she says to me, i feel so out of touch sometimes.
i tell her, don’t worry about being out of touch
you will never be out of my reach
i will always pull you out to sea
for far away lands and distant locales
for the strange and the delightful
for the macabre and the unusual
and together, we will return to home
together, we will find the shore
she replies, you keep me in the world
you have always been my connection to the outside
and i wept. who is holding onto to whom?
Monthly Archives: January 2009
self fulfilling
try to convince me i haven’t sinned, that i am not wretched.
and he gambles, i start from the point of forgiveness, that forgiveness is possible. do you get what i’m saying? this is very different from where you start from.
and he’s right: here i am pondering what why i am so wrong, why i’ve done the things i’ve done and he turns it around:
why do i begin with what new thing can i do today that i will punish myself with tomorrow?
now beg
wouldn’t you like to break me, she said and fingered her fishnets.
no, he said, i wouldn’t like that at all.
but, she slid a finger to the corner of her mouth, aren’t i pretty enough to break?
no, he said, you’re too pretty.
c’mon, she said and leaned forward pulling at her collar, wouldn’t it fun? you look like you’d be fun to break.
who’s breaking who?
why we’ve been breaking you all along my dear. she sat on his lap, now beg.
with her lipstick
cracked sideways like a lover crossed and molested, having been turned inside and out into streets where the stone curbs are ragged from the teeth. she felt me up, rubbed my back in circular ways that made me embarrassed and yet hard for her. stockings that covered naked pubis, breasts smooth and soft and wasted, hands that were always tired from lying. i was just another in a series of nooses, a line of victims turned perpetrators, flaccid cocks marred with her lipstick.
something to be said
there is something to be said of beauty and grace. there is something to be said about despair and the night. there is something sexy about the way i put my hand on your neck. there is something sexy about the way you look over your shoulder at me. there is something to be said about how i feel inside you, there is something warm and welcoming and peaceful about the thrust, the trust, the need that i must be there. there is something to be said about all of it, about holding you and fucking you and wanting you and wanting to fuck you even more, slower, harder, sideways, from behind, on top, it doesn’t matter, as long as we’re fucking ourselves into something.
unknowning the known (or doing the unstuck)
sometimes we’d go off on these mad riffs of misadventure and knowledge because, well sometimes you just need to unknow, you know, you need to figure out what you don’t know and that can be anything, like music or art or how a dishwasher works or what happens when you fuck sideways with a gag in your mouth, you just gotta know what you don’t know and it can go on for hours or days and nights, as long as it doesn’t go on for weeks because then you’re really fucking yourself up, you know, you’re completely lost, you don’t know not one fucking thing worth knowing because you don’t know everything, how can you know what you know without knowing what you don’t know, and you see, if it goes on like this for too long you just go ape shit, you just go fucking wild or catatonic or throw up because at some point you gotta know something, you gotta know which way is up at least, you gotta know your fucking name.
marked
beget thee
and i beget thee
everything you have
forgotten, every dream
you blew away, every sorrow
you made, until you are
as the dust and the ash and the cinder
left in the wake of a once great
but extinguished flame
old scrape
scrape, he scrapes. he sits in his chair and scrapes one nail along the arm. the arm of the chair, wood shavings on his thigh, on the floor. everyone once in awhile, he gets his bearings, grips his hands, pushes off and up. he steadies himself, shuffles about. he makes it to the bathroom, the faucet leaks, a trace of rust circles the drain. he pisses, it hurts, he shakes it at the end.
we all shake at the end. we all grimace and bite the insides of our mouths. he still has good molars back there, where he chews it up and swallows because there isn’t enough spit left.
gentle obsession
I am obsessed with wordlessness, the gesture, the sound, the image. I am obsessed with silencing myself, with erasure.
She dances before me, she never dances. She thinks herself too awkward, but there she is dancing. She crosses the room, suddenly, kneels down, kisses me. I ask her, why? Because I’ve been dancing without a partner but you’re here now. You’re here.
I am obsessed with recovery. Words have lead me into and out of trouble. Words have lead me here, with two children, a house bigger than what we need, and a wife from whom I have much more to learn from than I ever imagined.