i can see through the gray of seagulls, the kelp and firmament, crash of the tide on rocks erupting along the shore. i dreamt of my hands cooled digging into hot sand. i saw crystal blue and sparkle throughout the horizon and nimble bodies much younger than mine lazy and about on stitched cotton, baked by the sun. the sounds of the city were part of some other foreign land, years ahead or behind me, it no longer mattered. i closed my eyes and finally slept it all away.
Category Archives: internals
thoughts, musings, life, etc
snowflake novel writing
i tell her of an article i read, about writing a novel. it’s a step by step guide that centers around the idea of a snowflake, starting from a simple shape and developing the corners exponentially until from a triangle you get the snowflake. and i explain to her that there’s so much prep work, it’s organic in of itself, but i wonder if i really do have it in me to do so, to commit to such a task. and she responds with an idea, i test her by pointing out it has to be in 15 words or less. but what she comes up with isn’t half bad. what a story, she says, about you and your mom, starting from her childhood, your father up to the point when he left you guys, then imagine the rest. and i had something like that years ago, a convoluted thing bereft with repetition and imagination but died soon after. it is appealing, although, where to begin? always the first question.
sometimes the wind
sometimes a cold gentle wind sounds just like the roar i was so long used to hearing.
this singularity
looking at the corpse, sieged by reefs and flowers, two placards set off to the side overwhelmed with photos of a life that has been reduced all down to this singularity: you can’t take it with you and you leave everyone behind.
angeliki vlamakis
i am sorry my friend that i could not extend her life by giving her some of my own.
echo through time
i tell her, “these things echo through time.”
and we look at our daughter and talk of the little i remember of my father, the four or five memories of him beating my mother, throwing me aside, the night he raped her, the feel of his palm on my cheek as i was terrified of him. these scant moments have circumscribed me, defined certain limits and obviously have opened doors within me that i might have been better off if they were closed. perhaps it is those open doors i fear the most and pray that i am never the one who opens them for my children.
the malaise
sometimes the malaise comes over me and although i know it’s a sickness of the mind, it is difficult to think through it, to imagine the other side where i am alright and my thoughts are not tinged with rot. that there is a dawn where i will be able to take deep strong breaths and fill my lungs without sharp pain or a heavy sense of futility. i curl up on our love seat with my newborn son cradled in my arms and i want to stitch him there, safe and sound and smelling his father, a buried memory he will always carry within him even after i am gone. i kiss him and in turn reach out to my daughter to kiss her soft cheek as well, and each time she veers near me i whisper, i love you, because one day i won’t be able to say anything at all. i only remember fear and the sickly sweat of my father’s death. it is difficult, despite everything, despite this new thing i have become, to abandon myself effortlessly, to hold myself still enough and breathe it all in.
promises of a calm winter
down to 250ml, my friend’s mother gasps for air at a quarter of a liter throughout the day as he watches over her until she falls asleep in the early morning. another friend brings his daughters, all three of them, and they fill my house with squeals of laughter, running between and over us. my father pines for the earliest recording he has of his father singing, his voice tinny, hum and hiss filling the speakers, the distance between the microphone and the music. in our room, my wife brushes aside my hair to kiss me, our son cooing in the same bassinet our daughter once slept in. the night is cold and clear and the fierce wind has died but holds no promises for a calm winter.
just like this again
sometimes my head is so full of bricks and my mouth so stuffed with mourning that i am short of breath and the wind whips the skin off my bones and my muscles ache and my knees crack and i can barely stand up to it all, this swelling up and over, this drowning of the dam, that all i can think of is, and tomorrow will be just like this again, and the day after that, and the day after
hooliganism
i remember going to the mall, the odd assembly of stores packed tight, robbing kids of their beepers because we knew someone who could tune them up and resell them. i remember smoking in between subway cars, flicking open my butterfly knife and cutting the rubber seal to the conductor’s booth, announcing stations somewhere between here and hell. i remember chasing down the two muggers who snapped off our chains in the bronx and pounding the head of the one we caught into the sidewalk until it was wet. i remember firing my first gun, a .22 raven off in the dark of forest park, not hitting anything but wishing there was something to catch the bullets in between the trees. i remember running across queens boulevard and someone saying, it’s him, it’s him, and we had guns drawn down our sides like mad men, then suddenly, when the guy at the pay phone looked at us, we stopped abruptly, turning away, it ain’t him, it ain’t him. i remember learning they finally snatched up into a cargo van the kid that had stabbed me and that they broke both of his arms. i remember the rage and the clear detachment, the grief and the guilt, and the curious sense we were all toeing a very dangerous line and at any time it could have gone either way.