky movements. Disheveled look. Given the mostly pale demographic of the town and -- except for the Indians who worked in the hotels and the Mexicans who did the service industry grunt work -- R stuck out simply because he was black.

After I was unable to give him a cigarette, he asked where I was going and where I'd come from. So I gave him the quick and dirty version. Hearing that I walked from Staunton to Litchfield elicited a wide-eyed shake of the head.

"Why'd you do that?"

"I had to get here."


"You didn't have a car?"

"If I had a car, I wouldn't need to catch a train."

That seemed to satisfy him for the most part. It also gave him a door to prove the current events of his life more interesting than mine.

R was not from Carlinville. He was from Springfield, Illinois, but came there via St. Louis. And he did it for a girl. The part that seemed to surprise him, even though he was standing in a brick box train depot waiting for the train that would take him back to Springfield with his few possessions in a 33 gallon garbage bag, was that it didn't work out.

"She's a white girl," he said. "And she's... you know... not thick." He repeated this several times throughout the story, as if he was trying to convince himself that it should have, and for those very reasons.

The story unfolded something like this: he met the woman he was trying to escape the day after he got out of jail. R explained that yes, "It was drug related stuff," but that he had cleaned up his act since and was no longer doing whatever it was that got him locked up. But, he admitted that, upon his release, he was on the hunt for the one thing he couldn't get while he was incarcerated. And it just so happened that he got call from a former cellie who had a girlfriend who had a friend.

"I was looking for a one night stand," R maintained. "But it didn't turn into that."

Upon his release, R had been sent to a half-way house to ensure that his rehabilitation would take. After one night with this girl -- whose name, I have to admit, I don't remember -- she took it upon herself to harass his Parole Officer and the Missouri State Department of Corrections to secure his release from the half-way house so that he could move in with her. When calling St. Louis didn't help, R, said, she drove from Carlinville to St. Louis five days a week in order to visit him and track down the dodgy P.O. Naturally, the development seemed to work to his advantage, so he didn't argue. And while he never uttered the word, the confluence of events must have seemed to him, at the time, serendipitous. And when his parole officer secured his release from the half-way house... making it clear that his only reason was to get the woman off his back... R thought he'd stumbled onto the love of his life.

His first indication that something was amiss was when he showed up in Carlinville and discovered that not only did his true love have two kids -- from two different fathers -- and that both of them were medicated for educational and developmental issues, but that she also lived with her sister, her sister's flavor of the week, and HER two kids.

To hear him tell it, his one true love did nothing except sleep all day, eat ice cream and want to fuck. She didn't want to deal with her kids. She didn't want to deal with her sister's kids. Apparently the sugar she ingested while watching Maury Povich was only to be used in the pursuit of more ice cream and sex.

To hear him tell it, she screwed him raw. And in every way possible. And when he was too exhausted to get it up "I'm not as young as I used be, you know" she would insist that he do something else to fill her appetites. And then she expected him to take care of the kids, who wouldn't listen to him. And then she expected him to make her a sandwich. And then clean up the house. And then go buy her some ice cream.

I was waiting for him to admit to something involving a ball gag and a french maid's outfit.

Instead, he told me about changing the sheets on the bed.

Apparently, there was a day when his own true love actually left the house -- for reasons he didn't explain -- and he took it upon himself to change out the sheets on the bed. She had told him he could find clean sheets in a Santa Claus bag in the hall closet. He found the bag and starting digging through pillow cases and sundry unmatched soft goods until he stumbled upon something that wasn't so -- soft.

Actually there were several.

"I'm telling you," he said, "the bitch could open a dildo flea market!"

He found out later, however, that not all the dildos were for her. Apparently she was hoping that R's time in prison made him a more amenable catcher to a stiff pitch.

R would have none of it.

And while he didn't say directly, the eventual decline of the relationship -- he reiterated several times that he was in love with her but "The bitch is crazy, and those ain't my kids!" -- began with his discovery of the toys and his denial of her strap-on passion.

Even love has it's limits.


25 March, 2012

Wayward Sacredness, Intermezzo 3: The Last Supper (A Poem)


You cooked dinner and I tried not to notice the small differences
since I'd been gone. Mexican Night: simple taquitos.
Corn. Black beans. Tomatoes. Over lean beef that will inevitably
over cook. We joke that food is never spicy enough since leaving Arizona.

The cat is acting needy, you tell me. We talk about our days,
the current and those that have past in between the last time
we sat down together and supped. There is no blood here,
and no body either, and no more salvation.

Keep the conversation light. Polite and pleasant.
Your voice echoes in my mind, back when you said
we were both rational... that we were both reasonable.
It didn't have to be difficult, you said.

I find myself faking chit chat and laughter
as I pile on the red pepper. The burn
always makes it better, keeps me present
in these moments I want to fall into my emotions

like one more failed baptism. It'll be okay, I tell myself
if I avoid your eyes – eyes that have been the only ones
that ever really saw me. I wish the water were bourbon
and then I could be a demon

and it would all be so much easier
and you could remember
and I could forget, just for a moment
that this is something we both need.

The disbursement of things has been easy, at least.
Packing at the end of a relationship (I'd forgotten)
always brings out my unsentimental side,
makes me want to burn all the memories out of my brain,

start fresh. But that only works in the mythology of crash and burn.
This is the one about 40 years of wandering the desert,
being led by columns of smoke and fire and praying for manna.
So there's no point in squabbling over DVD's and kitchenware.

Sitting on the porch after dinner smoking, you ask me
if I feel better. I confess I've stayed too long, that Out There
is calling me. My discomfort shows. We speak casually
of divorce, like butchers dismember carcasses for steak.

I can hide behind the pipe smoke
so long as I avoid looking in your eyes,
where I might be tempted to say
Save me. Take, eat, this is my heart. 

[I normally post poetry here. But since the poetry is tied to the traveling and experiences of the travel log, I'll be posting more of it here... especially as it relates.

Thanks for reading. Remember, if you like what you read:
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Every little bit helps, especially as I gather steam to push westward.]








