she says to me, i’m afraid that you might be faking it.
and i feel tendrils snake out from under my ribs and clench around my neck and smother my mouth until i choke and a current shoots through my spine and i secretly pray that one day i suffer like she has, that I whip myself into the same torment she has endured.
Category Archives: internals
thoughts, musings, life, etc
i now am, am now
i can do this, i ‘ve done this a million times, in a million different lives. night air crisp, walking through the canyon streets, she asks, have you killed yourself before? and i lie, i lie holding her hand, i lie as i put a wrinkled dollar into the hat of the jazzman playing on the corner. i lie as we turn corners and watch beggars sift through the city’s garbage, so clean of life, of anything edible. i lie down in the morning and feel the sun etch angry fingers across my face. our daughter leaps into bed while my son cries from another room, cradle stranded. she asks, fingering open my red red eyes, are you alive daddy? reaching for the curve of my wife’s hip, i now am. i am now.
dream home
he falls into sleep with his children in his arms and his wife by his side. he awakes, startled but rested. in the dark she whispers, you are home, you’ve always been welcomed home.
love twine
deny it all you want: desire lingers like a stain. years go by and there’s no erasing it, a scar on the skin that only fades but turns a brilliant white in the sun. i tried to turn away from you out of fear, out of an imagined loneliness only to find myself in you. shattered meat, a ghost of a man, held together by your belief, your religious tenacity to never let us go.
remorse
it’s a mixed bag, cement dust to be watered and withered petals to be crushed. i can feel her change, i can feel it fall apart, like a sigh down my back. clouds over a window sill. shadows breaking for sun, my throat cracks into nonsense. i am lost, so utterly lost in despair. fit to be hung, i broke the one thing that mattered to me most, the one thing that kept me from disappearing.
choice thing
a sense of normalcy, a return, nothing i ever was, some new thing that is quite old. i am not who i was years ago, i am not the sulking thing who awoke from nightmares to catch his breath. some new terrible thing that is no longer resigned. some new terrible thing that knows that all kindness is a choice, that all hate is a choice. the favorite things, the loved things, breathing. constant, over and again. a power there, the only true one, once forgotten. some new monstrous thing, not quite as powerless as i thought i once was.
wipe
if i could scar my face further, if i could rip into the skin for all the world to see my shame, to see the disgusting beast that i am, if i had the courage i would, if i could muster the courage i would wipe myself from all their memories
daughter fear
warm days chilling into the night. she is afraid of me when she is in pain. a splinter in her toe, my mad grip on her foot with tweezers to dig it out. i let her go, she was sobbing, shocked, i broke some sort of trust with her. you say i am imaging things, but today, she was running, joyfully, trotting to our car. i had our son in one arm, i was watching her little feet dance forward along the pavement, admiring. she reached our car, she stopped but for some reason then stumbled. landed on her face, her hand. i ran to her, tried to help her up one armed, baby still in my other grip. she was sobbing hard, screaming in pain. i needed to see the damage, if there was any, my little girl. and i looked and looked but she was reluctant, afraid. small scrape on her nose, another above her lip, slight swelling off center. but she so afraid, afraid of what i would do next to fix it. and all i could do was hold her and promise her that she would be alirght. that i wouldn’t do anything to make it worse. i wouldn’t do anything at all.
turning four
my little one, i dreamt you. i loved your mother and you came to me in a dream. i saw you and heard your laughter. i saw you in a dream and suddenly you were here.
and you are everything i had imagined, you are everything i had hoped for. i dreamt you and you became real. i dreamt you and you came to me. you came to me and i became real too.
flux
the world moves like this, small little steps of intense focus and blip it is gone. it comes much easier than this. the man sits across from me and says delightedly, strippers come to me from miles abound. i note the intonation and refile through useless notes that turn me blind. my friend says, this is all very surreal and i reply, i know, we’re going to become a different class of people aren’t we? and in a matter of hours my three year old turns four and already she is unknown me, a mysterious animal with much charm and beauty and great potential for violence. these are exciting times, i tell my lover, i’m quite nervous. and she says, it’s all like a dream come true.