the morning after pill, where we bitterly swallow the dreams from the night before and cough up cobwebs of strained relief
Monthly Archives: November 2007
in the middle of the early morning hours
in the middle of the early morning hours because i could not sleep i whispered to her, i think i would be better off far and away in the woods, far and away from anyone i ever knew.
antiparos
i can see through the gray of seagulls, the kelp and firmament, crash of the tide on rocks erupting along the shore. i dreamt of my hands cooled digging into hot sand. i saw crystal blue and sparkle throughout the horizon and nimble bodies much younger than mine lazy and about on stitched cotton, baked by the sun. the sounds of the city were part of some other foreign land, years ahead or behind me, it no longer mattered. i closed my eyes and finally slept it all away.
snowflake novel writing
i tell her of an article i read, about writing a novel. it’s a step by step guide that centers around the idea of a snowflake, starting from a simple shape and developing the corners exponentially until from a triangle you get the snowflake. and i explain to her that there’s so much prep work, it’s organic in of itself, but i wonder if i really do have it in me to do so, to commit to such a task. and she responds with an idea, i test her by pointing out it has to be in 15 words or less. but what she comes up with isn’t half bad. what a story, she says, about you and your mom, starting from her childhood, your father up to the point when he left you guys, then imagine the rest. and i had something like that years ago, a convoluted thing bereft with repetition and imagination but died soon after. it is appealing, although, where to begin? always the first question.
purple and black
there is a purple wall he stares at sitting in a purple chair in a purple room of a purple house. the street is purple, the cars are purple, the trees are purple. only the sun is as black as his heart. he stares at the purple wall and grips the arms of the chair with a fierce determination lest he fall out of it. he has been falling for quite some time, there are deep scratches on the floor where the pulp beneath the finish feels naked. it sounds very much the way hands do rubbing along the brick wall of a building that has had hands much older build it from scratch. he gets up from the chair and walks up to the wall that takes as forever to reach the way wrinkles take a great amount of time to leave their impression. he leans on it and it, in turn, shudders. the whole house shudders, the street shudders, the trees shudder down purple leaves that curl into crackling things when they touch each other. the sun cracks, a mirror without shade, white light bleeds through but everything remains purple except for fragments bled with static from a radio in the bedroom above him. a conversation over a very short amount of time, beginning-middle-end, end-beginning-middle, end-end-end, a loop without a station. through the window he hears her, he lets go of the wall. the wall falls, the chair falls, the floor above him falls, the building falls. everything into broken pipes and split frames around his feet, standing in the middle of a purple square of rubble where the streets have turned suddenly black into this sound.
sucked at life
she just couldn’t handle it anymore, the whining, the begging, the something or the other that always plagued him about her. she was restless, he wanted control. it all used to come easy to him, one deal after another landing on his lap, there was never a question of how things were supposed to go. and when the difficulties arose in the outline of her skin, he found himself wondering how to fit her into his pocket, into his wallet, yet another token of how good his credit was. he sucked at life the way a baby does a breast and when she wrestled out from under his weight, he didn’t know what to do. he threatened and promised, cajoled and stalked, which just drove her even madder, in both senses of the word. she had paid a high price in her life to make it her own: she knew what she wanted and had a rough idea about how to get there and she wouldn’t be derailed from it. not for him, not for anyone, not for everything he promised her, not for millions.
sometimes the wind
sometimes a cold gentle wind sounds just like the roar i was so long used to hearing.
left beyond repair
he found caterpillars for gravel and pulled from his teeth the roots of a tree and when he brushed them aside stuck underneath his fingernails were the tracks of a scar he could not stop ripping. he asked her, “have i left you? have i left you beyond repair?”
and the sun had gone from orange to crimson, a horizon in the howl of a wolf beaten and she peeled the skin off her knees where the wound bled thick pearls made of silver atop ants of gold. she replied, “you left me blind, you licked all the color out of my eyes.”
he pried open the space between them and drew out molted lilacs and handfuls of sheared wool caked with blood. he sealed it all off with spit and coughing as the moon yawned the sky, “i’ve ruined you, you’ve destroyed me, we’re nameless without a home.”
divisions of a man
“there’s a place,” the grizzled man said, whittling away at the stick they found near. “there’s a place where the divisions of a man suddenly seize up and come this close,” he held the stick inches from the younger man’s eyes, “to breaking him.”
he went back to whittling the stick until it was sharp, “never go to that place boy. never go there.”
this singularity
looking at the corpse, sieged by reefs and flowers, two placards set off to the side overwhelmed with photos of a life that has been reduced all down to this singularity: you can’t take it with you and you leave everyone behind.