soft soft like lying, lying beside the ocean, the whisper of a sea too distant to feel the current and yet drowning, drowned, i can’t swim out of it, i can’t find where the sky should be, there is only night and her, the dream of her waking up, the sun rising, there is supposed to be some sort of bottom or else how do i find my way upwards, how to find air, when there is no undertow, just a pulling at all sides, the whip tails of something passing, eyes open but blurred for lack of place, i cannot see her, only feel the weight she carries, as if she had been the anchor to my dilemma and she cut me into pieces, cut me loose, adrift, drifting and swept up just before breathing, and cut and spun, again and again, again and again.
Category Archives: internals
thoughts, musings, life, etc
there is no story here
there is no story here, only whips and snaps of something that has leaked through, that has made an impression, that has been butchered beyond recognition. you cannot see what is here, a funhouse mirror at best, only the distortion of noise where the signal found is your own. i am my own and only, as ever have been, this lonely fucking place, where there is no sound other than the roar that defined me as a child and set me apart, the curious detachment that i have lived this all before, nothing ever comes as a surprise, even the happy moments, even in tragedy, nothing at all. just the sound of there having been something here at one time, the trace of a breath, the outline of a something better than this, all but gone except for this blood rush, this fucking maddening absence that spills over and over, shits on everything, breaks everything, shows me for what it is, how truly empty every moment, how devoid, how clean, unblemished, pure and eternal, this thing in me that has no home, that keeps me exposed to it all, that keeps me away from you. this is the true always and forever, my own and only, this lovely fucking solitude where i am most at peace in its silence, where only the noise for company and you will never be permitted to see.
pre-k oriententay
And at the pre-k orientation program it’s a litany of parents you must do this and not do that PLEASE. A whole tirade of how we as parents need to act. And it doesn’t matter to me, I don’t mind, I’ve heard most of this kind of thing before, but I have to wonder what kind of ridiculousness prompted the need for it.
the envelope
you will push the envelope wont you? you will push it until it no longer crackles or bend. you will push until something breaks, until she breaks, until you break, until it is all ruined and torn. you will keep pushing until we all fall off a cliff or you are left satisfied.
but there’s no real satisfying you at this point is there? too much, too much, seen and said and felt and already, too soon, too soon, forgotten. you will keep pushing until the seam reveals itself for what it truly is: shambles of a life you never really wanted.
your anger
your anger is so lucid
broken a kind of stupid
i was talking to my friend the other day and he said, there’s something wrong with the way you use the word broken, the way you refer to yourself, over and over, as being such and such, broken this and that.
and it unnerved me a little bit because i did not know quite where he was going with this and he continued, you see, broken implies that you are not whole, that there are pieces that will always be missing, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way you are right now.
i could see his point, i could see if you stretched the horizon of it even further, broken implied a certain sense of stupidity, a certain kind of culpability.
damaged on the other hand, he laughed, damaged would be right on.
fissure
on their bellies, looking out over a cliff. rocks and sand, red and brown like some alien planet.
“i think… there,” the grizzled man said and pointed out into the distance. “can almost see it.”
the younger man squinted his eyes, strained in the sun. “what? what’s there?”
“where the fissure begins,” the older man snorted. “there’s always a fissure.”
“i think i can see it, behind the rocks, the sand barely covers it,” the younger man took a deep breath, “almost looks like a trap.”
“the fundamental divide always is son.” the grizzled man rolled onto his back, fished out a cigarette from his shirt pocket. “it always fucking is.”
she does have tumors in her head
and it takes him a while to say it, he’s been pacing around the office floor, getting up without speaking, ghosts his way out of the maze of cubilces and into a conference room. there in the dark he hears the results of the mri, things have been pretty bad so far, the inner lining of her lung had detached, and when they thought things were getting better, she hemorraged in her brain and now there’s numbness down one side. he says these things with a detached curiousity, as if he himself is also hearing it for the first time, but he’s heard this all before.
at my reaction he says, it’s funny how your facial expressions are much more animated than my own.
fifty more
“ultimately”, he said, lighting another cigarette, the last still smoldering inches from them both, “there is no shelter. you cannot escape you.”
he leaned back and dragged deeply and slowly exhaled. i itched for a cigarette for the first time in years. he stared at me as if he knew, “buck up son, you got fifty more years of this to deal with.”
comfort fall
she tosses and turns. little limbs splay to the left, then the right. she rubs her eyes, stares at the ceiling. she wakes up asking for mommy.
mommy’s at work, i say. she asks again. it goes like that sometimes, as if she’s still dreaming and she doesn’t know she’s awake already.
mommy’s at work, i say, want to go downstairs? and she nods and wobbles up and climbs into my arms and just hangs there, goes limp. i would think she fell asleep again if not for her giggling as i bound down the steps, always with the horrific thought that because i can’t see the stairs because i am holding her in my arms, i will miss a step and we will tumble and i will snap my neck or hers most definitely, so i wobble down kind of quickly, kind of slow and she laughs because she thinks it’s a game when it’s this horror show in my head but we get to the bottom without incident like we always did.
and after the whole bathroom routine, i convince her that she wants eggs and hash browns for breakfast and even a little bit of juice too and she does just that without complaint, like we’ve been doing this every day all along when in actually it’s literally been months since i cooked for her, months since we sat up together in the morning at the same time.
and sitting with her here now, eating, helping her eat, her mad hair from sleep clipped back and away from her face, watching bugs bunny, i have my daughter back after such a long drawn out summer, and we fall into the routine, we fall back into comfort.