Category Archives: words

general, internals

she says, “6 weeks 4 days…”

and i am ravaged, she clicks around the mouse, right there, toying with it, moving under the screen, along the sonogram’s image. she says it like she’s disappointed, fidgets with her glasses, like she expected more, like we were wasting her time.

“come back again 2 weeks from now…”, frowning, “you know, so we can track the development, before I send you for bloodwork.”

and then it all freezes, like some pause button’s been pressed and my wife sits there with a thin piece cheap of tissue covering her legs, looking at the doctor like she knows as well, how hopeless this all is.

then it starts up again, and the doctor presses another button, snaps off a tongue of a black and white image from the machine, turns to us, grins and sighs, “congratulations…”

and she says something about meeting her in her office after my wife gets dressed and I’m looking at the image of yet one more child that we are hoping for. I know I saw its heart beating this time. I know I saw it as I put my finger on where I believed it to be.

general, internals

i seem to have written this

in order to forget it. but writing it brings it back. just the thought of it, here on the page, perhaps this too will not turn out well.
she’s reading books on pregnancy and only reads the appendices of failures, of statistical nightmares, the cold hard numbering of it all, cross referencing age with history with circumstance. she digs herself deeper.
our daughter knows nothing of this. she plays with dolls while we debate how informed should we really be.
i compare notes secretely, in the dead of night, i don’t want her to know, i don’t want to know-know (but i have to know, i have to be ready) and i pour over website over website. faqs, blogs, doctors, mid-wives, support groups. i’m getting sucked in: i’m asking her, everyday now, how are you feeling? any cramps? any bleeding? etc, etc.
but during the day i think nothing of it. i think nothing. i play legos with our daughter. we play out Cinderella and Snow White, exchanging roles, 2, 3 times a day. i tie her hair back as she eats, to keep it out of her food. we watch tv, we nap together. and in my dreams, with our little one on my chest, i find some rest, i find some hope, i dare to dream of another one, of some other one, maybe another one.
at least one more, please. at least one more.

frags, internals

a grand ole fear

Cannot sleep, afraid of it, afraid of being alone in the dark, of being alone infinitely, of this moment with nothing but your thoughts stretching forward like this, days into nights, night upon night, growing, everything you love dying around you, first your father, then your mother, then your wife, without her, child or children gone, night upon you every where, always hours before the dawn, locked in, time a snail’s pace, it was always this bad, even in albany, a child has changed nothing, losing a child has changed nothing.

she says, “really? For me it’s like, you thought you knew suffering before…”

frags

there is something to this

there is something to this, there is some THING to do this here with. some matter of the imagination, something blue, something sharp, something that catches the light and sharpens it to the eye. makes a thing of it in the dark, splits it open like lightening.

there’s something to this, she says, feeling under her armpit, pushing the fingers in, there’s something here.

and i don’t want to listen to her, have spent a lot of time not listening. who wants to hear oncoming death? who wants to hear the breaking of her and everything she is to me? i don’t want to hear, i don’t want to look at the knuckles buried there, searching. i felt something she says, i felt like my heart died.

there’s something to this that i can no longer do. the lack, the void, the nothing to hold against, the nothing barring, the all bearing. there’s something to this that me as fat as i am, as pale and flabby can no longer do, no longer deserve to do. i need this disconnect, this is nice. being away from here, from all of you. kept away, kept back. at arm’s length and my terms. terminal. at my terms and terminally kept that away. forgotten cargo kept at bay.

i thought of you again today (when have not thought of you?). i said to her: i cannot believe my father is dead. and my eyes welled up. my god, the damage you’ve done to me without having known me, without having ever spoken to me even at the very end. it’s all i can be sometimes: a child you abandoned, a son you never spoke to as he wept and you died.

damage, that’s all i am these days.

frags, internals

I need to hear some sounds that recognize the pain in me

i cannot demarcate for you the line that i crossed. i cannot find it. i’ve looked and looked and i cannot tell you where i went over, when i lost myself completely, when i became hard and intolerable and impatient.
i cannot tell you when it happened, i cannot even tell what brief series of events eroded that last piece of me that i used to look on with such pride and remorse and longing.
i’d like to believe that it’s some sort of nostalgia, some sort of experiment in masochism that will eventually end and i could gather and analyze all the evidence and draw a conclusion and somehow be better off for it.
but i think, even then, i’d still feel swindled, that i was still missing something vital and pure and true.
i sometimes think i’m not even broken anymore. that this is what i am supposed to be when i’m all put back together. this is me, whole. this is me, cruel and unfeeling, sealed and complete.
this is me, nothing that i ever was.

frags, internals

lazy time in the fall

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.

general, internals

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

frags, internals

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.

internals

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)

general

CRACKER: Nine Eleven

I got lots to say about TV: I watch much too much of it; between it and the internet, I’ve lost everything I could have been.
OK, so that’s a bit over the top. However, I do watch alot of it, again, like the internet, for distraction, and entertainment of course. But more often than not, I’m hardly ever entertained.
Given that, some notes about the series CRACKER, a British Crime series mostly written by Jimmy McGovern (who later wrote another incredible series called “The Street”) that feature an alcoholic, gambling and philanderous criminal psychologst Dr Edward “Fitz” Fitzgerald, played by Robbie Coltrane. The series was clearly dated, you could tell that it was shot during the nineties, but the stories were incredibly complex in their emotional depth and impact. 
Anyway, this recent episode really just blew my mind: it was very visceral, very hands on. The idea that 9-11 and the global war on terror drowns out, belittles, all previous terrorist activity that people who have suffered first hand almost on a daily basis (i.e. the UK and the IRA), is both fascinating and troubling. It’s intriguing in the sense that the world caught up in this drama that has the US as its lead, but as this episode tries to demonstrate, this is not the drama the world has been living, and the US has usurped the world’s fear, grief and anger for it’s own purposes.
As the antagonist of the episode points out, the US had no problems facilitating terrorism abroad before, but now, suddenly, the US has taken it upon itself to dictate the terms and focus of the war on terror. It is now THIS war, in Afghanistan. Now it is THIS war, in Iraq; etc. etc. How arrogant and selfish, as if before 9-11, there was no terrorism.
Yes, Fitz is an antihero: he is not good looking, slim, athletic or even faithful. He is not driven to discover the truth or to honor the dead. All that matters is finding the suspect and breaking him or her down, to crack them. The rush is not in solving the crime, but where he has to go in his head to figure the killers out. The episode opens with Fitz at his daughter’s wedding arguing about 9-11. Six years later, we’re in Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran wants to go nuclear while supplying Hezzbolah in its conflict with Israel in Lebanon. And, just like the gentleman whom Fitz was arguing with, when it comes to 9-11, we’re still frustrated, angry and, ultimately, speechless on the subject.