just because the beer is in the cooler, it doesn’t mean the nuts aren’t salty.
Category Archives: frags
abandoned pieces, fragments, scraps
an aversion to rest
a sinking of the teeth, i dont wanna hear this, i’ve never heard
you say it, not so loud, not like this and i feel as if the clouds
are conspiring against me, and the leaves have turned the sharpest just
before winter and if there was a way around it, i expect you to find it
to put the curves into it and the corners to rest, have the cement edges
weathered down by tongues and hold my hand through it all,
i’ve been done long enough to have it all come to this, to stray pebbles
caught beneath the heel, sand and dirt in my hair to coughing
and i dont wanna hear the tremor of your voice or the wind pushing
against the door or empty branches
only the sound of a palm caressing the cheek before leaving
of putting my eyes to rest
there’s a magic place in me
and she’s got little feet just so
and she mutters to herself lost lullabies when she’s tired
and leans against me with laughter, slides across my back
and she makes up words for what i am and who i can be
and during the quiet times, she whispers instructions to her little friends
and puts them here and there, telling them their stories
and i believe in her, i believe in this place
and i believe in the magic of life
i believe in the magic of my child
c’mon c’mon
anger and spittle, the chance of everything, of nights split open like pomegranates, of lightning fast and so easily slow, of streets yawning the horizon just before daybreak, of drink upon drink, of steering wheels and jumped corners.
and you were the friend in the need, in such demand and you made me feel cool, like we owned the night with each drink. and we broke things, we broke open ourselves and we laughed, heckled every demon back into it’s corner. we were princes and we were to be feared and loved and reviled and envied.
how i miss drinking with you, losing myself, losing the hours to the night. how i miss the possibility that this is all that was.
a grand ole fear
Cannot sleep, afraid of it, afraid of being alone in the dark, of being alone infinitely, of this moment with nothing but your thoughts stretching forward like this, days into nights, night upon night, growing, everything you love dying around you, first your father, then your mother, then your wife, without her, child or children gone, night upon you every where, always hours before the dawn, locked in, time a snail’s pace, it was always this bad, even in albany, a child has changed nothing, losing a child has changed nothing.
she says, “really? For me it’s like, you thought you knew suffering before…”
there is something to this
there is something to this, there is some THING to do this here with. some matter of the imagination, something blue, something sharp, something that catches the light and sharpens it to the eye. makes a thing of it in the dark, splits it open like lightening.
there’s something to this, she says, feeling under her armpit, pushing the fingers in, there’s something here.
and i don’t want to listen to her, have spent a lot of time not listening. who wants to hear oncoming death? who wants to hear the breaking of her and everything she is to me? i don’t want to hear, i don’t want to look at the knuckles buried there, searching. i felt something she says, i felt like my heart died.
there’s something to this that i can no longer do. the lack, the void, the nothing to hold against, the nothing barring, the all bearing. there’s something to this that me as fat as i am, as pale and flabby can no longer do, no longer deserve to do. i need this disconnect, this is nice. being away from here, from all of you. kept away, kept back. at arm’s length and my terms. terminal. at my terms and terminally kept that away. forgotten cargo kept at bay.
i thought of you again today (when have not thought of you?). i said to her: i cannot believe my father is dead. and my eyes welled up. my god, the damage you’ve done to me without having known me, without having ever spoken to me even at the very end. it’s all i can be sometimes: a child you abandoned, a son you never spoke to as he wept and you died.
damage, that’s all i am these days.
I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me
i cannot demarcate for you the line that i crossed. i cannot find it. i’ve looked and looked and i cannot tell you where i went over, when i lost myself completely, when i became hard and intolerable and impatient.
i cannot tell you when it happened, i cannot even tell what brief series of events eroded that last piece of me that i used to look on with such pride and remorse and longing.
i’d like to believe that it’s some sort of nostalgia, some sort of experiment in masochism that will eventually end and i could gather and analyze all the evidence and draw a conclusion and somehow be better off for it.
but i think, even then, i’d still feel swindled, that i was still missing something vital and pure and true.
i sometimes think i’m not even broken anymore. that this is what i am supposed to be when i’m all put back together. this is me, whole. this is me, cruel and unfeeling, sealed and complete.
this is me, nothing that i ever was.
lazy time in the fall
we’ve been redoing the kitchen. i’ve redone nothing. i’m good at tearing things down, breaking them, demolition. i’m good at giving it everything i got, going all out to take it apart.
i’m even good at cleaning it all up. the sweeping, the dust, the settling and sweeping up again. i’m good at making piles that seem insurmountable and steadily picking and shoveling the rubble until it is all bare. until there is nothing but the shell of whatever it once was. i’m good at stripping things away and making them disappear.
it’s never pretty but i’m good at it. i find it elegant, the void that it leaves.
i do not however have the patience to make anymore, to create to plan, to build. i never had the discipline for it, the forethought. i was never a chess player, more a checkers man. one, two maybe even three moves ahead and that’s more or less it, the end of it, endgame or game over.
so here i am in a perpetual stay of deconstruction/reconstruction, as much as i tear it down, i find others putting it all back together again, sometimes better, always different. different enough for me to keep it that way for awhile, to keep me distracted enough.
until i have to tear myself down all over again.
poised as if in mid thought, mid stream, in the middle of
poised as if in mid thought, mid stream, in the middle of.
he is poised as if writing, as if living, as if the day is not already night but still days and days ahead of him when it’s night all around. poised, as if he finally caught his breath -still drowning.
silent, silent killer night, suffocating closure and the nonsense of all that was. how did it come to be like this, he asks without asking, lips half open, stuck open, finger stuck suspension. i had been all of this, he says, i had been at this many times before.
his mother with his child on her lap asks, what’s the matter, what’s wrong. he thinks of his wife, of the child they lost early this year, of the recent miscarriage this week, of the death of his grandfather and the weeping of his father. he says he is tired. he never thought he would have gotten so old this quickly so young. sitting, she reaches out to him across the room to comfort him, sitting. he gets up and he walks away, he pushes down and stops feeling that.
he walks from one room into another. it could be something other this, some fantasy tale and life and slit ends and dovetailed structures. he could make it go this way or that. he lays down on the couch in the basement, flicks through channels, watches a show, all he sees are flaws. flaws in the wall, flaws in the floor, the possibility of mold, cobwebs in the window.
he adds up numbers: 34 and 2. 52 at 20. 46 at 12. he tosses, he’d like to sleep, a little piece of oblivion please, i’m exhausted. his right eye burns open, his left cannot stay awake. so late, we started too late.
i push down and stop feeling that.
and here i thought of nether regions
and here i thought of nether regions,
of dark places i would wonder just how soft, how wet, how dark
like lips before speaking, hands before kissing, something tense like a foot raised on its tippy toes
fingers to the lips, like praying, sudden like holding, to lock the eyes, to lock the jaw, to grit the teeth
passion like spit, like cursing, like mad as hell for being kept out of the dark, kept out of the wet, kept out of the soft
spent before anything else, anything further, like legs entwined, like a lazy hand on a breast, like a tangle of hair caught in the mouth
i oscillate like wild
i am the last frayed ends of some child’s dream. i am the lust that comes after denial.
i am the withered thing in the corner, i am the crawling sound between gasps.
i am the sweat and the euphoria. i am the swallowing of the whole and the pining.
i am the clasp of your hips, i am the unfulfilled desire.
i am the wounded tree, the tooth through the broken lip.
i am the snarling beast when you’ve said you’ve had enough.