What I remember of my father? I remember the smell of bile on his breath, faint, almost embarrassed. I remember that he often carried me on his shoulders and would run through the apartment, grasping his short hair in my fingers. He was a very jealous man. No that’s not quite right, he was a man always unsure of himself, insecure, never quite knowing how to go about being himself. My godfather would say he was just on that side of paranoid, but he really wasn’t. He was a worrier, a verbal hand wringer that just didn’t know how to let something go.
Category Archives: frags
abandoned pieces, fragments, scraps
remember the story
I once wrote a whole story out of thin air right here. right on a things like this, it was called, what was it called. I was sitting at my father’s shop, the autobody shop, there answering phones, I forget why, I don’t know if he wasn’t well or not, and that’s something I should remember because it could account for the type of story I wrote of revolution and language and torture and love. I think you could call it those things. it did get published after all and someone out there remembers it even though I don’t remember the name right now, it might have been “then” but no, that’s another story and I worked on that one I think, I don’t even remember, but it seems a lot of them write themselves, just sort of pour out, but that’s romance. sure there lots of stops and gaps and pondering with the pen to the lip and all that, but a rhythm was there from the start and this story I was first writing about, the one I wrote in my father’s autobody shop, that one I clearly remember as just coming out and going and going. like it was already there. there’s editing afterwards of course but that’s to be expected, I’ve always understood that part of it, the tinkering because you can’t ever really leave it alone. but I remember that there wasn’t much to do with it, considering the story it told and where it was, and I remember deeply being in awe of it, that it came from someplace I could not yet know, nor would I ever know.
pathetic and empowering
at some point it has to be enough, I am vomiting again and I feel a relief from it, from a certain kind of bloating that surrounds my life, insulates me from living.
I’m vomiting again and it’s ugly with sticky veins of saliva between my mouth and the toilet bowl and it’s a relief because a little bit of pressure is eased, one hand steadying the porcelain and my knees pressing tile and it’s enough to get through the night, enough to want to go about it a little longer, just a bit more, I’m vomiting again to get the edge off my inertia, to get off, to ease the bloat.
I can understand the appeal of defeating my body this way, feeding it, stuffing it, then ripping it out. I can sense the danger in this, I can feel the measure of satisfaction it brings, I can see myself wanting it more. It’s grotesque and wonderful, pathetic and empowering.
I am broken in ways that I can never repair.
And he felt that he was filling up a place other than where he was, as if he was filling up some other aspect of someone he didn’t necessarily want to be, and he was leaking, leaking by dregs, by chunks. He stood over the toilet bowl and carefully, with one hand, teased away the remaining saliva that tethered him to the seat cover. With the other hand he furiously unrolled toilet paper and wiped his face, his shirt -specks of vomit had back splashed- even his hair. Partly anxious and ambivalent, he felt a sense of accomplishment. Something got done tonight, if not his work.
dark walls
you wait for something to come from the dark. Something to come out of the dark? No.
You wait
for something.
Some one?
I’ve been waiting in the dark for a life time, a generation. I’ve born you a granddaughter you will never know. Then again, I’ve never known you either. This relationship we have is so intimate and yet you’ve never known its heat, its groove. How deep it runs, how you haunt me, bring me still to tears. Now I have listless days with my newly born daughter, six months old. The past two have been amazing. Wake up, some crying the first day, the second lazy. It seems as if I had been talking to her all day.
All of you will never know her. None of you will and as cruel as that sounds, I want nothing to do with any of you, not uncles or godmothers or cousins or nieces. I do not care, this is the dark gift I’ve taken from our shared blood and I’ll put it between us and it will grow and I will fester it, I will tend to it, I will be ever vigilant to keep you away from me, from us, from this little bit of life I want to keep for my own.
random beauty from chaos
and I will believe in children again.
And I can never be a child again but I will be something other for my own.
I will try to grow past the misery
and reach between the hiccup of her giggle and smile and find some comfort
beyond the 2 second fascination with her toothlessness
I will believe that I have a future without fear eventhough I cannot imagine it.
I will not imagine it in order to save myself from it.
And I will touch again my wife and feel again what it was like to be twenty with her and silly as I am silly again now with our child.
I will learn to forget shame and inhibition.
