i sputter about, half mad, half exhausted, a pinwheel run amok. between desire and disgust, i look in the mirror and finally recognize myself, i truly see myself. grizzly, barbaric, poetic soul in the trappings of a beast. my skin is is my own. there is no redemption, only the constant yearning for it, only the constant attempt. try again. fail again. try harder, fail harder.

the truth is i do not spend enough time with them, i am caught up in my own obsessions, in my willful emptying of space, place, in disappearing into the circuits, into the nonsense minutiae of rights management and authentications, the technology of disappearing or disappearing into technology. i fall asleep exhausted into my daughter’s arms, she grasps me through the night, and i sleep and sleep and find rest. my son, my daughter, my wife, all in my arms, a perfect dream

every dream has its consequence, some unforeseen cost that can not be accounted for. my mother traded her life for a man that promised her a new world in which he song abandoned her in. and now as her older siblings begin to endure the ravages of time, she weeps because she can only console them thousands of miles away. i gave up a life of words and letters for some sort of normalcy only to lament how precarious and tenuous that normalcy actual is. every dream has its price, if only it was matter of how much sleep could be devoted to it.

it is ok to delete this post, to wipe it from memory. your daughter struggles with the attentions her newfound brother steals from her. she tosses and turns through the night knowing that something has fundamentally changed. my son gargles and razzes and shrieks like some mad miniature godzilla stuck to our hips as we saddle him around the house. a thick snow blanket over night swaddles our home but my daughter loses her mind at the sight of me stumbling awake. she tugs and pleads and never stops dancing from corner to corner. timidly, her eyes on the tv screen, my wife whispers, do you still like me? you cannot delete this, no matter how much it hurts. it will always radiate outward, it will always overwhelm you. it almost cost you all this.

there is a wound i’ve tended to for a very long time. full of pus, a sore that could not heal. and i poured vinegar and salt on it to keep it from healing. but the wound reached outward and split open the lips of people that i love and i found myself weeping as if i had been the victim when the truth was that i was the cause of it all. she reaches out to me in the dark because she needs me to believe. and in the dark i hold her to learn how to be someone to believe in.

months later he realized why he could never let go of the sensation that he had already met her. he had: in a different place, a different time. and she had destroyed him then, broke open the world and revealed it all for what it was. she had taught him the second lesson, the first being handed down to him from his father. he had become estranged to it all at that point, a violent trembling that had racked through his body and he had been so terribly cold that his teeth had chattered in the spring sun. the last lesson would be the one he taught to himself, the turning away without stopping.
all that has been written on you, will happen again, and by your very own hand.

i don’t know who the man is, where that particular voice comes from. i don’t know if he means me harm or does me good. but he comes, every so often, this hardened voice, this voice with no compromise or remorse. steady but thick like gravel. he knows all pain because he’s seen and lived through too much of it. i only know that he comes around from time to time to steady me, when i feel like a lost boy in search of his mother. he reminds me there are no mothers for men like us, there are no siblings, no family, no hope. he reminds me that ultimately everything is a choice, our loves, our friends, our words, and the choice is solely mine. then he goes, disappears into the ether, into the dark part of my mind where all the demons need tending. he disappears back into the woodwork and i move on.

and in my sleep i try to toss and turn but my daughter claws onto me desperately and i fall back into exhaustion and i want to be that edge of warmth that gives her comfort and i want her to be the anchor that keeps me steady the dream that denies all the monster that i’ve become