frankly, i’m not surprised
Category Archives: words
Rapping Guerrillas
there’s something really cool about outlaws, especially when you don’t expect much from them.
our first home, before the fiasco
about this house, it was the first one that we almost bought, coming this close to actually fully executing a contract.
we found it by chance because it was in the same neighborhood as a much less expensive, but albeit worse condition, house similar in style. what we loved about this house was that it’s kitchen and bathrooms were up-to-date, jacuzzi in the master bathroom, that sort of thing. we were enamored with the neighborhood, a shady and secluded nook just off the highway with only one hard to spot road in and out of it.
unfortunately what we didn’t like about the house was its lack of finished basement (which, considering the steep asking price, was a surprise). in addition, it was a fairly small house, with strained closets in the bedrooms. it was also on the edge of the community that we became enamored with, facing a fairly well hidden but noisy highway.
what killed the deal however was that the seller uprooted trees from the property despite the fact that we had threatened to walk away from the deal. the day after we had signed the contract for the property, i wanted to show the house to a family friend only to find that there were already four mature trees removed and shrubs planted in their place.
in hindsight, it’s been for the best, for the reasons above, and now hopefully we’re buying a much bigger house, almost twice the living space but needing a little bit of work, for much less than what were we willing to pay for this one.
i have to admit though, seeing this house still on the market half a year later… i get all warm and gushy inside.
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.
figuring it out
they’ll tell you it’s a matter of drawing a line into an arc and then back onto itself. of course, what they don’t tell you is the amount of pressure each progressive swing takes, and how the matter of your fingers twisting doesn’t factor into any of it. but it does and in the figuring of one gracefull movement into another, you find yourself tied in knots, wrists for thumbs, hands for elbows.
Hello world!
hello, welcome to some online nonsense. had to “fix” an already “bent” php installation to get it to work on apache 1.33
but it works, and here it is.
much changes ado…
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.