we’ve been redoing the kitchen. i’ve redone nothing. i’m good at tearing things down, breaking them, demolition. i’m good at giving it everything i got, going all out to take it apart.
i’m even good at cleaning it all up. the sweeping, the dust, the settling and sweeping up again. i’m good at making piles that seem insurmountable and steadily picking and shoveling the rubble until it is all bare. until there is nothing but the shell of whatever it once was. i’m good at stripping things away and making them disappear.
it’s never pretty but i’m good at it. i find it elegant, the void that it leaves.
i do not however have the patience to make anymore, to create to plan, to build. i never had the discipline for it, the forethought. i was never a chess player, more a checkers man. one, two maybe even three moves ahead and that’s more or less it, the end of it, endgame or game over.
so here i am in a perpetual stay of deconstruction/reconstruction, as much as i tear it down, i find others putting it all back together again, sometimes better, always different. different enough for me to keep it that way for awhile, to keep me distracted enough.
until i have to tear myself down all over again.
Category Archives: internals
thoughts, musings, life, etc
if you were to begin to write
if you were begin to write, what would you do? where would you begin? would you start with the years in albany, where you first felt the beginnings of your life realized? out there between graduate classes and talking long walks with her through the park?
or would you begin with him, with him and his hands on your mother, ripping the phone out of the wall? would you begin with that, with watching Columbo and confusing him with Beretta?
or would you begin with 9/11 that all but shut the door on making writing a life? would you begin with the end of that dream?
or would you begin with how losing one unborn child was not enough, that you’ve lost another? would you begin with how the pain still ebbs and flows and nothing quite feels like it and it persists like it will never go away?
or would you begin with the little one that runs throughout the house and says how big her house is, how this is her big house and when her mother can’t get the channels on the tv to work right, she picks up the phone and says, call daddy, my daddy can fix it
poised as if in mid thought, mid stream, in the middle of
poised as if in mid thought, mid stream, in the middle of.
he is poised as if writing, as if living, as if the day is not already night but still days and days ahead of him when it’s night all around. poised, as if he finally caught his breath -still drowning.
silent, silent killer night, suffocating closure and the nonsense of all that was. how did it come to be like this, he asks without asking, lips half open, stuck open, finger stuck suspension. i had been all of this, he says, i had been at this many times before.
his mother with his child on her lap asks, what’s the matter, what’s wrong. he thinks of his wife, of the child they lost early this year, of the recent miscarriage this week, of the death of his grandfather and the weeping of his father. he says he is tired. he never thought he would have gotten so old this quickly so young. sitting, she reaches out to him across the room to comfort him, sitting. he gets up and he walks away, he pushes down and stops feeling that.
he walks from one room into another. it could be something other this, some fantasy tale and life and slit ends and dovetailed structures. he could make it go this way or that. he lays down on the couch in the basement, flicks through channels, watches a show, all he sees are flaws. flaws in the wall, flaws in the floor, the possibility of mold, cobwebs in the window.
he adds up numbers: 34 and 2. 52 at 20. 46 at 12. he tosses, he’d like to sleep, a little piece of oblivion please, i’m exhausted. his right eye burns open, his left cannot stay awake. so late, we started too late.
i push down and stop feeling that.
darling child of mine, we are at it again
darling daughter of mine, i see you and recognize you. i see your mother, i see myself, i see our beginning and our end. i see us mixed up in you and something else entirely, unrecognizable.
what is this thing, this growing jumble who sits besides me even after i’ve scolded her, even when i was wrong for doing so, sits besides me, climbs all over me, snuggles herself between me and and the couch wants to watch tom & jerry while i’m desperate for sleep?
i’m still waiting for a hard drive for the brain to never forget any of this, to never forget how she rolls her eyes, how she holds up three crooked fingers when she wants to say she’s two, how she tilts her head to the left and to the right and she dips and sways while singing some sing-song nonsense that eventually leads to an abrupt cackle of her laughter.
never forget any of this, not forget any of her or her mother, until the end of days, until my very end, until the end of all of this.
