really having a hard time with the grip this morning, i feel the edge of claws, i feel my sternum yawning, i have to keep moving, i need to keep moving, i can’t let my mind stay still, work and work and tv and noise and the shaking of the head.
let me be rid of this, please let me go, let it go, accept it, accept it, grow old gracefully you bastard.
and i am having the damnest time as fuck, the worst it has ever been, wide awake and clawing, wide awake and almost right there, right in the waking hours that have always been safe, nothing is safe, i thought the waking hours at least were safe, the busy time was safe, but even this is eroding, even this has begun to wear away.
i can’t even bare to look at my face anymore.
is it because my youth has left me, is finally leavng me, right there at the door, hand on the knob, ready to abandon me, and it reminds me with one foot across the threshold, you were never cool, you were never one of the cool kids?
Category Archives: internals
thoughts, musings, life, etc
he dreams of caverns
he dreams of cavernous walls of swelling, he dreams of color and fear.
how can i be both? heartless and warm. lustfull and cold? not heartless and cold, but warm while being heartless, you get it? all part of the grand manipulation scheme that i’m a back seat driver of. like i told her:
2 competing impulses: to nuture to grow old with my child, my wife, to love them endlessly in one small room. and the other, to want to scream through the walls, to self destruct, annihilate, to no longer be, to be empty of all this.
screaming mad along the highway, waiting for the right backdraft to sweep me off my feet.
all these things matter everywhere
all these things matter everywhere, from the sound of your fist slapping the pavement to her mouth opening laughter or weeping.
all these come down like spent ballons exhausted, world weary, liitle more than withered skins succumbing to the weight of it, of them, of you, of me. drifting.
i find no comfort in rest, find no comfort in silence, find no comfort in the swelling urge to repeat myself, over and over, outward, to matter. to make all this matter, the knuckle of my finger, the hem of your skirt.
but then the delicacy of how she holds things, between thumb and finger.
and then there is that, and then there is her. the immensity of her, the nowness of it, her all the time, never yielding, never interrupted, never complacent. so there, in the thick of it, becoming all of it, devouring it, an angel to all things, an angel of all things, blinding light wiping out.
all things between her thumb and finger, what a grasp that would be.
i want this to
i want this to work, i really do, right around the edges, i want it to bleed, bleed softly, like little petal drops that’ll float up to the surface of things and make it all right, clear these left turns all up.
would it be that bad to wish inside out, have her be me and me she and baby as some three headed hydra wolf of all things and spit and smiles. she climbs slides twice her height and says tada, look at me, look at me, better than any tree.
it’s just a matter of roots isn’t it? of growing, digging into soils, digging into place, staying in place, learning to stay in one place long enough that you can grow into some bark they’ll learn to write on and you in turn will learn to live off the sun.
you want you
you want you to say all those things that haven’t been said before. you want to stick a stake through it and let it squirm pinned right to the floor. you want to tell her that it’s been one time too many and she could easily have been anyone.
you want you to get in the car and run it against rails and dividers, sparking all the way to the furthest bar you can get to before it all goes to shit. you want to out drink every single drunk and call them an asshole while you buy them another round.
you want you to feel the steering wheel go tight in your hands and keep the car out of a tail spin.
you want you to feel the gums of your teeth peel back raw and scream your throat dry. you want your eyes to stay open forever and not miss one second of it. you want your hand on her thigh and her tongue in your ear and her hand in your crotch, grinding it into gear.
waking to funeral
furnerals are long, tedious and full of grief. they’re an endless procession of procedure, of hearses and caskets and priests and pallbearers and weeping and flowers and goodbye.
there’s a fountain of ritual after dying and before burying. i could not imagine burying my father. someone asked him if he wanted anything.
I want my father, he said, a little boy again, lost in the woods or a department store or somewhere where he thought he could find his way back and now realized he couldn’t. he was suddenly small, not frail, but small and burdened and his clothes too big for him.
at the wake, during the day and the evening, it all seemed easier. my grandmother wept, bursting with each new arrival. my uncles stood around the casket with sunglasses, guarding it. the casket itself was beautiful, a rich and deep red mohagany with easy curves and sharp lines. people came, some well dressed, some out for lunch. in the evening it was all black and sorrow. you could walk right up against it, feel it press itself on your chest, almost not give way. i was in and out, my grandfather’s corpse was ice, my daughter played outside, picking flowers.
the actual service was even more difficult, my aunt could not stand, my grandfather’s sons wept, my grandmother told my grandfather to look, that we all were all here, to come back, look Yianni, we’re here, we’re here, come home, how could you leave me?
we were a procession of twenty cars snaking through island park, oceanside, east rockaway. we drove past his house one last time before leaving for the cemetery.
in pinelawn, competing cemeteries have acres, lush and thick, the size of golf courses. along the shoulders and inbetween them are stores selling tombstones one atop of the other, like vegetable trucks. dull and grey and somber, you can almost sense the near hysterical need to throw out some color.
no one walks the sidewalks.
at the burial we were exhausted. we said good bye at the wake, we said good bye at the church, we were saying goodbye here. we were spent, resigned, submissive. we do not actually watch the casket be put into the ground. and then we were done. and as we all made our way back to our cars and drove one by one away, the funeral director stood alone by the casket of my grandfather. he stood there, watching us leave, waiting. he did not wave, he didn’t even move. he stood there even when we were all gone.
time slides
at the park she climbs up the slide, all of two and a smattering of months. i watch from a couple of feet away as she reaches the top and sits. she glances over her shoulder, tangle of hair in the corner of her smile.
then she’s gone. just like that.
