Always that slight musty smell that he could never get rid of and the creak of the stairs that annoyed her to no end. “At least,” he had told her, back when he was oblivious to the disintergration of their marriage and she was in the full swing of it, “you’ll hear me coming.” And he smiled and for the first time she hadn’t, but as all things that were too close to discern them for what they truly were, he didn’t see it. At the bottom of the stairs, he saw nothing, heard only the rain pound the basement windows.
Where were the children?
Category Archives: words
Who on whom
Sometimes you could not tell who was burning whom, whose burns were deeper or more profound. I found myself confused at times: was I picking my own scabs or hers? And still the sizzle, still the butts strewn underneath her window. Inedibles for dirty pigeons and wayward ants far from home.
Tricks
Tricks of the trade, tricks of the slave. We own you. Cherish you. Lavish you. We fill you up. We fill you out. To the brim. We are the rim of your consciousness. We butter you up and make you slick for the world. They won’t get a handle on you. Let them try. They’ll never figure you out.
Waking up
Waking up with a tune in my head I don’t want to hear anymore, dry cough and the shiver of a dying winter bullying its way through the house. This house, our house, will we keep it in the end? Plans to ditch the 401k for now, give yourself that raise only because we have to dig ourselves out of this somehow. After all, we weren’t planning on retiring in our forties now were we?
One last
One more for the road, for old time’s sake, one more to close out the day. Something that woody allen said about philip glass: you can tell him you don’t like it and he says ok and will just throw it away. And you like that don’t you, the idea of prolificness, the idea that you have this ability to riff off of anything, that you can spin any mad set of words out of nothing and keep doing it for days.
Well obviously this will be a test of that.
Each time
Each time you come out here, he said, you are literally sucking your life away.
Yes, yes, I said, I am and all that. Look, I continued, does it matter? The quality of life is getting better everyday. Even if I have less life to live, the life I’m living gets better every moment.
But, he interjected, if that’s the case wouldn’t you want to live longer since the longer you live there’ll be more to enjoy?
No, I replied, at some point it’s just nurses and dribble on your chin. Who needs a healthy pair of lungs for that?
Cigarette burns
With cigarette burns up and down her sleeves I watch her tell me she cannot wash them away. As hard as she tries she cannot despite the scalding water and the countless bars of soup. I run myself ragged to hide them, but they keep coming back, I’d unfurl my skin to keep her pristine for once.
All these
All these things become merciless, a beating to a wake, her hand on the wheel, a fire hydrant exhausted before a blaze. I hold myself together with stems and twigs and patches of bark chewed over. A spindle of wire for twine taut over and under and over again between tooth and gum and ankle and wrist. I would prefer origami if my body wasn’t so coarse.
test
we are testing,
testing the valves, the values, are you sure enough, have you paid the fare,
should you be here?
ground etch
I wear this tattoo for all the right reasons, that there is ground inwhich I cling to, there is something I stand on, there is a light at the end of this tunnel.