19 February, 2012

Scant Minutes Til The End of a Long Distance Romance


Bus Station flowers
still cold from refrigeration
hands wrapped around
tightly. Red knuckled.
Eye out for a bottle of wine.

Bus will arrive any minute, he thinks.
Does she like white roses?
Are they even real?
Do roses come in white?

Lover Boy believes he was short-changed.
But what is a few dollars,
in the name of love? Besides,
he was in a rush. He forgot.
Meant to buy mums;
but he didn't know
what they look like. That
he thought that she never mentioned.

Sometimes, you just get stuck no matter what.

Remembered she mentioned
mums were her favorite flowers.
Once in passing. Pillow talk.
Early on. When the sex was still good,
and he didn't mind the way
she hogged the sheets
and farted in her sleep.

One eye on the clock.
The other on his surroundings.
Gets hit up by a bum,
shoos him off with the flowers.
Another approaches. He gives a dollar
to avoid the conversation. The flowers
look like they were starting to wilt
seeming more yellow
under a different light.

Do roses come in yellow?

Eyes a crusty old man
holding a plastic shopping bag
full of smelly clothes
and a key to a padlock.
The man holds these things
as if they are his most precious possessions.
Lover Boy despises and envies him;
but the stench made it impossible
to ponder further, as Lover Boy posited
that the smell is bad for the flowers.

17 February, 2012

Détente and Domestic Policy


There is no resolution, sometimes.
Arguments over things
less or more important
matter more or less
in an endless geography
that makes up a tiny home.

Toothpaste caps gain weight,
resonate with horror show sound.
When the world reduces, becomes
this compact, this confined –
down to paper thin walls,
remanded décor, plywood cabinets –

random couch cushions become
entirely new countries.
More or less.

05 February, 2012

Baboon in the Bluegrass, Intermezzo 1: Cupid Is a Sadist




"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
 Admit impediments." -Shakespeare




“Love is all right for those who can handle the psychic overload. It's like trying to carry a full garbage can on your back over a rushing river of piss.”  
― Charles Bukowski




Love stories are fraudulent, sentimental tripe -- which is why I don't, as a general rule, write them. Sure, I've written my share of love poetry; but poetry about love, like reality TV about self-important morons, isn't all that unusual.

STD Soup

The thing about love poetry -- in spite of how many people rehash "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" -- is that it lives in a moment and is gone again. That's the nature of poetry. That's the nature of love. That people find solace or reflection in a love poem after its moment has passed is only a confirmation of the continuity of human experience. That love has a beginning, a middle, and end is a reflection of the absurdity of the human condition; because even though it ends -- and it always does -- you either split up or one or both of you dies. Either way, the shelf life of love is terminal and short -- so it is with life.

That's the problem with telling love stories. No one wants them to end. And with Valentine's Day approaching... perhaps the most ridiculous, Capitalistic, and conspiratorial holidays on the U.S. calender... it's important to realize that all love stories end. They end because they have to.

But that also means they have to begin. And on rare occasions, even though they end, it may be worth the time and space to tell them. When they matter.

When I first met her, she was 18 years old, and a college Freshman. I was a few years older.  I was also trying to excise myself from a  relationship that had gone horribly, tragically wrong. There's nothing particularly interesting about that story, except that then, as always, I had gone into it with the best of intentions. But relationships have always proven problematic for me. For as long as I can remember, I have neither understood how they worked, nor have I have been very good at maintaining them. I also have a tendency towards thickheadedness when it comes to knowing whether a woman is interested in me or just being nice.

And when I met her, this college freshman, I thought she was interested in one of my friends. Past experience had taught me that this was most likely the case. Most women were interested in my friend. He was not only a talented and (some would say) troubled person, but he was -- according to certain women friends of mine -- handsome. Tall, with broad shoulders. Strong jaw. When he was in a good mood -- or in the early turn of a manic phase -- he knew how to be very charming.

Charm wasn't -- and probably isn't -- one of my strongest qualities. So when she came around, I assumed it was for him.  But even so, there was something about this girl -- this spark of an Eastern Kentucky girl that would smile, giggle nervously, ask me serious questions and seem interested in what I had to say -- that felt different. I was nervous around her because she was beautiful: shoulder length reddish-brown hair, blue eyes. But there was something about her that also made me feel ... well ... safe.

Safe. And very confused. I wasn't used to women who made me feel safe. I was used to the most recent dysfunction of my marriage to my daughter's mother. Prior to that, my experience had been severely limited by a painful shyness and social awkwardness that still, on occasion, plagues me -- along with the frustrating thickness in the head about whether women like me or whether they're just being nice. (I always assume the former.)

It wasn't until a mutual friend pointed out her interest in me that it occurred to me that maybe she was being nice to me other than because I was the roommate and she was trying to win me over in the process of chasing after my friend.

The relationship -- if you could call it that -- was a dismal failure, for all of the right reasons. She was young, and coming out of some pretty rough stuff. I was in the process of going through a gut kicking divorce. There wasn't enough of me to invest. And eventually, I ran her off because of my own unique ineptitude to say the right thing at the right time. (Another flaw that plagues me almost daily.)


But I never forgot about her. And, to be more precise, I thought about her. I thought about the way she made me feel -- that sense of safety that I thought I'd destroyed. I thought about the warmth of her body, the sound of her laugh. I thought about her belly button. (Don't judge me.) She became the standard -- real or imagined -- by which I judged other women, other relationships.

So it seemed more like destiny than chance when I ran into her again. And not only was I surprised to find that she still wanted to talk to me, but I was also surprised to find that I still felt that sensation -- that sense of safety, warmth, and acceptance. And I found -- I rediscovered -- a woman who has always seen me for who I am, who has never really wanted me to be something other than who I am.

And while the relationship is over -- because all love stories end -- I am grateful for the time. And while there is pain and anger in the parting, I know that when the sense of loss is past, I will be left with gratitude. And while that may not have been my intention... it certainly wasn't what I wanted... that is what I am left with.

And it will have to be enough.



