you’d like for this to be the end of it. An end to beginnings, or at least, an end to endings. An end to the fear of the end, of endings, perpetual and continual, throughout the night, between breaths, in the long silence that falls between.
I’d like to have apologized to you because I had made such a demon out of you, but the truth of it is, holding my daughter, seeing her seeing me and knowing me, knowing that I am someone apart from anyone else and her mother is someone set even further apart from anyone else, seeing her smile when she first sees me in the morning…
No, I have no apologies for you and if I could, I’d let you die again and again without a word to me.
Three years ago tomorrow, the world changed. It is much more frightening and grim, unsure. The economy is faltering along, we are trying to buy a house. It’s a struggle: we found a home in an area that we really like and is convenient for both us, close to my parents, and just when we thought we were on our way, that our only problems were how we were to juggle the documentation of assets and debt to income ratios with the mortgage bank, the seller wants to uproot two trees.
Our lawyer says, well, people taking light fixtures is normal, but trees? Well, that’s certainly unique.
So, of course, your father’s reaction is pure spite. Sure you can have the trees, but knock off 2 grand off the price. And as a matter of fact, while we’re at it, why don’t you spend about another 10 grand on the repairs and replacements the engineer recommends and if you’re thinking of taking those swings that you’ve featured so prominently, well guess what, that’s another 2 grand.
The contract was supposed to be today as well.
Category Archives: words
Ba’s Birthday Note
Dear Baba,
Today we celebrate not one birthday, but three: one for the loving father who has provided and cared for us through physical toil and emotional strength. The other is for the husband, who’s kindness and patience has laid the most solid of foundations for a long time future of love and security. And more importantly, we celebrate the birthday of the man, always quick with laughter and wit, the very soul of this house.
random beauty from chaos
and I will believe in children again.
And I can never be a child again but I will be something other for my own.
I will try to grow past the misery
and reach between the hiccup of her giggle and smile and find some comfort
beyond the 2 second fascination with her toothlessness
I will believe that I have a future without fear eventhough I cannot imagine it.
I will not imagine it in order to save myself from it.
And I will touch again my wife and feel again what it was like to be twenty with her and silly as I am silly again now with our child.
I will learn to forget shame and inhibition.
I will no longer crouch and I will no longer let myself linger in the madness of the night and the easy lazy sway of despair.
I will walk, I will straighten my back, I will run, I will make my heart beat mad from within to remind me of where it was when I was first born.
I will no longer try to settle debts with old demons but rather let them run amok. They do not have any hold over me for they are the engines to all this, the fears have driven me to make something more of my life than what it was.
It was the demons that brought my love to me, that brought me child to me. Random beauty from chaos.
I will believe.
Ioanna’s First Foray
N Nxm/zhkumdwam, dd KJI87HU6Y9JK,M.
suddenly dark I am hearing this
this come suddenly am I mourning in the dark
to hear you, here, over and over, you here you
suddenly dark I am hearing this, this over here
over hearing one breath too many, too winded
wind along windows, over and over, pushing the frames
and I have to stop, I can no longer be this, over and over
do you hear me, no longer this here in the dark
suddenly one breath too many
I’ve forgotten something and I don’t know quite what it is, I know it’s missing been missing for some time and although I cannot trace the beginnings of it I am sure it’s been growing for some time this forgetting, this leaving of something, some things, some thing vital, my vitals behind, along the floor, further back into the dark and I cannot see it despite the daughter I have brought in to this world, despite the woman who must love me desperately and patiently I cannot see it for them, to make sense of this, of what I am becoming.
I have always feared the night and the passage of time. I sat huddled against my window sill overlooking the highway on nights just like this, hot still humid the sounds of cars jetting across the on ramp and I listened to Pink Floyd and classic rock that spoke to me and sometime I would even make tapes and I cringe at the things I might have said. And sometimes I cried for the child I had been but somehow I remember that being mostly during the winter, where there was no air and only cold frozen. And the nights then were incredibly longer than they are now and there were such interesting things on TV: I have and will always have a love affair with the television, from Hawaii Five-Oh to Columbo to Kolchack the Night Stalker and the Prisoner. Nowadays there isn’t much late night watching that interests me; I don’t know if it’s me or the times.
this strange lightness
this strange darkness in life…
The truth is there isn’t any more darkness in my life: it is buoyant, light, strong.
