Something of this like the moment the wind dies down and I can breathe again, the head clears and the heart settles. Settle my heart down, keep it in your hands lest it leaps out onto this highway and we crush it into the ground with lizards and scorpions and the bones of men much more foolish than I.
Monthly Archives: September 2007
pre-k oriententay
And at the pre-k orientation program it’s a litany of parents you must do this and not do that PLEASE. A whole tirade of how we as parents need to act. And it doesn’t matter to me, I don’t mind, I’ve heard most of this kind of thing before, but I have to wonder what kind of ridiculousness prompted the need for it.
i hate shit
i hate shit, i really do. i mean i hate looking at it, or god forbid smelling it. i mean i’ll wretch and gag if i get too close to it.
i hate having to clean it up. especially someone else’s. even my kid’s, i cant stand it. i mean she’s three and all so from time to time she has an “accident” (accident my ass) and i’m there by the sink getting the crust of it off her undies with my fingernails because shit is organic and it’ll stain if you don’t get to it quick enough. which in turn freaks me the fuck out and i end up using half a bottle of that soft-soap foamy nonsense and cutting my nails down to the quick.
but don’t get me wrong, i love taking a shit. i’m not one of those people that pops in the bathroom, scrambles for the toilet, shoots it out and can’t wait to run back outside. i take my time taking a shit. never mind magazines, i have books next to my toilet. i want to make sure i am good and done before i even go about the business of wiping my ass, which is a whole other nightmare to begin with. i mean, yeah sure, after two or three passes, the toilet paper looks clean, but what about at the microscopic level, i mean where the bacteria are still there running a three ring circus in your asshole?
i don’t know, but shit is just this big lose-lose situation you know?
the envelope
you will push the envelope wont you? you will push it until it no longer crackles or bend. you will push until something breaks, until she breaks, until you break, until it is all ruined and torn. you will keep pushing until we all fall off a cliff or you are left satisfied.
but there’s no real satisfying you at this point is there? too much, too much, seen and said and felt and already, too soon, too soon, forgotten. you will keep pushing until the seam reveals itself for what it truly is: shambles of a life you never really wanted.
korean mac’n’cheese
overheard: unless that korean cop gyps me on the macaroni and cheese.
limb and finger robe
he wore a robe of limbs and fingers, with a crown of intestines and femurs for sandals. he danced to the beat of a heart strapped on top of his chest that had long since stopped being his own.
i look at you and it all floods me, washes me anew, shoves me out of place. what a terrible, terrible thing your eyes could be.
after anarchy
after the fall, after the break down, after the deconstruction, after we go about the business of taking everything apart that’s been handed down to us and found offensive, which is everything, what do we do? what is there left?
we cannot, after all, live only in rubble. we would be covered in soot. we wouldn’t be able to breathe because of all the dust. we would cut our feet. our palms would bleed. our children would starve. our old would be forgotten, history lost. we eventually would need to build. and in building anything, some fundamental principles would need to be applied or no structure will hold, nothing will withstand our weight. there will be no comfort or shelter.
in other words, in order to be safe, we would have to come up with some sort of code to live by. the question then becomes, how much of it will be borrowed from the generations before? how much of it will be driven by biology? how much of it will be made straight out of thin air?
then, of course, we return to the beginning, after all that, after all this, how do we withhold what we’ve made, how do we maintain in the world we sought to destroy and make anew? how do we avoid all the traps and idiot nonsense that comprises both the margin and the center? how do we go about living as our own and only?
this after thinking about LaChappelle’s Rize, the reality show about tattoo artists in “L.A. Ink”, and my ambivalence to my own culture
your anger
your anger is so lucid
broken a kind of stupid
i was talking to my friend the other day and he said, there’s something wrong with the way you use the word broken, the way you refer to yourself, over and over, as being such and such, broken this and that.
and it unnerved me a little bit because i did not know quite where he was going with this and he continued, you see, broken implies that you are not whole, that there are pieces that will always be missing, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way you are right now.
i could see his point, i could see if you stretched the horizon of it even further, broken implied a certain sense of stupidity, a certain kind of culpability.
damaged on the other hand, he laughed, damaged would be right on.
she twists
she twists against the rope that he wraps around her.
he tells her he loves her and loops it over her neck.
she tries to tell him she loves him as he sets the rope on fire.
her hair aflame she spits, “when are we going to wake up?”
and i watch this with a certain kind of tension,
as if i was the rope and the victim, the sadist and the fire.