if i hadn’t then i would’ve and then something or other would’ve burst like a balloon filled with water, stale and poisonous, shot through the air like a stain, and we all would’ve wondered where did that boy once go? he had been filled with such hopes and aspirations. and i would’ve ducked under fire hydrants itching my knuckles and licking the curb, because enough really isn’t really enough with these fucking nightmares of jaundiced skin and tobacco fingers when i sure as hell don’t even smoke anymore.
and where’s the reset button, not restart, re-set, set all this to happen someplace else and if it doesn’t work out that time, set to happen all to someone else. someone who’ll learn how to live and not be the miserable mess of fat and flesh that i’ve become. there are times when i can feel my intestines poke through and i’d love to grab a good handle on them and not yank them out, but pull them a little to the left or the right, in any direction but the one i seem to be going because it’s becoming unbearable and maybe it’s the night, the ghost halls and dead air conditioning, the empty streets pock marked and scarred with flipped cars and hazard lights.
but then my daughter, while i was on my back making believe i was a monster she killed with the toe of her one-sy, bent down ever so carefully as not to lose her balance and kissed my forehead.
Category Archives: internals
thoughts, musings, life, etc
if i hadn't
if i hadn’t then i would’ve and then something or other would’ve burst like a balloon filled with water, stale and poisonous, shot through the air like a stain, and we all would’ve wondered where did that boy once go? he had been filled with such hopes and aspirations. and i would’ve ducked under fire hydrants itching my knuckles and licking the curb, because enough really isn’t really enough with these fucking nightmares of jaundiced skin and tobacco fingers when i sure as hell don’t even smoke anymore.
and where’s the reset button, not restart, re-set, set all this to happen someplace else and if it doesn’t work out that time, set to happen all to someone else. someone who’ll learn how to live and not be the miserable mess of fat and flesh that i’ve become. there are times when i can feel my intestines poke through and i’d love to grab a good handle on them and not yank them out, but pull them a little to the left or the right, in any direction but the one i seem to be going because it’s becoming unbearable and maybe it’s the night, the ghost halls and dead air conditioning, the empty streets pock marked and scarred with flipped cars and hazard lights.
but then my daughter, while i was on my back making believe i was a monster she killed with the toe of her one-sy, bent down ever so carefully as not to lose her balance and kissed my forehead.
dreaming seeing wishing
i hate dreaming knowing it’s a dream and yet i still work through it, explore it try to change it no matter the oftentimes confused and confusing series of events and feelings. recently they’ve been powerfully nostalgic dreams, wish filled re-memories, where the past is mixed with the present, forgotten subplots of my life worked into today’s intricacies. and it’s painful in the sense that i know i am dreaming, that what i am seeing can never play out in the waking world, that this imagined past is not dead because it was never alive…
sometimes, even in waking, i have the edging fear that i do not like where my life is going.
and yet, and yet, i cannot see it any differently.
house hoping hunting
things with the house are moving forward, somewhat.
i never thought that buying a house would be this prolonged and complicated. actually, it isn’t complicated as much as it is rife with too many details and particularities that are almost bureaucratic.
in the time that we had begun looking for a house, my parent’s have bought 2 in the tampa suburbs and my in-laws made themselves a home in colombia (i forget if its an apartment, a small apartment building, or house proper).
we started in malverne, took a couple of glances into franklin square, but couldn’t touch lynbrook. headed to oceanside but what we could afford there we were not willing to live with.
briefly, we had a flutter with a cape alot like my parent’s in its exterior but couldn’t bridge the gap between their asking price and what we were willing to pay. came awfully close to that house in west hempstead, but that’s the one with the dug up trees and schools that were good enough for my daughter but not for the seller’s son.
we danced along the edge of oceanside in baldwin where the same house we saw in west hempstead was perched instead infront of a lake. and after we all signed the contract, we were dancing in the interim between signing and committing and closing. however, the seller’s husband didn’t fill out the proper paperwork for the work done to the house, nor did he file the satisfaction of their mortgage, and in the end we were out in the cold between thanksgiving and christmas looking for house number three.
ironically enough, the third house is located on third street and its the biggest of them all while also being the least expensive. lots of room needing lots of time and lots of work.
god knows we’re willing.
this is what i live for
when i come home at night, in the early morning hours after the end of the shift, sometimes she rustles up out of bed and garbles out in the dark, “Dahdee!”
with each crawl, step, gargle and giggle, children mark, and they are the mark of, our mortality .
and i am willing to give myself over to this churning, to this growing, i will finally give myself over to time and let it have its way with me as long as time cares for this one, as long as time makes all the time in the world for her.
when had there
when had there been a time when all the cliches were new?
when had there been a time when every word we thought was clever and fresh and never spoken before?
prowling the night like cats, lion kings on a quest stalking the streets, hopping trains. children old enough to envision just the edges of a future.
and now, mired in the present, disentangling myself from a future that i no longer look forward to, fearing it, wedging a foot between its chin and neck, holding it at bay.
i look at my daughter and i can see my youth all over again and sometimes, especially when she does one other thing she had never done before, sometimes it’s more than well worth it.
order of preference
when they’re first born, they’re miracles, needy, noisy fragile little miracles of flesh. nervous and scared to be alive.
then they grow a little, flap their limbs, learn to turn over, listen to the nervous world that is suddenly around them.
soon they start grabbing things and pull themselves along. up they go, up, up and away, knocking down everything in their stumbling path.
little pets they become to whom you teach stupid tricks. clap your hands, say mommy, say daddy, please and thank you, come here, no, no, that’s garbage, that’s daddy’s, that mommy’s and so on and so on.
you chase them just to keep them from growing up any faster.
and i had wanted
and i had wanted an end to this, this gnawing of the gums against elbows, this rubbing against the cement.
i had wanted to say, “this was,” and to turn and, pointing again, say “this is”
and for it to be radically beautiful and simple and elegant and final and certainly not this, this turning and turning, pointing and pointing, over and over, “this was, this is, this was, this is, this was, this is….”
testing pressure
testing the limits of my privacy. mz doesn’t want foreign unknown eyes to roam over me, the text, as if they are one and the same, when all this is prepetually different, differing, deferring away from me.
you forget to continue
you forget to continue. The spoon perched inches from your lips and you forget, you hold steady but you forget and remain still. A still life, still passing for what’s called living. You then hear a truck blare its horn outside your window, or the clatter of garbage cans, a cat in the alley screaming for children. You stutter and focus your eyes. There’s the spoon full of mush, you bring it that much closer, clamp your lips around it. It’s gotten cold sometime between picking it up and swallowing.
All days come to this and for some sooner than others. I want oblivion, this bliss of absence, of forgetting of place, identity, of disappearing into the walls. I want to disappear. I do not want to grow old. I look at my daughter and although the fear is still there, I reminisce more often. I think of my childhood, more specifically my teenage years. I try to trace where I faltered, where I stopped being a successful student and let myself go to waste. I sometimes try to delineate that, but most of the time I am trying to remember for when she comes of the same age so that I might better understand her. She’s barely ten months old and already thinking of her teens.
You pull the spoon away from her mouth, gently caress the underside of her chin. Even after all these years, her skin is so soft, so pale. She slowly chews, eyes out the window at an indiscriminate point in our past maybe? When we were young and fought and loved passionately? Before we ended here wiping each other’s ass when it occurred for us to do so, when the stink provoked the shame out of us. We’ve turned into sacks of flesh that have forgotten who we were to one another, what the world meant with us in it.