time is a vicious, persistent beast. it laps at our feet, follows us around, it never leaves us alone. there is no reasoning with time. it does not bargin.
in another life, we have a house full of children. she has a big brother and a little sister. we never aborted one, we never lost the other. in another life i never give up writing because it still matters. in another life you do not have to work. you’re not riddled with exhaustion and guilt. in another life we stroll through parks and grassy knolls while the kids run. i make big production of dinners i cook out of cook books whose recipes i never follow and everyone laughs between faces. in another life i sit in a quiet den with wooden shutters and watch the sunrise while you all sleep.
in another life i am everything i could be to my family and to myself. in another life, time doesn’t matter.
i watch my daughter climb up the slide and turn away from me. i watch her go down and disappear. i hear her laugh as she disappears.
tears in the sun, i watch time disappear.
some semblance of madness, if not rest
they’ve come back from florida without my grandfather’s death in their hands. weary and exhausted, not exactly resigned, trying to be there, trying to be resigned, but the old man is still breathing. even after they took him of the ventilator. even after they signed the DNRs.
even in death there are other obligations. things that keep us away from each other, things that keep us going. if not for work, it would be waiting full time, 24/7 for their father to die. 24/7 of waiting, of noticing the dip in the numbers, of hopeful and fearful realizations, “is he going to go now? he’s going to go soon. he hasn’t gone yet…” 24/7 of trekking back and forth the tampa suburbs. 24/7 of waiting for that last call that will tell them that’s finally over, that it’s almost over they better come soon, it’s almost time.
but no, none of that. back to reality, back to new york, to the autobody business and the cars and the adjusters and the customers who’ve been waiting much too long for their cars. back to ill-fitting parts and paint booths and that one worker who’d rather stare at the cracks in the wall rather than ask what to do next.
not a distraction, a way of getting on with things, a way of getting back together with the living when you’re waiting for your father to die.
to live and die in rome
my throat was slit, very slightly, but just enough that if i spoke too loud, or said too much, i would bleed endlessly, easily. there was a bandage of sorts, from the tunic of caesar whom we had betrayed. i don’t know why or how, but i realized much too late that we had done him wrong and were deserving of whatever punishment awaited us.
mine was death and they had begun with slitting my throat, just below the adam’s apple, where there’s a bit of loose skin and maybe that’s why i was living a bit longer.
but my day was due and i was setting my house in order. i had a son or a newphew or a stweard or squire or just some idiot man-child who admired my scheming and cunning, who modeled himself after my ambition and ego. he would not leave me alone, asking me if i needed anything, a woman, a sword, an army, anything at all to survive, to overthrow the counsel that had sentenced me to death.
i longed only for rebirth, a change in identity and as impossible as that sounded, i somehow thought, while inspecting the sliced skin at the neck just above the collarbone -it looked like a papercut, i swear- that i could make some sort of appeal at humilty, not beg, no, no never that, but an appeal in logic of some sort, to talk my way out of this, knowing that talking just might make the wound bleed out and i wouldn’t do any one any good.
and i was thinking this while in the bathroom, modern of course, not ancient at all, shower stall and jacuzzi and marble floors and tiled to the ceiling, and they wouldn’t let me lock the door for privacy, lest i escaped down the drainage pipe. my stewart was just outside, chomping to come in and wipe my ass, which disgusted me. he was too willing, too craven, too depraved and i was angry and stiffled because i could not tell him off, i had to save all that for the end, for the appeal, wait until the right moment where i could blurt out for leniency before they sliced off my head entirely.
and there i was in looking in the mirror, with shit in my hands, because we didn’t have toilet paper then, only papyrus, and my tunic stained because i could not fully reach around and clean myself properly…
i realized then it was a dream and i woke up. i was in our apartment in albany, eating dinner with my family: maritza, ioanna and our adopted son from nigeria. the mail came and in with the bills was an envelope from the court. within it was a legal summons: i was getting sued for a camera i had destoryed during a yankees game in the bronx in october of 1997.
i don’t even like baseball.
to recover
recovering for a week now. he’s not recovering. a phone in the middle of the night, saturday into sunday, while playing cards my grandfather slumped onto his brother-in-law gently, upbruptly, as if reaching for a dropped chip. he was no longer breathing. my grandmother, his wife of 56 years, tried to give him mouth-to-mouth.
15 minutes of not breathing, not recovering. in hospital now, some glimmers of hope, but more or less, no change. he winces at pain, but it’s a reflex, or even worse, an imagination of what his children want to see. my father is there, literally putting his father’s house in order. he swings from resignation and acceptance, to disbelief and despair.
a week agao, when he called, he had said to me, “it’s the phone call i’ve dreading to hear. it’s the phone i’ve been expecting…”
some time between then and now, i had lost everything in the last year i had written. a year gone, and lately it was getting good, rolling into May had some steam. but with a server crash and stupid user error, i could not recover it, only everything from before.
to recover, to salvage, to save, to cherish again, to prize again, to ignore again, to cover from pain, from illness, from abject and senseless randomness. a week later and they say he’s not going to recover, my grandfather in the one in a million shot he pulls out of his coma, will not be the man we had known. i never really knew him, who really knows their grandfather, much less on who was introduced to me when i was late in my teens, nearing twenty.
if, when or ever he opens his eyes, he will have little memory of the man he once was, if any at all. nothing to recover, nothing to forget, nothing left to live for. another ghost for this life parade.
i’m sorry i never got to know you when i should have. i’m sorry i did not devote enough time to you and what you could have meant to me. i’m sorry i let language and shame stop me from doing so.