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22 February, 2010

Excerpt from New Manuscript

Since I had the cash, I went against my better judgment and decided to pay rent. The next day I woke up in the late afternoon and walked up to the gas station on the corner and bought a money order, two corn dogs, and a 40 of Miller High Life. On the way back I stopped by the manager’s office, the money order through the mail slot near the bottom of the locked door, and went back home to burrow in and avoid the day light. When I got back, there were two more messages on my phone. One was another message from Lynda, wanting to talk to me. The other was from my mother, asking if I’d talked to Rhea lately.


The corn dogs were hard from sitting under the heat lamp too long, but I added enough ketchup that it didn’t matter, and the beer washed it all down nicely. I tried watching TV for a while, but I couldn’t talk myself into sitting through any of the shit on any of the channels. They’d be doing me a favor, I thought, if they just shut the fucking cable off. How many years had I wasted watching television? Over my lifetime? It’s enough to stupefy the imagination. The time people waste never occurs until it’s well past reclamation; I spent my life doing what I thought was living. I worked – sometimes. I married. I had a child. I divorced. I worked – sometimes. I remarried. I got a career. I paid taxes, amassed debt, missed car payments and rent payments and utility payments. When I had the money I always tried to tip at least 15 percent when I went to bars and restaurants. I spent recklessly. I survived hangovers, evictions, break ups, break downs, deaths, funerals, births. In my mid-30’s I was able to look back and see a life not unlike the lives of other men my age. I wasn’t so different.

So why did most all of it feel like malingering death?

There were only two things I did right in my life, as far as I could tell: having Rhea and marrying Lynda. But Rhea was getting too old to visit and Lynda took a job out of town for a few months. She told me when she left it wasn’t me; but I knew it was.

“You never do anything. You don’t go anywhere except that bar. You don’t have any hobbies. You don’t even write anymore; and it used to be so important.”


“It still is.”


She shook her head. “But you’re not doing anything about it. You’ve been moping around the apartment for a year, Nick. A YEAR. I can’t take it.”


“So you’re leaving me because I’m a little depressed.”


She shook her head. “I’m not leaving you. I’m working out of town for a few months. I need to get out of here. I need to do this for ME, ok? Besides, the time apart might be good for us.”


“Whatever.” I didn’t believe for a second that she planned on coming back. She’d go off with her gypsy theatre friends and send me postcards that read Wish You Were Here (Not!).


A car honked outside. “That’s my taxi.”


“I could have taken you to the airport.”


“It’s not a big deal.”


It would have been, I thought. Once.


“I’ll call you when I land.”


“Ok.”


She sighed. “I still love you, Nick.”


“Yeah.”

She walked out of the apartment and got into the taxi. I stood there watching her leave. It felt like my entire life was riding off in a yellow taxi.

That I wasn’t working wasn’t the issue, although that played a role. Lynda, unlike most of the women I’d had dealings with in my life, wasn’t obsessed with money. She worried over it sometimes, but not out of some shallow social-status issue. Her fears of poverty had deeper roots than even I understood when we first got married, and I had come to take them seriously – even if my own nature got in the way of doing anything about it.

I walked downstairs because I was tired of standing in the middle of the bedroom. Of course, once I reached the bottom of the stairs, I hit the wall of smell that encased the entire first floor. What had Randall called it? Dead fish and dirty ass? He was often an intolerable human being, but he could be (entirely too often) astute in his observations.

“I really need to clean,” I said. My voice echoed. It was a wonder that Marie Rubio didn’t say anything about it when she dropped off the delinquent rent notice. For all I knew, the odor was starting to creep out under the door and out the edges of the window. Hell, it could’ve been seeping through the walls; the walls were painted concrete blocks, which gave the place a cave-like quality. It also dated the construction of the complex to the late 1960’s to early 70’s. Before advances in central air and energy efficient building materials, the best way to build houses in the desert was out of cement blocks; they kept the cool air longer. It made for shitty insulation of course… but the winters were mild except for the nighttime temperature and the cold always burned off by ten the following morning. That was one of the things about living in the desert Lynda and I didn’t realize; I suspect that most people don’t realize it, either. The winter nights get cold – sometimes below freezing. It’s not the same kind of cold; it’s not that mid-western cold that gets into your bones the way it gets into the ground and freezes solid to stay until the spring thaw. The desert ground doesn’t hold onto the cold in the winter. There’s not enough water or soil or clay for that to happen. The temperature simply drops, and maybe there’s a micro-thin layer of dew the following morning; but that, along with the cold, disappears quickly and leaves no trace of its existence.

The cave-like atmosphere of the apartment held the smell in like it held the cold; sometimes I had to hold my breathe from the time I walked in the door to the time I made it up the stairs to the bedroom, which was the only sacred place left. When Lynda first left, I couldn’t sleep upstairs; trying to sleep alone in our bed was simply too much for me. And no matter how much I drank, I couldn’t sleep in our bed without missing her – the feel of her next to me, her radiating warmth, the little snoring sounds she always made (and always denied making). I missed the way she talked in her sleep and didn’t remember it the next day, and the way she used to cling to me in the night when she had a nightmare. I missed the weight of her when she’d lay on my chest, listen to my heart, and play with my chest hair, always pulling out the gray hairs and accusing me of turning into a monkey. So for the first month or so, I passed out on the couch downstairs and slept with the lights on to erase the memories that lingered in the darkness and kept me awake.

Eventually, though, the smell downstairs and the uncomfortable couch pushed me upstairs; and I made sure to drink enough that I wouldn’t wake up, and I kept the television on to block out the sound of all those memories whispering at me from the shadows in every corner of the room.

