i want to remember how you remember me.
Category Archives: frags
abandoned pieces, fragments, scraps
if i hadn't
if i hadn’t then i would’ve and then something or other would’ve burst like a balloon filled with water, stale and poisonous, shot through the air like a stain, and we all would’ve wondered where did that boy once go? he had been filled with such hopes and aspirations. and i would’ve ducked under fire hydrants itching my knuckles and licking the curb, because enough really isn’t really enough with these fucking nightmares of jaundiced skin and tobacco fingers when i sure as hell don’t even smoke anymore.
and where’s the reset button, not restart, re-set, set all this to happen someplace else and if it doesn’t work out that time, set to happen all to someone else. someone who’ll learn how to live and not be the miserable mess of fat and flesh that i’ve become. there are times when i can feel my intestines poke through and i’d love to grab a good handle on them and not yank them out, but pull them a little to the left or the right, in any direction but the one i seem to be going because it’s becoming unbearable and maybe it’s the night, the ghost halls and dead air conditioning, the empty streets pock marked and scarred with flipped cars and hazard lights.
but then my daughter, while i was on my back making believe i was a monster she killed with the toe of her one-sy, bent down ever so carefully as not to lose her balance and kissed my forehead.
if i hadn’t
if i hadn’t then i would’ve and then something or other would’ve burst like a balloon filled with water, stale and poisonous, shot through the air like a stain, and we all would’ve wondered where did that boy once go? he had been filled with such hopes and aspirations. and i would’ve ducked under fire hydrants itching my knuckles and licking the curb, because enough really isn’t really enough with these fucking nightmares of jaundiced skin and tobacco fingers when i sure as hell don’t even smoke anymore.
and where’s the reset button, not restart, re-set, set all this to happen someplace else and if it doesn’t work out that time, set to happen all to someone else. someone who’ll learn how to live and not be the miserable mess of fat and flesh that i’ve become. there are times when i can feel my intestines poke through and i’d love to grab a good handle on them and not yank them out, but pull them a little to the left or the right, in any direction but the one i seem to be going because it’s becoming unbearable and maybe it’s the night, the ghost halls and dead air conditioning, the empty streets pock marked and scarred with flipped cars and hazard lights.
but then my daughter, while i was on my back making believe i was a monster she killed with the toe of her one-sy, bent down ever so carefully as not to lose her balance and kissed my forehead.
dreaming seeing wishing
i hate dreaming knowing it’s a dream and yet i still work through it, explore it try to change it no matter the oftentimes confused and confusing series of events and feelings. recently they’ve been powerfully nostalgic dreams, wish filled re-memories, where the past is mixed with the present, forgotten subplots of my life worked into today’s intricacies. and it’s painful in the sense that i know i am dreaming, that what i am seeing can never play out in the waking world, that this imagined past is not dead because it was never alive…
sometimes, even in waking, i have the edging fear that i do not like where my life is going.
and yet, and yet, i cannot see it any differently.
this is a test
This is a test
of the emergency broadcast system
of broadcasting that makes emergencies out of us
of a system which we’ve been for quite some time
this is only a test
it’s only a dream
it’s only a test
this is a test of a dream
of dreaming up emergency systems that will save us
of emergency rooms without doctors
that will inform us
that this isn’t a dream
this isn’t a test
before the time
he had been there before the time he hadn’t been and although this isn’t the right way to tell it, it had been telling for some time before it could be written.
he had washed ashore on her and although she would regret much of it later, she was amused in the beginning, as all these sort of things. her hair was soft, tickled his neck.
rumpled up into himself, he carried on, knuckles dragging along the wall. he would have bent up if he hadn’t left his spine between Broadway and sometime or another.
there would have more blue, if only it didn’t hurt so much and take away everything.
order of preference
when they’re first born, they’re miracles, needy, noisy fragile little miracles of flesh. nervous and scared to be alive.
then they grow a little, flap their limbs, learn to turn over, listen to the nervous world that is suddenly around them.
soon they start grabbing things and pull themselves along. up they go, up, up and away, knocking down everything in their stumbling path.
little pets they become to whom you teach stupid tricks. clap your hands, say mommy, say daddy, please and thank you, come here, no, no, that’s garbage, that’s daddy’s, that mommy’s and so on and so on.
you chase them just to keep them from growing up any faster.
and i had wanted
and i had wanted an end to this, this gnawing of the gums against elbows, this rubbing against the cement.
i had wanted to say, “this was,” and to turn and, pointing again, say “this is”
and for it to be radically beautiful and simple and elegant and final and certainly not this, this turning and turning, pointing and pointing, over and over, “this was, this is, this was, this is, this was, this is….”
figuring it out
they’ll tell you it’s a matter of drawing a line into an arc and then back onto itself. of course, what they don’t tell you is the amount of pressure each progressive swing takes, and how the matter of your fingers twisting doesn’t factor into any of it. but it does and in the figuring of one gracefull movement into another, you find yourself tied in knots, wrists for thumbs, hands for elbows.
you forget to continue
you forget to continue. The spoon perched inches from your lips and you forget, you hold steady but you forget and remain still. A still life, still passing for what’s called living. You then hear a truck blare its horn outside your window, or the clatter of garbage cans, a cat in the alley screaming for children. You stutter and focus your eyes. There’s the spoon full of mush, you bring it that much closer, clamp your lips around it. It’s gotten cold sometime between picking it up and swallowing.
All days come to this and for some sooner than others. I want oblivion, this bliss of absence, of forgetting of place, identity, of disappearing into the walls. I want to disappear. I do not want to grow old. I look at my daughter and although the fear is still there, I reminisce more often. I think of my childhood, more specifically my teenage years. I try to trace where I faltered, where I stopped being a successful student and let myself go to waste. I sometimes try to delineate that, but most of the time I am trying to remember for when she comes of the same age so that I might better understand her. She’s barely ten months old and already thinking of her teens.
You pull the spoon away from her mouth, gently caress the underside of her chin. Even after all these years, her skin is so soft, so pale. She slowly chews, eyes out the window at an indiscriminate point in our past maybe? When we were young and fought and loved passionately? Before we ended here wiping each other’s ass when it occurred for us to do so, when the stink provoked the shame out of us. We’ve turned into sacks of flesh that have forgotten who we were to one another, what the world meant with us in it.