you can break a person much more easily than break an addiction. you do not become addicted to people, it is the circumstance, it is the thrill of denial, that you are alright when everything you are doing is wrong. it is not his face. it is not her voice. it is not the feel of warm fingers clasped around your arm. it is none of those things. just as it is not the needle or the spoon or your friend that wiggles the pack before you. it is everything, it is the subversion of everything else. it is the perversion of the person, of the place, of you. it is the wormhole where you never arrive.
Monthly Archives: February 2008
alibis of lost lovers
he reaches within her and pulls out tinsel and christmas amongst alibis of lost lovers and shipwrecks along shores cracked off the earth. she touches his chin and can taste mountains of empty bottles of spirits cast off from rooftops but land unbreakable into alleys made of tired bricks and devious mortar. i had been the pinnacle of success, he says and stretches open his chest so that moths can erupt from his sternum and take flight with dizzying turns into a sun that never sets nor rises, merely tosses and turns through this nightmare along the horizon.
can only suffer
nothing was and is ever enough. not promises, not kisses, not even blood. talking in the dark a solitary lamp in the corner that could have been hundreds of miles of away. passion spent, the nausea of the inevitable, the beckoning night laced with roads leading away from everything. I pull on this cigarette with a desire that my body can only suffer.
believer
there is a wound i’ve tended to for a very long time. full of pus, a sore that could not heal. and i poured vinegar and salt on it to keep it from healing. but the wound reached outward and split open the lips of people that i love and i found myself weeping as if i had been the victim when the truth was that i was the cause of it all. she reaches out to me in the dark because she needs me to believe. and in the dark i hold her to learn how to be someone to believe in.
make peace with the bones
you make peace with the bones or they make peace with you. you need to settle dust and learn to breathe because this moment of clarity is fleeting and before long you will be in the harsh light again.
reminiscence over and again
months later he realized why he could never let go of the sensation that he had already met her. he had: in a different place, a different time. and she had destroyed him then, broke open the world and revealed it all for what it was. she had taught him the second lesson, the first being handed down to him from his father. he had become estranged to it all at that point, a violent trembling that had racked through his body and he had been so terribly cold that his teeth had chattered in the spring sun. the last lesson would be the one he taught to himself, the turning away without stopping.
all that has been written on you, will happen again, and by your very own hand.
the walking man
i don’t know who the man is, where that particular voice comes from. i don’t know if he means me harm or does me good. but he comes, every so often, this hardened voice, this voice with no compromise or remorse. steady but thick like gravel. he knows all pain because he’s seen and lived through too much of it. i only know that he comes around from time to time to steady me, when i feel like a lost boy in search of his mother. he reminds me there are no mothers for men like us, there are no siblings, no family, no hope. he reminds me that ultimately everything is a choice, our loves, our friends, our words, and the choice is solely mine. then he goes, disappears into the ether, into the dark part of my mind where all the demons need tending. he disappears back into the woodwork and i move on.
you abandon this
you abandon this, like everything else. you leave things. undone, wrecked or even barely begun. works in progress, works of incompletion. walked away, without stopping, without ever turning back. with the sense that all that you’ve left behind is a narrow road of despair.
suicide math
not a day goes by where i do not calculate the math of my suicide. i tally 401k’s and savings accounts, i estimate funeral homes and burial plots. i pour over the fine print of insurance policies and the period before the dispersal of funds. and even in death, i still come out up short. the sum of it, or rather the difference is, ultimately my family cannot afford my death, cannot afford for me to pay what is truly owed.
valentine's day massacre
i expect no valentine’s, i expect no promises. i’ve broken every one i have ever made, i’ve been broken down into unrecognizable parts. i sift through joints and fissures, i misalign and fail. nothing fits. i no longer fit. i am trying, i am still irrevocably broken, off set, a juxtaposition of betrayal, of something once human, once tender. i am hysteria and rage, i am the drowning thing out of the sea and gasping for relief. i’ve run out of denials, i draw strength from losing time, i draw strength from my time being short. i expect no valentine’s, i expect vengeance, i am pleading to be judged and rendered.