hang time, the suspension of belief, that one crucial moment where we wait with baited breath and our lungs fill to capacity and it would be a marvel that we were still breathing if the nail wasn’t set to puncture us all.
hang time, the noose around her neck, while we wait for the trap door to drop and for her to kick at us and we toss stones against her forehead and her torso and her knees, scratched and bruised and scabbed with every lie.
hang time, where calloused fingers loosen their grip and i fall forever and ever into the mouth of this disappointment, having said it and done, over and over until raw, until my throat is hoarse from screaming your name.
hang time, all over again until it is over.
Monthly Archives: December 2008
light / dark
When will there ever be peace in my heart?
When will I let go of despair, when will I find it unattractive?
You said once I was a pain junkie. I wonder if it’s a simple as that.
I am a dark soul. I think I’ve seen and done too much, and not enough of the right things.
Will you teach me how to embrace the light? Will you teach me not to be afraid of the dark?
ever real
it is difficult to let go of an addiction, particularly when it is sprung from self destruction, when the addiction is to self destruct, to self mutilate. a denial of happiness. i tell her in the dark, i need to tell you this, i need to tell you that you are real, the only ever real thing i have ever had.
in the dark, untouched
i scramble in the dark, i make myself up. every instance, another me, another entanglement, something else i cannot sustain. i scramble my brains over a cold skillet, nothing cooks. nothing even simmers. i grow stale. i am lost, i make myself up, ten fold, twenty fold. the need to disappear, overwhelming. to not be, to erase myself, to obliterate. not out of malice, not to destroy, to create anew. blank slate, dig up even the foundation. there is no foundation, only dirt. it’s all been built upon dirt, mud, shaky ground. i cannot sustain, i scramble.
i have never been reached, i have yet to be touched by another person. i have yet to be moved. i am always looking for a way out. i am always looking to not be.
happy nothing drowning
“whatever will be willed of me”
-tool, “lateralus”
throughout and through, thrown out and pitched, the wave and the tide and the undertow, relax, let go, she said, let it go, she said, she kissed me hard on the mouth and my teeth hurt, my gums bled and i tasted her as a mixture of blood and rage and the longing of every man that crossed her, of every longing i ever had that was denied and i felt nothing but the drowning even though i knew the shore was near, even though i knew the sun was above me, even though i knew which direction to go, i felt nothing, i felt peace, i felt happy as nothing at all.
a fiction of you: once thought beautiful
there is of course, a mad almost feverish magic to writing, to this, to you in the dark sleeping. as if. as if time begins and ends here, between each letter, then ruptures before the next word. you inhale, your torso gently rises, life sprung anew, blood coursing through veins, then exhale, the leaving of everything, silence and stillness. until the next word, the next breath. enraptured i write with bitter hands that had once held, what, our child? there were never any children. only the denial of children, only the thorn of reaching out for something we once thought beautiful but could never possess.
options
There is no reset button, there is no way to go back in time and undo the damage before it even began. I do not know what to do, and if I delve into it too deeply, I feel as if I might go mad. But I cannot. There are children, there are bills, there are frail and fragile human beings involved that I am afraid to reach out to. The only option is to disconnect. The only option is to stop.
valued sleeplessness
I have gone from one day to the next, not stopping. A certain kind of restlessness, an inability to let go. No panic, no racing thoughts, no irritation, just no need for sleep. I tried everything, upstairs downstairs, somewhere in the middle; but nothing. The effect however was soothing: I was kind to her, I was kind to the children, I was accepting of disappointment, not resigned, accepting. And there was value in that.
shock and awe
I look back on the last couple of months and I am confused as ever. Did I really say these things, did I actually do them? Who am I, over and over. Every stance I take, every utterance feels contrived and belonging to someone else. Nothing quite fits. And I feel a certain kind of resignation, that this is it, I have crumbled and there is nothing even spectacular about it.
furlough
and you say and think and think and say and round and round it goes, some warts all around the neck and wrists and above the left hip, like the time she bumped her head against the bureau and blamed you for it although you were miles away on a trip to antigua where the children dance around you to and fro darting their hands into every pocket and what a cruel dog it must have been on that day as you kicked it when no one was looking except for the old man who smiled approvingly and his wife bespeckled and worried because even with them damn things on she still couldn’t see a thing.