I will no longer crouch and I will no longer let myself linger in the madness of the night and the easy lazy sway of despair.
I will walk, I will straighten my back, I will run, I will make my heart beat mad from within to remind me of where it was when I was first born.
I will no longer try to settle debts with old demons but rather let them run amok. They do not have any hold over me for they are the engines to all this, the fears have driven me to make something more of my life than what it was.
It was the demons that brought my love to me, that brought me child to me. Random beauty from chaos.
I will believe.
shudderspeak
imagination dead imagine. Imagine this.
Shudder speak, a bone breaking across the chin. Did you see that,
could you have seen it
any better. Shudder speak,
the moment of greater things.
I once believed this, I believed you. Like this,
a tender breaking.
Shudder speak, the crawl from here to there, orchids across rooftops
could not have said it any better
breaking a silence two fold without walls
Here the shudder speak between the blades and muscle
bone picking
would you have dreamt it differently
had the ocean slung fingers backward of surprise?
forgotten stretch of street sweat
And there he was, dancing in the rain and looking for sewer pipes. He would have been blind if not for the stench of cut glass. Bloody fingertips along curbs, a kind of snaking along. Half serious, half alone, a slight tremble where her spine could have been. Lots of this there, he said, lots of this, he points, …there.
Stumbling to gaslight, bent on the knobs on his knees, he wretches. Gags on bits of hair and worry. Lots of this, he says again and holds his place where she could have been. He yanks and shudders, twists up into a crawl, standing. The blue shingles of an awning long forgotten and stretch of street sweat.
unmarked, unmarred, unblemished
how many keystrokes to nirvana, how many keystrokes to break through this wall of despair and silence.
The emergent sound of my daughter’s laughter, the half start, pre-giggle of an incomplete chuckle. It is like fresh apples, it’s like sun after a chilly night. It is her standing on the oh so tiny musculature of her legs, pigeon toed, steadying her by her forearms and her looking at you, toothless smile, all clean, all pure joy, unmarked, unmarred, unblemished, and the opening choke sound, the rise of laughter and just trying it on for size because it’s beginning to feel like the right thing to do, a thing that she can now begin to do so and here’s the occasion to try it out.
drifting
we had been waiting a few and really didn’t know what to expect. Jennifer was running her fingers through her hair, racing them around the edge of her glass, fidgeting with the loops in her earrings. This was going to be her first despite the fact she told us otherwise. We all knew she was lying but we would rather she was with us when she broke into this business.
Okay, and what business is that? What utter crap.
He has been sleeping, walking, jogging, farting, living, smiling and he then fell, kissed, slapped, promulgated, signed the waiver, which more or less, rather, supposedly, definitely, hesitantly sealed the fate, lives, plastic, hemorrhoids of his car, fiancé, boyfriend, couch, curb.
Ok, what the fuck was that?
You have to live to write but you cannot write while living. Always the furthest away from a pen or writing instrument of any sort and the voice or voices, sometimes a gaggle come and drift and whisper things that are prophetic and beautiful and meaningful and something you’d want to write down to leave behind but no in the stillness of this night of this rampant boredom and mad desire to go home, so unsupervised, I can’t get a bloody decent word out.
Children beyond our imagination
and so we lived quiet lives of sweet subjugation to our children. Lives of rustling grass and soft cars faraway on asphalt. We spun tales of the big city as night fell and dreamed of the daily routines our children fell. We nursed them and tossed out into the wild when they thought they were ready. Oh sure, we clung to them the way a rock climber the sheer of a cliff but their legs and voices grew stronger than our brittle bones, we were far too old for them anymore. She struck the big city upside its head and it dances to her tune. He, on the other hand, much kinder, has Thoreau’d himself further than we have, writing in and of the emptiness of Montana. This is what I dream of, write of, breathe of, of children stretching beyond the you and I we could have been. Children beyond our imagination.
And here we were, holding and dreaming, holding the last vestiges of our youth, cuddling our daughter while she took our youth from us. It’s bitter, but it is true. Our daughter will never know us as we are now, will never know the zest and heat of our ideals, the silliness of our bodies. She’ll be embarrassed of us at best and perhaps wonder how we must have squandered a youth that she will make better of. She’ll never know.