At night, after he’s eaten and tried to get through the news (a terrorist attack in Mumbai, the president elect announces his cabinet, the market plummets), he doesn’t even attempt to write again. He cannot. He remembers the girl, the wave in her hair and the boy laughing hysterically. Did he ever laugh like that? His shoulder radiates an echo of pain not necessarily from the bone. He thought of her voice on the answering machine, he wants to hear it again but he cannot. Outside the soft staccato of rain, a shower hesitant to breach the earth below.
All posts by manny@savo.us
waiting room
Sitting in the waiting room. Always waiting, waiting for what? Just waiting, Waiting for Godot, for some sort of arrival, some sort of departure, waiting for rain, waiting to die, waiting to live, waiting, waiting, waiting. Hold your breath. and it’ll burst out of your chest, it’ll ravage you, punish you, floor you, leave you gasping just when you thought you didn’t want to take another
word machine
Everyday, have this at least, despite the sorrow and sadness, have this at least, this measure of you, this ounce, hang onto to this at least believe in this at least, not your failures, not the disappointment of who you are, just this, hang onto this, the words and the pain, the loss and the dispersal, this vital act of simultaneous becoming and disappearing: this is who you are, the congregation and dispersal, the want and the lack, the focus point, the sieve of despair, the void come to life.
steps towards anything
after every utterance, you see a contemptable person would be like this or that but not like you. and i get it, he’s trying to alleviate the guilt, the “intense” guilt and regret i feel, that i feel intensely, and he wonders aloud if the running i do, where i tap into it, this fucking sea of sadness, if i’m also literally running away, and i say no, i say it in my heart, i say no, i have never run away, i have always walked away or turned away, after all these years i have found myself having gone nowhere, i have always been right where i started and the bones have calcified, all these years and i haven’t taken any steps towards anything at all.
self suture
our capacity to demand, for reassurance, for justice, for hope, endless, unbound, always thrown in the face of someone else. we expect reciprocation, we expect a volley in return, we expect to hear the tenor of sincerity, we expect like for like, love for love, hope in return for despair, we demand and rend and tear and claw until we get something, not just anything, but that which belongs to us, that mirrors, a pound of flesh for kindness, sutures for this wound.
germ
Even pebbles add up to boulders, shaky as they are. You make the effort, mountains out of molehills, a pile of whispers into conversation. What matters is the steady pace, even if at a crawl. It all amounts to something, it all adds up. It doesn’t have to be beautiful or a magnum opus, everything big starts out tiny. even the body succumbs to a virus.
wrung free from bone
you can be wistful all you want, but the thought gums up the gears, stops any and all traction whatsoever. whatever, he said and put his beer down and fumbled through the crowd, jostling for escape, stumbling out into a night filled with drunken women and flustered men. he did everything for you until he couldn’t do anything more, her mother said, and wiped her husband’s brow while their daughter bit her bottom lip yet again. why do you mock me, he asked, and in the dark with the bedsheet covering only the bottom part of a slender thigh his lover replied, because you love me as no other, because no man would take this kind of abuse from another man and love me so fiercely. these are the lies we tell one another between the friction and the release, to get from friction to release. it is never happenstance, only a series of moves across, an accumulation of flesh wrung free from bone.
poker sucks
playing poker blows: had an amazing run at the start of the day only to lose those gains late into the night. granted, out of the 6, 2 were sloppy plays and recklessness, but the rest were bad beat city: KK versus JJ, AK versus AJ, QQ versus 99, shit like that. had one guy from cleveland ohio bust my balls about a call i had made that nearly wiped him out. So i abused him in turn, telling him cleveland sucks. my avatar on the poker site is a picture of ioanna at one. so he turns and says, ‘bet that kid sucks better.’ and i don’t know, i kinda climbed all over him. but never once did he apologized and i was thinking what a truly disgusting human being.
transformative blogging
While looking through blogs, what the fuck are people are writing, how are they making a living at this, if anything at all, I came across http://www.peridotash.com.
I have to say, this is the most amazing thing I have ever read: not because I am reading some sort of literally marvel, but because of it’s honesty and vulnerability. It’s a sex worker’s blog, detailing the ups and downs of a ‘sideline’ escort and the clients she services. it is such an engaging story, wuith reoccurring themes and characters, subplots and conflict, hope and disappointment.
I clicked and clicked and read how this woman transformed from a part time escort who made peace with this aspect of herself (no self hate here, only a very keen acceptness and awareness of what it meant and what she was doing) to a professional dominatrix (introduced to her by a client whom she later gives free ‘dates’ for training purposes).
You can chart her progression and awakening, from escort to domme, from diary style journal writing to self referential web presence. Character’s that reoccured in previous posts are now cross linked in later posts. Associative tags emerge as opposed to rigid/static categories.
As she ages in the blog, she entertains being a pro-domme more and more because she is no longer a naïve twenty something year old, she is aging and frankly “I just don’t want to do it anymore.”
on the scalp 2
As he screams, I tell him about the bruises his wife showed me. I rip out a good section, rub the flap of skin against his good eye. He starts to plead, he stutters, it’s a pretty ugly sound. I take the broomstick he beats his son with and jam it into his mouth until I crack his molars. He chokes and gags like an animal with blood and snot and spit. Holding him down with both hands on the stick, I lean and whisper how his secretary never enjoyed a minute of it, that she was frightened and afraid and angry and disgusted. And as he spasms while I choke him, I just cannot stop laughing and laughing and laughing.