(we’ve been at it again, another baby on the way. please. please, take anything you want from me, leave this one whole, leave them all whole, take only from me for them, leave them whole, i need nothing that would keep them from being whole)
and here i thought of nether regions
and here i thought of nether regions,
of dark places i would wonder just how soft, how wet, how dark
like lips before speaking, hands before kissing, something tense like a foot raised on its tippy toes
fingers to the lips, like praying, sudden like holding, to lock the eyes, to lock the jaw, to grit the teeth
passion like spit, like cursing, like mad as hell for being kept out of the dark, kept out of the wet, kept out of the soft
spent before anything else, anything further, like legs entwined, like a lazy hand on a breast, like a tangle of hair caught in the mouth
i oscillate like wild
i am the last frayed ends of some child’s dream. i am the lust that comes after denial.
i am the withered thing in the corner, i am the crawling sound between gasps.
i am the sweat and the euphoria. i am the swallowing of the whole and the pining.
i am the clasp of your hips, i am the unfulfilled desire.
i am the wounded tree, the tooth through the broken lip.
i am the snarling beast when you’ve said you’ve had enough.
no liquor apologies
don’t apologize.
never apologize for the liquor.
many a ramble on the liquor, many, many, many a ramble.
sometimes i think i’d like to see them all again when i’m on the liquor. the lost ones, the dead ones, the ones that i miss so terribly and i know they no longer know me. the ones that don’t remember. that’s the ones i want to see when i’m on the liquor, the ones that don’t remember.
that way they not remembering won’t matter at all.
i’ve been out of lately
i’ve been out of my mind lately. it comes in waves, i think
(in waves i think, in oceans, in drowing, i dream of drowning in wakes, funeral processions stacked atop of each other, held aloft by dirt and flowers and crabgrass)
there so much talking instead, so much body language and the wearing down of the body. sometimes you have to dance without a tune to figure out it’s rhythm. i’ve always been guileless, i’ve always been two left feet.
blitz said i had a habit of putting together incredibly complex things and then going backwards to figure out the simple stuff they were made up of. as if, why did i even bother. i miss him. i miss being a writer-in-becoming, artist-at-large.
now i’m just large. i’ve grown ridiculous. l’ve grown lazy. i’m just not hungry anymore. this is not the life i imagined, not the life i wished for. and it’s become this steamroller of a thing, perpetual motion machine, bringing me into this life i never thought i would allow myself to succumb to.
but then my daughter comes to me, still early in the morning after i’ve just gotten home from the night before, and she tugs at my fingers, pushes the hair out of my eyes and looks for my face. she pokes her fingers around there, finds my eyes to wake me up. and even though i can’t even keep my eyes open, i want nothing more than this, half dead from lack of sleep, flipping between day and night and night for day, nothing more than more she poking for my attention.
or when my wife has this look on her face that’s only for me, when her faces juts and curves like classic sculpture, something permanent and something permanent for me and only me, and i become her bear and we touch and it’s like water along stone, every fissure, every crack, every crevice bridged, covered, healed.
if only we could split ourselves, divide out across time, across each fork in the path, to have it all, every outcome, every possibility, every lost love, every lost child, every lost utterance, all at once, at all times, to live, to live, to be a pertpetual motion machine instead of being trapped by one.
and with nothing there are words
and with nothing there are words, plenty, all over the place, out of the corners, out of the cobwebs, a swirl of words, a haunting, a cackle.
with them there is nothing, only them, no words, only them-as-no-words, them-as-no-words-needed, them as everything.
and here i need to lose myself, to obliterate myself like the old days, myself-as-once-was, myself-as-lost-within-the-cackle.
myself-as-all-draped-in-noise, myself-as-looking-for-signal
were you only just a ghost, figments. i don’t sleep, i twist into and out of a state of consciousness like a worm in dirt
disneyworld madness or is that just the world?
walking right in, just past the castle in front of the carousal, on the floor screaming, a child and no one listening
generalities
bbq burger secret = boar’s head meat marinated with peter luger steak sauce.
sat tv (or lack thereof) = inspired, i got a hold of an rf-modulator (takes s-video and rca audio cables and pipes it into coax) and some remote extenders and now all the tv’s in the house can tune into channel 3 for shredTV (the tivo pc in the basement)
cherokee = it drives like a car, which is deceiving and have to keep the curb corners in mind. five minutes at my parents’ house, already bird shit on the windshield. but i think it suits me. it’s got a compass. 11 miles on the odometer, ain’t that fresh?