Coffee, I thought. I need a little coffee and then I’ll scour the place clean. I steeled myself and waded into the kitchen. Dirty dishes stacked in high in the sink and spreading onto the counter top when the space ran out. Old, dried out food encrusted on the plates, the bowls, the silverware. Empty, crushed beer cans and drained bottles that once held wine, bourbon, and scotch. The floor was sticky. The stove was covered in layers of crud and stained with meals I didn’t remember trying to cook and the burners were riddled with acne-like little circles from Randall lighting his cigarettes on the burner. Old pizza boxes. Rancid delivery and take-out containers. I had to clean the place; if Lynda walked through the door at that moment, the sheer horror of it all would have pushed her right back out again. It was not evidence of a Man Debauched – which she probably expected – or even of Dedomesticated Man – which might have been forgivable. There was some other evil at work there altogether; it was something older and more rotten. In the light of the morning – and why that morning I didn’t (and still don’t) know – I began to understand that it was more than my laziness or depression or drunkenness. The thing I faced in my kitchen was not months of neglect, but that ageless decay that all civilizations succumb to in the end. It was the thing that took down the Aztecs, the Mayans, and the Roman Empire. It was that impulse that lived on in the stories of the Christ’s crucifixion, the murder of Osiris, the death of Mohammed, the execution of Patrick Henry, and the railroading of Sacco and Vanzetti.

I found the coffee pot much in the same condition it had been in when I abandoned it the previous morning. How bad do I want this cup of coffee? I told myself I could walk back up to the gas station and buy a cup of their burned, yet still amazingly weak java. Then I could come back reinvigorated with something resembling caffeine and the fresh air, and take on the filth of the centuries that had taken root in my kitchen. The beer and the shitty corndogs were brewing in my stomach, churned by the deadly cornucopia of smells I had no choice but to breathe in.

Lynda would have a fit if she walked into this. She wasn’t a clean freak or anything; if anything, she was as absent minded as I was when it came to the daily futile chores of eradicating the dust, grime, and filth of living. But she would know what it was before I had a chance to try and explain it.

My stomach was in knots and I knew I was going to throw up if I didn’t do something. So I went back upstairs and took a fast shower; I made sure to turn the water up as hot as I could take it so I could burn the filth off my skin. Then I dressed, held my breath as I went down the stairs, and retreated from the apartment.

Instead of stopping at the gas station, I kept walking until I got to the bar.

16 February, 2010

[Morning Glory]

The next day I woke up to someone banging on the door. I wasn’t sure of the time. I looked at my cell phone. The clock read 10:35. Shit. I didn’t know anybody who would be up at this time, let alone anybody who would be banging on the door. I rolled out of bed and stumbled downstairs, if only to tell whoever it was to shut the hell up and leave me alone.

I opened the door. There was a woman on the other side of it. It was Marie, the apartment complex manager. She was an attractive Latino woman with big dark eyes, a ghetto ass, and smooth dark skin. When I opened the door and the outside air hit me, I remembered I was naked; but I was too hungover and pissed off to care. Marie took a few steps back and made sure to look directly at my face.

“What do you want?” I asked. “It’s not the first of the month.”

“Don’t you think you should… put something on?” I couldn’t tell if she was really offended or if she felt the need to act that way. “There are kids around here.”

“They’re in school,” I said. “And if they’re not, they deserve what they get.”

“It’s SATURDAY.”

“Oh. They’re not up yet then. I wasn’t either, as a matter of fact.”

“There are FAMILIES here, Mr. Rafferty.”

“Did you beat on the door just to tell me that?”

“I could have you arrested.”

“Well, do that. I’ll tell them you sexually assaulted me.” Horror spread across her face. Of course it was all bullshit. But that’s what she got for waking me up. “I’ll tell them you threatened to evict me unless I put out. It’ll take YEARS to straighten out and by then you’ll have lost your sweet little gig here and I’ll be living in Alaska. Now if you’ll excuse me…”

“I was just dropping off this notice Mr. Rafferty.” She held it out in front of her at arms length. I grabbed it from her and looked at it. It was a notice informing me I was late on the rent.

“So what’s this mean?”

“It means,” she said, “that you have five days to pay or move. Or we start the eviction process.”

“Uh huh.”

“And let me suggest, Mr. Rafferty…”

“Call me Raff. Anybody who sees me naked gets to call me Raff.”

“Let me suggest, MR. RAFFERTY, that you take this seriously. And next time,” she sniffed, let her gaze drift downward, arched her eyebrow, and frowned. “Put on some clothes. You’re embarrassing yourself more than you are me. Really.” She turned and shimmied away, laughing to herself.

I closed the door, locked it, and looked down at my limp cock. Fucking depression. I blamed depression. Lynda had blamed booze. She said to me, “You’re giving up your libido for a bottle.” Fucking hell. Used to be I could set the clock by my morning wood. Used to be. And here it was letting me down, literally. I couldn’t get it up for pathetic reality TV women, girls at the bar, or even porn. It had been months since Lynda and I fucked. And that was before she left. And she’d been gone almost three months. No wonder Marie didn’t respect me. No wonder Lynda didn’t, either. I dropped the notice on the floor and went back to bed.

Twenty minutes later someone else was banging on the door. This time I knew who it was; it was Randall. He was calling my name while he was beating on the door. Among his more annoying qualities, he rarely experienced the wonder of a full blown hangover. The bastard. Again, I considered ignoring it, but then I remembered he had my key and he’d probably use it if I didn’t answer. For all I knew, the fucker went and made a copy.

This time I pulled on a pair of shorts before I stumbled and opened the door. When I did, he was smiling.

“I thought you’d be asleep by the pool again,” he handed me my key. “You gave me your house key.”

“Thanks.” I moved so he could come in.

“Does this mean we’re going steady?”

“Fuck off, Randall. I’m not in the mood.”

“Well GET in the mood. We got us some PLANS today, son.” He made a face and sniffed. “Dude, maybe you should… I don’t know… CLEAN every once in a while? This place reeks of old ass and dead fish.”

I was trying not to look at the mess as I tried to make coffee. “And just how do you know what those things smell like?”

“I visit you.”

“Do you want a cup of coffee before I kick your head in?”

He smiled. “Nah. You know I don’t drink the stuff. It’s bad for you.” He pulled a cigarette out and lit it. “Besides, we don’t have time for coffee talk. Get cleaned up.”

“Why?”

“We’re going to the track.”

“You didn’t lose enough yesterday?”

“Shee-it. That was yesterday. I got a new lease on life today.”