I have a wife, I have a child, I have what seems to be career more so than a job. Outside of purchasing a home, it cannot really get better than this. But buying a home brings up a certain fears about job security and financial comfort, i.e. if I lost my job, could we keep the house afloat on Mari’s salary and if so, more than likely so, then for how long? The idea of unemployment, still sore in my memory from 2001, is too scary, too visceral and feels far too likely.
Still however I am afraid of growing up and it’s happening faster: first child has already arrived and then the next and who knows maybe another, and at some point I will have to begin to look older at the very least, my youth has to start to abandon me. All I see right now is a new crop of grays, but still slight. My friend Mike has lost his hair and shaves his head now, as does Pete the Foot and even Watersport Pete show signs of wear around his skull. Still thick head full of hair, no deep lines embedding themselves, no hardening or leathering of the skin. The weight sure but that’s more of a sign of excess than age.
I haven’t been remembering my dreams of late: with a job like this I wrestle myself into and out of sleep, there is little to remember in the exhaustion. And I’ve started hitting the gym again, although with a different purpose in mind. More set on losing pounds than pressing weight. Running now for the last two weeks six days a week, 2 plus miles at a time. I work with free weights three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Fridays while running around the nearby park the other days. The progress I’m making surprises me and encourages me. I’m trying, trying to build the health I’ve taken away through over eating and smoking.
And the writing, save for a few ghost sentences here and there, the segment of an idea, the piece of something not broken exactly, but definitely not a piece of something larger, is entirely gone. I don’t know if it’s a question of discipline but I can’t seem to break through or go on in any sort of prolonged manner. There’s a spark or two, but then that’s it, nothing sustaining or maybe sustainable? Not a good idea in any of them. Or like I wrote somewhere else, “I get bored” and lose interest.
But what if the problem is not the idea, or finding a fresh idea, but rather, the impatience in taking the time to build something better than a gimmick?
shudderspeak
imagination dead imagine. Imagine this.
Shudder speak, a bone breaking across the chin. Did you see that,
could you have seen it
any better. Shudder speak,
the moment of greater things.
I once believed this, I believed you. Like this,
a tender breaking.
Shudder speak, the crawl from here to there, orchids across rooftops
could not have said it any better
breaking a silence two fold without walls
Here the shudder speak between the blades and muscle
bone picking
would you have dreamt it differently
had the ocean slung fingers backward of surprise?
forgotten stretch of street sweat
And there he was, dancing in the rain and looking for sewer pipes. He would have been blind if not for the stench of cut glass. Bloody fingertips along curbs, a kind of snaking along. Half serious, half alone, a slight tremble where her spine could have been. Lots of this there, he said, lots of this, he points, …there.
Stumbling to gaslight, bent on the knobs on his knees, he wretches. Gags on bits of hair and worry. Lots of this, he says again and holds his place where she could have been. He yanks and shudders, twists up into a crawl, standing. The blue shingles of an awning long forgotten and stretch of street sweat.
unmarked, unmarred, unblemished
how many keystrokes to nirvana, how many keystrokes to break through this wall of despair and silence.
The emergent sound of my daughter’s laughter, the half start, pre-giggle of an incomplete chuckle. It is like fresh apples, it’s like sun after a chilly night. It is her standing on the oh so tiny musculature of her legs, pigeon toed, steadying her by her forearms and her looking at you, toothless smile, all clean, all pure joy, unmarked, unmarred, unblemished, and the opening choke sound, the rise of laughter and just trying it on for size because it’s beginning to feel like the right thing to do, a thing that she can now begin to do so and here’s the occasion to try it out.
drifting
we had been waiting a few and really didn’t know what to expect. Jennifer was running her fingers through her hair, racing them around the edge of her glass, fidgeting with the loops in her earrings. This was going to be her first despite the fact she told us otherwise. We all knew she was lying but we would rather she was with us when she broke into this business.
Okay, and what business is that? What utter crap.
He has been sleeping, walking, jogging, farting, living, smiling and he then fell, kissed, slapped, promulgated, signed the waiver, which more or less, rather, supposedly, definitely, hesitantly sealed the fate, lives, plastic, hemorrhoids of his car, fiancé, boyfriend, couch, curb.
Ok, what the fuck was that?
You have to live to write but you cannot write while living. Always the furthest away from a pen or writing instrument of any sort and the voice or voices, sometimes a gaggle come and drift and whisper things that are prophetic and beautiful and meaningful and something you’d want to write down to leave behind but no in the stillness of this night of this rampant boredom and mad desire to go home, so unsupervised, I can’t get a bloody decent word out.