it is difficult to revell in tour humanity when you are frail and weak and fractured. it is difficult to breathe, to not punish yourself for every transgression. these days she sees my humility as a betrayal of who I once was. I tell her, to be otherwise would be a further betrayal to her.
Category Archives: words
the most deserving
this whiplash of living leaves scars on the membrane. I dance, I bleed, my limbs fling outward smashing every face I see but my own: the most deserving.
bare thread
you want to tell her you love her but you’ve broken that promise before.
you want to ask her forgiveness but she’s forgiven you countless times.
you are spent of yourself, you pile of clothes worn thin. you grime, you stain.
and the night mocks you. and the night mocks you.
graveyard shift
and here we are, here it is. its furry, it has teeth. you can pet it, feed it. but you can’t name it. it has a name all its own. picked itself. pulled it right out of the graveyard. made a mess of us all. and there i was and there you were, all grimy, all spent. grit between our fingernails, a bit of sand in the hair. and it licked our toes and we laughed ourselves up from the tombstones. and there we were, leaving into dawn, making a mockery of it all and it was just fine.
breaking you
I said I broke this
she said you’ve broken it
I said why did I break this
you said I’ve broken everything
I asked can we fix this
you said you’ve broken me beyond repair
I always wrote with a scattershot attention and a pulse that quickened between the muscles of the throat as if i believed it was the very last time I would ever see you again
mother, father, cubs
i would watch my parents unfurl like blossoms but he stained the ground he walked on with thick black ink where we would leave footprints across tiles she broke her back over. and when he shouted it was like a mangy old tiger whose teeth were sore but still sharp and my little brother would pick at his fur and my father would settle around us. fearsome, grueling, but ever always cooed by the fragility of my mother’s delicate hand.
poker life
the buzz of cards and everyone becomes eights and aces and flush draws. i hug my daughter and all i think is you’re a pair of jacks. i pick up my son and rub my face into his belly and his laughter reminds me of a flush. i sit across from my wife with our daughter laying across her and our son razzing on my lap and all i can hope for is a full house.
tid bits
when an israel day care center decided to tack on a fee for parents who were late in picking up their children, the number of these late parents increased rather than decreased. it turns out that once you made it a financial transaction, the social/moral stigma of being late for your child was removed.
in another study, where a six pack of coke and a plate of dollar bills was left out in the open unattended on each floor of a college dormitory by the end of the day the six packs were consistently taken but the dollar bills were left untouched. it turns out the more disassociated the crime was from monetary theft, the more likely it would occur.
interesting audio
freakonomics
predictability irrational
the black swan – taleb
the age of turbulence
pogo
everyday like this, the madness of it, outside breathing yearning that one thing more, always the one thing more, never forget it, the choice, the choices before, everyday and another, again and again, to live, to choose to live, to love, to dream, to be, whomever you are, where you are, not just another stain, not just a mulching machine rift and saddled with mistakes and regrets, a being machine, a making machine, soft and hard parts, bone and skin and desire and grief.
i have always been badly tuned to the pain and joy within me, such highs and lows that the whipping had me bouncing off the walls to a dance only inside my head.