Lucky fucking you. “I don’t feel like doing shit today, okay? Just let me wake up and go on about my day. You can tell me how much you lost later.”

“Come on, Raff. We’re meeting up with Steve and Paul and Chris. It’ll be fun, man. It’ll be good for you. And if you don’t have any money, I’ll stake you a few bucks. But you need to get your smelly ass in the shower first and get that creeping stank off, or I won’t let you in my car.”

If I waited until later that night, he wouldn’t care about letting me in his car because chances were I’d be driving him home. I had money. I had a little money. My unemployment payments were reliable, if nothing else was. I was behind on rent, sure; but losing a few bucks at the track wasn’t going to make any difference anyway.

“I need coffee.”

“We can get you coffee up at the bar.”

“Will they let you back in?” I don’t know why I asked.

He laughed. “You know better. That place needs me. I bring in all the good business.”

“Fine. Give ten minutes.” I pushed by him to get upstairs.

“Seven,” he said. “I’ll give you seven. Hey, I saw this cute spick chick when I pulled up. Longish dark hair; ghetto booty. You know her?”

“Marie.”

“You ever tap her?”

“Nah,” I answered. Briefly, I considered putting Randall on her trail; it would come to nothing but it would give him something to do besides roust me and it would annoy the shit out of her. She was only doing her job, I thought. So I decided to do her favor. “She’s a lesbian.” But I also said it for myself. I couldn’t have him trying to play grab ass with her; that would only make me homeless faster.

“Huh?”

“Yeah. She likes chicks. Real militant, too. Hates men. Carries a big knife in case she feels like cutting somebody’s junk off. She needs more pussy than you.”

Randall whistled. “Fucking shit, man. I mean, I wouldn’t marry her or nothing…” he drifted off for a second. “Maybe she hasn’t seen the right dick yet.”

“I’m sure she’s met plenty,” I said. “Do you want me to shower or do you want to circle jerk over the apartment manager?”

“Shower,” he said. “I don’t spank in front of nobody.” His smile widened. “Unless she’s into that freaky shit.”

13 January, 2010

Pendleton Underground: Part 6 of 7

I’ve always hated the smell of hospitals. The particular odor of death, urine, and bleach that’s unique to all hospitals and nursing homes fills me with what I can only describe as preternatural dread.


“We have to go,” Linda told me. “We really SHOULD go.”

“Is it a ‘have to’ or is it a ‘should do’ kind of thing?”

“Don’t be that way.” She rubbed my shoulder and kissed my cheek. “If you don’t go and something happens you’ll regret it.”

I couldn’t argue with her; but part of me still wanted to. It’s hell sometimes when a woman knows you well enough to make you do what you really need to do but don’t want to do.

We’d gotten a call from Red. At least half the time I just didn’t pick up the phone when the caller ID flashed his number; mostly he called when he wanted to complain. Sometimes he called to brag – but that was rare. Our conversations never lasted more than a few minutes because I always ran out of things to say. This time I answered because I was in a particularly good mood. I’d picked up a couple of classes at a community college and was bringing in a little money for a change; Linda was still working too much overtime, though, and I was looking around for other opportunities. I’d also had some luck publishing – a poem and short story were going to be published in two different small journals with an even smaller distribution. There was no money involved, of course; but it was nice to be noticed and appreciated, even if it was only by a few people.

Red’s call sucked all the air out of my lungs and all the good energy out of the room. He called to tell me Pendleton was in the hospital, that the doctors weren’t optimistic. Surgery would definitely be involved and because of all his health problems – high blood pressure, bad heart, kidney and liver problems (a side effect of the blood thinner) – one tiny problem and Pendleton wouldn’t wake up.

“You should be here,” Red told me. He was barely holding himself together. “In case… something… happens.”

It took us two hours to get there, driving at night in late October rain. Linda drove because I don’t like driving at night. When we got to the hospital, Red met us in the lobby and took us up to the ICU waiting room. It was full of exhausted, worried people living on vending machine coffee and bad cafeteria food. I didn’t see Brenda, but Red told us she’d gone home for a change of clothes and would be back.

“We should wait,” he said, “until she gets back before we try and see him.”

“Have you seen him?”

Red nodded.

“How’d he look?”

Red shrugged, trying to be unemotional and manly. He was trying not to cry.

“Can’t we just see him now?” Linda asked. “There’s no harm in seeing him now.”

Red sighed and nodded. He was being very solemn. “You need to prepare yourself,” he intoned. Like a fucking undertaker, I thought. “He looks… ah... different… from the… last… time… you… saw him.”

I wanted to tell Red to shut the fuck up and cut out the dramatics. I wanted to tell him I wasn’t some dumb ass kid who’d never seen an ICU or visited someone on the edge of death. I wanted to tell him that I wasn’t the pussy standing in the middle of the waiting room crying. Mostly, though, I think he was talking to himself; so I didn’t say either of those things. His calling me was simply a courtesy – one that Brenda probably hadn’t agreed to, but Red had convinced her that Pendleton would want to see me. Linda took my hand and gave it a squeeze; she knew exactly what I was thinking and was telling me it would be okay.

I found out later that he’d been in the hospital for three weeks. That was when I figured out that calling me wasn’t a reaction; it was an afterthought. I was an afterthought. I’d been out of the loop for so long that it was only Red’s sense of propriety and obligation that prompted his call. For some reason, that hurt more than the possibility that Pendleton might die and leave his bitch of a wife in charge of his memory.

Truth is I knew my exclusion was my fault. When Linda and I moved out of the cabin, I cut off all contact with Pendleton and Brenda. If there’s one thing I can do well, its hold a grudge. And hold one I did. I still did. This has been called different things over the years; my parents, friends, ex-girlfriends, my ex-wife and my ex-mother-in-law all called it stubbornness. I was too bullheaded. I was too drunk. I was too deluded. I was too proud to admit when I was wrong. I was too arrogant to consider the possibility that I might be wrong. About something. About anything. About everything.

