we’ve been redoing the kitchen. i’ve redone nothing. i’m good at tearing things down, breaking them, demolition. i’m good at giving it everything i got, going all out to take it apart.
i’m even good at cleaning it all up. the sweeping, the dust, the settling and sweeping up again. i’m good at making piles that seem insurmountable and steadily picking and shoveling the rubble until it is all bare. until there is nothing but the shell of whatever it once was. i’m good at stripping things away and making them disappear.
it’s never pretty but i’m good at it. i find it elegant, the void that it leaves.
i do not however have the patience to make anymore, to create to plan, to build. i never had the discipline for it, the forethought. i was never a chess player, more a checkers man. one, two maybe even three moves ahead and that’s more or less it, the end of it, endgame or game over.
so here i am in a perpetual stay of deconstruction/reconstruction, as much as i tear it down, i find others putting it all back together again, sometimes better, always different. different enough for me to keep it that way for awhile, to keep me distracted enough.
until i have to tear myself down all over again.
Monthly Archives: November 2006
if you were to begin to write
if you were begin to write, what would you do? where would you begin? would you start with the years in albany, where you first felt the beginnings of your life realized? out there between graduate classes and talking long walks with her through the park?
or would you begin with him, with him and his hands on your mother, ripping the phone out of the wall? would you begin with that, with watching Columbo and confusing him with Beretta?
or would you begin with 9/11 that all but shut the door on making writing a life? would you begin with the end of that dream?
or would you begin with how losing one unborn child was not enough, that you’ve lost another? would you begin with how the pain still ebbs and flows and nothing quite feels like it and it persists like it will never go away?
or would you begin with the little one that runs throughout the house and says how big her house is, how this is her big house and when her mother can’t get the channels on the tv to work right, she picks up the phone and says, call daddy, my daddy can fix it