your anger is so lucid
Category Archives: internals
thoughts, musings, life, etc
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.
to have your puppies
she says to him, “i want to have your puppies.”
she’s the dream that you cannot wake up out of, the name stitched underneath your tongue. and you wish you could hold her, you wish you could open her up. you want to find where all the passion comes from, how it pours out of her, even when she sleeps. how her eyes pierce you suddenly, nail you into place, make you swollen and hard and urgent and forgetful of all the tenderness you’ve mustered.
he says to her, “i’m not some sort of animal, really i’m not.”
and she laughs, “oh baby, but ain’t you just meant to be?”
the summer wanes
the nights inch their way up your spine, they tingle and whisper and sweep across your eyes. as the summer draws to a close, it’s the heat that first leaves. it chills and you never notice it until you step in the void it has left. suddenly, like a promise never kept. you laugh, where did the summer go? where has all the heat gone? you settle down on the bench, hands on your knees. so foolish, you shake your head. there’s night on the horizon and it’s coming for you. and the fall, and further still, the winter. full of ice and snow and hard wind. even then, even with all the dead leaves, something of this left, something of this that will never leave. and the summer goes without ever saying goodbye.
bee stung underfoot
it flew up right into her tiny foot and she panicked she said ow ow ow and it was stuck between the sandal and her sole and it stung the crap out of her she yelped in pain her bottom lip quivering you poor thing and i looked at her face i said let me look at your face and i was looking for swelling i was looking to see if she could still breathe and i asked her can you talk to me can you breathe and i was sure she didnt understand the question but she nodded anyway so brave up in my arms holding her so tight trying to calm her down so brave her lip still quivering ow ow ow and hugging me tight to make it go away i couldn’t take away the pain but i could make sure she could breathe i could make sure it would be alright
always and forever
always and forever is just that, always always always. loving you always until forever, until the skin grows old, until the bones turn to dust. forever spinning outward through time, my limbs entwined in yours, my hand perpetually on your cheek, looking at eyes that look at mine as if for the first time. there have been such rocks before us, jagged and uneven, such rough patches of road where there appeared no respite. and yet here we are. five years later, over a decade later, here we are, still struggling to make this right, still finding something worthy, again and again, everyday, to say to each other gladly and without hesitation, always and forever, forever and always.