What the hell do they want from me? I thought. I’m here. Linda and I came here and now I have to stand here and listen to Red tell me to ‘Prepare myself.’ What did he think I was doing all the way there in the car? Singing show tunes? Linda must’ve felt my muscles tighten, because she latched onto my arm and wouldn’t let go. If ever there was a woman whose love I didn’t deserve, it was hers. Maybe I wasn’t a nice guy; maybe I drank a little too much and maybe I was a stubborn son of a bitch. But Linda loved me. She understood me. Even if Red, Brenda, and Pendleton had their little goddamn sewing circle, I had Linda. The only bad part of that deal was that Linda had me.

Red was still dragging his feet when Linda asked him again if we could go back and see Pendleton. He kept talking about stupid shit. Cars and his job and his soon-to-be ex-wife and how she was using the kids against him. He made a joke about the cafeteria food and bitched about having to go outside to smoke. He told off-color jokes about some of the nurses. Red was always good at small talk; he could talk for hours and not say anything worth remembering. I was never good at small talk. Attempting it was torture. In most social situations I came off awkward or weird. First impressions have never been my forte. It wasn’t unusual for me to enter a light conversation and end up taking it somewhere serious. For years people told me I needed to relax and develop a sense of humor.
Pendleton always understood that about me. He didn’t mind when I didn’t talk, or when I inevitably led the conversation into some serious or odd direction. “If you’re going to talk,” he told me, “it ought to be something important, anyway. There’s too much static that passes for conversation.”

When I asked to marry his daughter, he eyed me carefully. It was an uncomfortably long silence. I’d expected him to smile and be happy about it. My family was in a state of shock, which wasn’t surprising; but her mother had been thrilled. Looking back, I realize she was hastening the union, almost from the beginning. She needled and prattled on about us, talked about us like we were already married. She used to let me spend the night when she knew there was more than sleeping going on in her daughter’s tiny back bedroom. I had more or less extricated myself from one family and inserted myself into another. They attended my high school graduation. They took me to college. I used to sneak back and visit without telling my family. I skipped out on holidays to be with them as much as I could. When Pendleton’s daughter graduated from high school, I transferred to her university to stay with her. We’d been attending the same university for a semester when her mother bought up (in the guise of a joke) the idea that we could get more financial aid if we got married. My ex kept saying, “We’re getting married ANYWAY, right? What’s the difference if we get married now or four years from now?”

Finally, after staring at me for what seemed like forever, Pendleton asked, “Do you know what you’re getting yourself into?”

“I think I do.”

He shook his head. “Is this what YOU want? Are you sure?”

I told him it was and he nodded his consent. Six months later I was his son-in-law. A year and half later, she moved out. A month after that, he moved in.
Red was stalling, trying to keep us waiting until Brenda got there. But when Linda mentioned it for a third time, Red looked at his watch and nodded. I noticed the hint of resignation, but didn’t say anything. Brenda would not be pleased. He led us through the doors that led to where the patient rooms were. It wasn’t a private room. I guess it was the poor man’s ICU; but the other beds were empty. Pendleton was hooked up to monitors in both arms and an oxygen machine. I noticed the piss and shit bags on the side of the bed with tubes disappearing under the sheet. His breathing was labored. His skin was so gray that it seemed almost translucent under the dim light above his bed. His hair and beard were long, mostly gray, with twisted strands of white. His eyes were puffy and his lids were closed, like he was thinking.

“Look,” Red said to him. He talked to Pendleton in that loud voice people use with the very sick, the very old, and with retarded kids. “Look who’s here.”

Pendleton opened his eyes; it took him a couple of seconds to focus. Was that surprise I saw spread across his face? Or was it pain? Maybe he farted.

“Hey,” he huffed.

“Hey,” I answered.

Linda smiled and touched his hand. “How are you feeling?” She spoke to him like we were sitting around the kitchen table playing cards. Such a sweet woman; she was always good at knowing how to talk to people. I was trying not to look at all the tube and block out the monitor sounds and keep myself from puking because that smell – that fucking hospital smell – had permeated the inside of my mouth, nose, and throat. Linda made more small talk and flirted with him in the innocent and adorable way she used to – which wasn’t all that different from the way she talked to little old men. Red stood there, arms folded, feigning machismo and still trying not to cry. I stood there, waiting.

I didn’t have to wait long. We weren’t there five minutes when Brenda’s heaved her way in. I didn’t think it was possible for someone that big to get even bigger. When she entered the room, it was clear from her body language who was in charge. She squinted at Red, who moved out of her way. She approached the bed, put her bible down on the tray next to the water he couldn’t drink and the food he didn’t want, and then she leaned over Pendleton and kissed him on the forehead like she was marking her territory. This is mine. She was wearing a small silver cross pendant around her neck; I’d seen it advertised in late night commercials; it had a gem in the center that, if you looked through it, you could see the Lord’s Prayer. That was when I noticed the framed picture of Jesus on the bedside table; it was one of those paintings where he looks like he was born to an upper class family in Connecticut.

“You can pray if you want,” Brenda said. “Everything helps.”

I didn’t answer. I hadn’t prayed in years and I wasn’t about to start at the behest of a church channel watching cunt. I wasn’t about to appeal to her god or her Anglo-Saxon savior.

“How you doing?” I finally asked him. “The nurses treating you nice? I guess with all these tubes, that limits your ability to harass them.”

Brenda shot me a hateful glance, Red held his breath, and Linda shook her head. Pendleton chuckled and coughed.

“I’m … ok…” Pendleton breathed. “I’m…”

“Of course he’s ok,” Brenda finished. “We’re just waiting for them to come and take him for surgery.” She looked over at Red. “I kind of thought you’d get here after it was over.” She went over everything the doctors had told her with the accuracy of a tape recorder. His kidneys were on the verge of failure. His heart lining was thin. His intestines were in knots. They were going to change his meds. “Gawd willin’,” she said, “he’ll be around for another 50 years.”

The sickness and Brenda’s voice were getting to me. I needed to smoke a cigarette. My stomach was turning and I was sure my complexion was going green.

