on the way back from a day long series of pit stops and family visits, our daughter from the back seat sighed and declared, “it’s to hard to be a person.”
Category Archives: words
easter adrift
the malaise sets in over faith and in consequence. how to break her? anger at a pitch over nothing at all. but there is something more with this, our lack of moral compass. do we need a practice to point us in the right direction? i think so, i’ve forgotten what faith feels like. first christmas, now easter. round and round it goes, adrift.
porcelain promise
thin ice, a hangman’s tale. she wove tales out of happenstance and skewed memory, where we were all victors and she the spoil. marred like broken bark, the fleshiness underneath. a finger without a nail, no gloss, nothing to for the nerves. i once told myself, drunken and worn in front of a mirror, you will die like this, you will die broken. look at me when i am talking to you, and i slump over the sink, knees slammed hard into tile for cool comfort.
itch
leave it at that, the grinding of teeth. cajoled and threatened, lice along the skin. an oily thickness, evermore, never said. leave it. alone and beckoning, shrill ring in the night. a certain kind of madness, parched lips. she once told me. he once promised. rewrite, remake, return. he once told me. she kept all her promises. i beat myself into street lamps and not one wish for incredible violence comes true. empty penance. leave it at that.
leave it at that
in the trenches, the knuckle-shift, the weight-bearing, the having-it-all: I came out of all of it unscathed, disgusting, a blather of a person. revealed as I always was, sham, shame. strive for redemption, the empty belly, the pining for hunger, crouched over. wait for it, the sudden pummel, the avalanche karma, the break down, the breakthrough, the leaving of all this pain behind. never arrive, only waiting. leave it at that.
cruel mistress
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.
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.