the little starts to cough that turns into a choke. playing poker i am frozen looking for the color of her face. someone says, do the heimlich and i get cross the room looking for color and see a face full of panic. i wrap behind her and tilt her forward, two fingers just below her sternum and wonder if the placement is right but i push anyway. once, twice, i don’t see anything come out but she starts to cry. can’t cry without air, she starts to cry and i am relieved. i pick her up and hold her tight and she bawls that she can’t breathe. i laugh a nervous tension and whisper in her ear, if you couldn’t breathe, you wouldn’t be able to tell me.
Category Archives: general
merry x-mas
merry christmas to my extended family, scattered across the city, without collared button down shirts, without slacks, without fine stockings, without a home to call their own. merry christmas to the fools and the war mongers, the drunks and the diseased, the addicts and the lost. merry christmas to the childless couples and the children without love, to the stray dogs sniffing through dumpsters, to the whores huddled together over a bottle of wine. merry christmas to the abused whose bones never seem to mend right and the thieves who can never seem to have enough. merry christmas to all the wretched, all those without hope, to those that are mired in despair, to those that remain sleepless, to all of us that have the faintest memory of dreaming and what any of it means.
randomness
somewhere there’s a hotel of santa’s imported from around the country belligerent & snapping towels at each other.
there’s a woman utterly convinced that the priest & tv crew of a paranormal-based reality show are exorcising her grandmother.
my cousin, who is thirty five and divorced takes it upon himself to give his two younger cousins, both sixteen, “the talk” about boys and girls.
and why is it every year feels less and less like christmas?
beneath my station
a house full of children yelling like banshees while adults mill about in their clicks. the hosts meander from site to site, checking up, filling glasses, offering cigars. santa gently handles each child on his lap while people of a better class than mine snap photos of them little realizing that jolly old nick has a full sleeve of tattoos down each arm. but he shows incredible kindness with my son who sleeps in his arm as if he was the real thing. we sit on the patio and talk of the politics of the world and the economics of our children’s future. i say little but am filled with anxiety. i ask him, your father owned a business, you are a partner in a law firm, what do you hope for your daughters? he says, i want them to find out what they like and get good at it and we’ll be well off enough that hopefully the money will come one way or the other. i think of my daughter’s fine hand and her penchant for photography and how she rambles prose that sounds almost right and i think of all the wrong turns i’ve made that the other is not an option for her.
3 choices
years ago i had written, in any given situation immediately three choices:
1.act
2.react
3.or remain perfectly still
the third option, the most difficult of all.
wordless clarity
the winter, although not fully here, has been slow moving. it’s been relatively warm, cold at times, but nothing bone chilling, nothing cracking the thermostat like years past. christmas is fast approaching, having snuck up on us like some sort of feline predator and we have yet to scurry out of its inevitable grasp. i awake some mornings with a clarity that i know is fleeting, where i am wordless and without that nervy restlessness that compels me to write. i can sit and have my coffee, smoke a cigarette and simply enjoy watching others make their way through the beginning of another day.
letting go
as we leave class, the little one says, i want to sit on your shoulders. so i hoist her up.
we cross the street & she says, i want to run. so i put her down & she runs, laughing.
she runs away from me, little legs dancing, she runs past our car. i say, where are you going?
she doesn’t even look back. she just laughs & laughs. i ask again, where are you going?
unadulterated glee, she runs even further away without stopping.
city grudge
the city is, of course, brutal and unending, pure and ultimately relentless. circumscribed, the city inevitably consumes itself only to reproduce itself. the faces change, the strides, the fashion, but they are all the same, split apart and recombined, a gestalt of the city, of its desires and nuances, of its fickle and harsh method of living. it is infinite within itself, a fractal pattern that subdivides over and over until my eyes water from the strain of discerning the swirls from the limbs, the gesture from the act, the concrete from the skin, myself from it. i was born here. i made love here. i bled here. but i will not die here, i know this as sure as i know my own name. and the city most likely holds it against me.
the little one asks me to stay
i don’t always get along with the little one, she is tempestuous and ornery, has her mood swings, sticks her tongue out when i tell her what to do. but there are moments like this one, when she is suddenly frail, where even her frustration collapses her, when i get up to walk out of the room for some odd thing and she asks, where are you going? and i reply, do you want me to stay? and she nods her head and i stay and am overwhelmed with the sense that one day she will learn of all my sins, of all my crimes, and will want me to leave instead.
the little one knows
and its like the little one knows, she insists
that i sit with her, play
these games on the laptop,
puts an arm around me when I join in
to hold me still