“Do you want to pray?” Brenda asked again. This time she was clearly talking to Linda more than me. Linda wasn’t anymore of a believer than I was. She was about to answer, and I was curious about what she’d say, when the nurse came and told us we all needed to leave so they could prepare him for surgery. Brenda kissed Pendleton on the forehead again. Red wiped his eyes. Linda took my hand and led me out of the room. When Red and Brenda walked out, Linda and I followed him through the labyrinth of pastel walls and ugly floor tile to the outside lobby, where we could smoke and not talk about the dying man upstairs. I smoked slowly, trying to prepare for the long night ahead.

17 November, 2009

Pendleton Underground: Part 5 of 7

The final trouble came down to one hundred dollars.

To call Brenda a vampire would be giving her too much credit; that would bestow on her a predatory instinct she fundamentally lacked. Even classifying her as a leech is an overstatement, though that would be an apt enough description. The thing that motivated her was fear – fear of rejection, fear being laughed at, fear of being alone. She’d been heckled and put down her entire life, which, instead of giving her something to overcome, merely shaped her into a spineless lump of insecurities. She didn’t think beyond what other people told her to think. Before she met Pendleton, she took her cue from her narrow-minded religious father, her self-righteous martyr mother, and her dimwitted brothers whose success in the world was admirable only because of its improbability. After she met Pendleton, her thoughts and words echoed his thoughts and words; then she gradually dug in and the relationship took on truly parasitic proportions. She gained strength and he, proportionally, began to diminish.

True, his health had been poor. Losing the ability to work and suffering under my ex-mother-in-law’s harpish and vindictive nature had worn him down over the years. His first heart attack happened when I was still married to his step-daughter. That heart attack changed everything; and even though it was subtle at first, I noticed how he just seemed to … slow down. He blamed the additional medications. The blood thinner made him bruise more easily and it also made him more sensitive to sunlight. The gray in his hair started to stand out in contrast to the hawk feather black it had always been. He gradually lost interest in things –even his junk jaunts. His reading habits changed and took on a more theological bent. Not being someone who felt the need to explain himself to anybody, he said nothing about any of these things.

The break up of his marriage seemed to rejuvenate him. He stopped taking all the medications and read up on homeopathic and herbal medicine. Vidalia onions, he told me, were good for blood pressure. Garlic was a natural anti-oxidant. Certain fruits and vegetables, in combination with the right herbs, could control heart disease.

I didn’t know that I believed him; but it seemed to work for him, so I didn’t say anything.

By the time he married Brenda, he’d managed to regain most of his former self, though his physical strength had continued to steadily decline. That was one of the reasons Red was so handy to keep around; he could pick up the slack whenever Pendleton got tired, and he thought nothing of it. He was nothing if not reliable – and Brenda always made sure he felt welcomed.

At the time of his marriage to Brenda, he lived in small A-frame cabin in the lower Appalachians, near the edge of Daniel Boone National Forest; that had been his dream for as long as I’d known him. And while the cabin wasn’t much to look at, it was everything he needed: a ten thousand gallon cistern and a simple kitchen. He took out the wood burning stove that came with it and had the old iron belly refurbished and installed. It was the primary source of heat in the winter and a constant source of satisfaction. “She always said it was a piece of junk,” he told me, referring to his ex-wife. “Well, look at it now.” With the right kind of planning, a person could live out there and avoid going into town for months at a time – even during the winter when it wasn’t uncommon to be snowed in for days and weeks on end.

Brenda liked the idea of the cabin, but the lack of certain creature comforts – like central air and heat – quickly got to her. After the first winter there she convinced Pendleton to leave the cabin and move into a nice modular home closer to town with city water, city gas, and weekly garbage pick up. The cabin then became a large storage shed for all of Brenda’s things that they didn’t have room for in the new place. But Pendleton didn’t like leaving the place empty. When Linda and I were between places (after making the mistake of moving in people we considered good friends) we all struck on the idea of us moving into the cabin. Pendleton told us (much to Brenda’s chagrin) that as long we took care of the place, kept the grass mowed, and paid our own utilities, we could live there rent free.

The mistake we made was actually moving in.

Life was okay for a couple of months. Linda and I settled in and cleaned the place up – which was no small task, since Pendleton and Brenda had let it go since the move to town. We moved things around, put a lot Brenda’s things either upstairs or in the airtight prefabricated storage building Pendleton had erected with the intention of using it as a workshop. Linda planted a little garden of peppers and tomatoes. I chopped wood to stock up for the winter and tried to keep the grass under control. That was mostly a futile effort. The mower was shot and the weed eater didn’t cut. Deer and rabbits decimated our tomatoes. Hornets moved in under the front porch. That summer it didn’t rain and the cistern nearly dried up.

Brenda began dropping by unannounced. At first, she brought Pendleton with her. Then she started showing up alone. She’d poke around the cabin and want to dig some stupid thing or another out of the attic or the storage shed. She made catty comments about the grass. When I pointed out that the mower was a piece of shit, she shrugged her oxen shoulders and said “You knew that when you moved in. Why don’t you fix it? It’s not like you pay rent.”

Naturally I understood the subtext. She knew damn well why I hadn’t tried to fix the mower; I wasn’t mechanically inclined. When I did try and fix something, it all when to shit and I ended up fucking it up worse than it had been to begin with. What she was REALLY saying was “Why don’t you act like a man and fix it?” I wasn’t sure how she had any real conception of men. The only other man to touch her before Pendleton was probably a drunken redneck who did it either on a dare or out of the same desperation that would have been equally served by a hole in the wall. Her dad wasn’t all that handy and none of her brothers especially liked getting their hands dirty. But because Pendleton was increasingly allowing her to conduct his business, I had to suffer her moralizing and condescension. Then Linda told me Brenda came around when I was gone, too, just (it seemed) to put me down.

One day, fueled by frustration, I tore into the mower. The piece of shit ended up in several pieces and I had no idea how to fix it or how to put the damned thing back together. So much for my manliness. After that I went to Pendleton and told him Brenda was dogging me to Linda behind my back.

“Relationships are hard enough,” I told him, “without OTHER PEOPLE making them more difficult.”

