the night swoons like a bitter lover, half drunk and restless, roaming and kicking up dirt with shoes scuffed from a day’s shuffle of clouds and children. we were all meant to be like this: desperate and angry, having lost tin cans draped over telephone wire, laces tied behind our backs, and a tuft of hair tucked behind our ears. feathers locked within the links of a steely fence and we pine the folds between the neck and the collarbone. how grand the pock marked moon scratched atop trees with fingers withered empty.
Monthly Archives: October 2007
my mind always goes
my mind always goes straight to mayhem
hold ’em
and every person becomes a game of poker
you take your chances with each hand
just before it touches your own,
weighing the possibilities of each face
card before you and how much you can invest.
you wait for the flop, always wondering
what the burn cards you’ve never seen were
and who was lost there. just as the cards hit the felt
comes another round of betting and upping the stakes,
you take your chances with each breath
that your hand is good, it will bring no harm
to you. then comes the turn, it either strengthens
or weakens you, a matter of positioning, who’s on top
of whom, who suddenly has the edge. and the river
then floods in, where boats sink and pocket rockets
crash miserably, where a set of eyes meet your own
and you stare facing the enormity of everything
in the pot and the plays everyone else has made.
you take your chances and go all in.
do we ever make it to the end of november?
he asks, “do we ever make it to the end of november?”
and i said, no, we do not make these things, they just happen upon us, like bird shit on our sleeve. suddenly and without excuse. and everyone is embarrassed for us and they giggle but do nothing about it. and we do nothing about it but we cannot giggle. what choice do we have but to get our hands dirty and we stand there like the statues we admire in museums but not as pale and certainly not feeling as foolish.
he breathes
he walks into a room he looks at her she weeps
he moves forward he says her name she moves backwards
he breathes
he touches her face she looks at his hands he closes his eyes
he moves a stray hair she weeps he draws his hand back
he breathes
he pulls away she opens her eyes she says his name
he weeps shes draws her hand back he opens his eyes
he breathes
ach, crap. let’s try this instead
he breathes her into a room where she is weeping and finds her beautiful. he moves a stray hair from her cheek and she touches his hand. she says, don’t. he moves across the room where she is breathing him weeping into hands that are calloused from rubbing sandpaper into walls. she says, don’t, again and he opens his eyes. she is still beautiful breathing and he pulls away into the corner where the lamp sits on a dresser. he says her name and she moves forward around the corner of the bed by him. he breathes her touching his cheek but he is no longer beautiful. she takes his hand and pulls him to where the sheets meet the bed.
this stupid mystique of writers and writing
what is it with this stupid mystique of writers and writing? every writer i have met has been maladjusted in some way. a bag full of quirks, an idiosyncrasy that slaps you in the face five minutes after meeting them. a history of broken relationships. tenuous relationships with family. addiction.
i had a friend who wrote dialog that was funny without being sugary. dialog that crackled and was sharp. could never end a conversation with him, it would go on literally for hours moving from one topic to the next. then suddenly he would just turn around and walk away. no goodbye, no see ya later. just like that. when i brought it up, suggesting perhaps he had lost a pet at a young age, he claims he didn’t realize he even did it. he just figured there was a lull and he didn’t want to waste my time.
i had another friend, brilliant poet, excellent teacher, was told that he had a choice of either to stop drinking coffee or to stop drinking bourbon or else he would lose his eye. he gave up coffee because giving up bourbon would most likely result in him being arrested for assault. he also pointed out that when he taught in prison he often wondered if he had any business leaving it at the end of the day.
and we seem generally to be curmudgeons, in tune with some other part of the psyche that makes us keen observers but also disgusted by what we see. we don’t turn away though, we wallow in it, we roll around in it. as if we never had a choice, as if the possibility of having any other choice would be obscene. we were made or are we born?
gambler’s anonymous
according to the poker site’s stats, in three days time i’ve played over 2000 hands.
blunt piece of metal
the day ends with a soft chill that traces its way up my leg and stops short. in the middle of the night i heard a thump and i snapped out of bed grabbing a leftover tool with a metal edge whose name i didn’t know. i prowl around peering into mirrors, waiting to confront some one, any one, to put these goosebumps across my skin at ease. i work through hallways the way a mouse burrows within the veins of a corpse. hungry and sterile, blurry eyed and angry. hundreds of times i’ve done this and it never wears out the tread. alone with a blunt piece of metal in the dark, waiting for an excuse.
house impression
within a house, silence demands rupture,
a surface tension always at a point
of no return but never leaving. the roof
holds the exterior together, just as the edges
of your lips keep your tongue and your teeth
from flying out. and the weight of each
floor presses the center into the ground
the way your foot does in the mud
as you stumble away. every night
pulls itself inward, a slow and steady intake
of breath before bursting into exhaustion. i run
my hands over dead leaves and listen
for the promises that a set of nails makes
before being driven into concrete. if only
the grass were as warm.
spider song
i dreamt of spiders coming out of my hair with lilacs and orchids and they each sang a song i once remembered and i tried so hard to separate the orchids from the rest as they rained down my face carrying with them the words i couldn’t put my finger on and a part of me wanted to cover my ears to keep the song out of my head but i didn’t want the spiders to leave they were so graceful and soft but they had much better places to go and sing their song and the lilacs kept sticking to my hands