the night the most cruelest mistress: she hides everything in the dark, gives you only the most fleeting of tastes, whispers into your ear, makes promises you barely remember when the dawn comes. i have chased her, i have lost her, i have had her spit me out wasted and exhausted on to curbs.
Category Archives: words
surreality
here now, all real, all surreal, happening as if never before. daylight like twilight. afternoon into a haze. you’ve never slept like this before. everything rearranged, realigned, a sub group, sub par. will it leave scars. out of dreaming, a dreamt life. suddenly and viciously, like never before. gaussian blur, the fleeting glimpse. you were never here, you never arrived, you never left. buckle down and wait for it.
humility
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.
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.