He nodded in agreement and said very little. All I really wanted him to do was say something to her about it. Or at least pretend he had some interest in how she was running his affairs. But he didn’t seem all that concerned. His complexion was going gray, and so was his hair. I didn’t know it then, but (at Brenda’s insistence) he started taking the meds again. The rest of our conversation was trivial. He was growing his hair and beard, which made him look even older. When I stopped by I had interrupted his reading; he was pouring over apocryphal texts and making arcane notes on yellow legal pads. I made sure to leave before Brenda got home in order to avoid a confrontation.

One week later, Linda and I came back from a grocery run and found an envelope stuck in the screen door.

“What’s that?” Linda asked, setting her bags down.

I had set mine down to open the envelope. It contained a letter:

“Dear Nick and Lynda,

“As you know, when you moved in to the cabin, you agreed to take care of the property and pay your own utilities in lew of rent. This was a very genrous offer, since you know we could rent it out for quiet a lot of money. But since you were family, we decided to extend our hospitality to you and Lynda and alow you to live there.

“But you have not lived up to your part of the agreemint. The grass hasn’t been cut in more than a month and when we have tried to get you to do something you find excuses not to.

“For this reason, we have decided to start charging you rent. You will pay us $100 on the first of each month, starting with this month or you will move so we can rent to someone who is more responsible.”


It was already the fifteenth; that meant we had to pay them immediately or get out. Pendleton’s signature was at the bottom of the letter, but I knew he hadn’t written it. It didn’t sound like him; besides, he knew how to spell Linda’s name. He’d been schooled to believe – like public schools used to teach but don’t anymore – that misspelled and misused words were an insult, only to the language but to the person who made the mistakes and the person forced to read them. It was clear that Brenda, whose abuse of the language was not only common but engrained through generations of neglect, had written the letter and the Pendleton had signed it. I wondered if he bothered to read it.

“What the fuck?!” I showed Linda the letter.

She quickly read it. “What the fuck?” she echoed, handing it back to me. “Where the hell is this coming from?”

“You know where,” I answered. “Give that dumb bitch a little power and she acts like she owns us.”

“But he signed it.”

“He didn’t write it.”

“How do you know?”

“I just KNOW.”

“What are we going to do?”

“We’re moving,” I said.

“Where?”

“Somewhere. Soon. Let them try and find somebody else to live here who’ll take care of it. Bitch. Cunt.” I turned to walk back out the door.

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to tell them both to shove this letter up her fat ass!”

I walked out the door before Linda could talk me out of it or calm me down. As I was getting in the car, I heard her tell me not to do anything I would regret later. Not likely, I thought. After everything we’d gone through – the years of friendship in spite of my ex, his ex, and everything that had passed in between us since I had turned eighteen – after almost ten years – all of it meant nothing, now that Brenda bent his ear and dug her pudgy claws into him.

I didn’t have to go far. Just as I was getting ready to pull out, they were coming up the drive. They brought Red with them. I guess Brenda wanted to make sure we saw the letter and she brought him along as a witness. Stupid twat. When I approached them, Red didn’t greet me with his usual smile and over wrought badly timed joke. Pendleton nodded at me, which was all he ever did anyway. Brenda was the first to talk.

“Red’s here to fix the mower,” she began, sounding glib.

I ignored her completely. Pendleton was still sitting in the passenger seat of the truck. When approached he rolled the window down. “What’s this?” I demanded.

“Did you read it?” he asked.

“Yeah, I read it. I tried to, anyway. What is this? If there was a problem, why didn’t YOU come and talk to me?”

“We tried,” Brenda broke in. “But every time…”

“Shut up,” I said, not looking at her. My eyes didn’t leave Pendleton’s face. He didn’t react; there was a time he would have at least tried to scare me. But there was none of that left in him. “I know you didn’t write this,” I said. “She did. And you signed it. Did YOU read it?”

He shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Yeah,” I repeated. “If you had a problem with me, you should have come to me. But instead, you let HER write me a goddamned letter? Really? After everything?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

Red was standing off to the side, watching. He was tense. He would want to jump in soon. I didn’t care, but I didn’t feel like dealing with anybody else. There was only one person who mattered. I tore the letter into four pieces and dropped them in Pendleton’s lap. “That’s what I think about that,” I said. “We’ll be out of her by the end of the week.”

“You don’t have to move,” Brenda tried to cut in.

I didn’t answer her. I was still looking at Pendleton for some sign. Something. Anything. There was nothing. I turned and walked back inside. Linda was sitting on the couch reading. I opened the fridge and took out a beer.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

I didn’t answer.

20 September, 2009

2 New Poems: Dissent/Descent, Assent /Ascent

Dissent /Descent

I have always loved you.
Every kiss is an echo of years.

There is a point
in a man’s life

where he understands
more than he knows.

You occupy the space beyond
and call to me, laughing, arms

open wide and welcoming
while I wander and continue

to ponder the nicities of love.
Though it is not something

we fall into willy-nilly
(mostly it finds us whether

we want it to or not) still
I live for those moments

when I can return to you again.

Assent /Ascent

Every kiss is an echo of years.
Lips touch
and in those quiet seconds
we return to the place
we were born.

The days begin with discontent;
rumblings and rememberance of dreams
imprinted on our irises
and reverbing in our ear canals
like bad show tunes

or a hangover. In these moments
we are our purests selves – animals
awake under one more apatheic sun
one more eye
of one more decayed god

we conjured to explain
away our primordial fears
from the night before. Falling
out of bed and down the
narrow stairs, into the daylight

where all our inequties show
and are burned away in the struggle.
What we’re left with
is pure and real and awakened—
but only in that single moment.

26 August, 2009

New Poem: Dialogue of a Functional Relationship

Will we be alright? She lights a cigarette,

watches him carefully for contradictory



body language. Yes, he says. We’ll be okay.

She’s nervous and blows smoke like a factory.



Are you sure?

Yes, he says.



Are you lying to me?

He lights a cigarette,

feigns offense. No.



Why’d you ask me that? Would I lie?

She smiles. You might, she says.

To make me feel better.



He smiles, leans over to kiss her.

As long as you know.