i can do this, i ‘ve done this a million times, in a million different lives. night air crisp, walking through the canyon streets, she asks, have you killed yourself before? and i lie, i lie holding her hand, i lie as i put a wrinkled dollar into the hat of the jazzman playing on the corner. i lie as we turn corners and watch beggars sift through the city’s garbage, so clean of life, of anything edible. i lie down in the morning and feel the sun etch angry fingers across my face. our daughter leaps into bed while my son cries from another room, cradle stranded. she asks, fingering open my red red eyes, are you alive daddy? reaching for the curve of my wife’s hip, i now am. i am now.
Category Archives: words
mundanity
chicksaw and rapture, a divine tuning of the senses, of taste, of hearing, of touch: all the things you cannot see, that she cannot see, that he cannot imagine. a wind howls through me, leaves my mouth gaping open until the lips stretch over the teeth and the tongue dries. unbelievable, like christ traveling across the world while his body rots in a cave. men dig my neighbor’s yard, they pull thick yellow cables under and through the ground raising the amperage, more pulses for the dead heart of this town. sitting beside me she says while fingering the splinters of the bench on our porch, did you ever expect this, did you ever dream? choking i reply, i stopped dreaming the minute he died.
dream home
he falls into sleep with his children in his arms and his wife by his side. he awakes, startled but rested. in the dark she whispers, you are home, you’ve always been welcomed home.
grave robber
as she fingers the roots shot through her ribs, she wonders if it was a question of need or circumstance, the dying of petals, the swallowing of over-ripened seeds. and from her belly sprung out mischievous cattle that ate upwards the soot and mulch breaking a surface into the sun. beside her grave, he runs his hand over winter hardened grass and pricks his fingers with the memory.
love twine
deny it all you want: desire lingers like a stain. years go by and there’s no erasing it, a scar on the skin that only fades but turns a brilliant white in the sun. i tried to turn away from you out of fear, out of an imagined loneliness only to find myself in you. shattered meat, a ghost of a man, held together by your belief, your religious tenacity to never let us go.
i can’t speak it
i can’t speak it, a shudder in the chest, fingers climbing out from the throat. a gasping, scratching. the things that should not be said, the things i never say, the torture of this skin, the haunting i feel in the night. a longing for entropy, for oblivion.
even this boy, he tells me in the dark, even this is a choice.
remorse
it’s a mixed bag, cement dust to be watered and withered petals to be crushed. i can feel her change, i can feel it fall apart, like a sigh down my back. clouds over a window sill. shadows breaking for sun, my throat cracks into nonsense. i am lost, so utterly lost in despair. fit to be hung, i broke the one thing that mattered to me most, the one thing that kept me from disappearing.
city bone skin
hand me downs, rusty spoon, frayed blanket, a pair of jeans worn thin. i walk around and through sidewalks cracked upward, uneven streets tarred over countless times. patchwork. in the distance, the city beckons, nostalgia. never lonely only alone in a city of millions. and a comfort in that, a dire comfort for restless bones and weathered skin.
choice thing
a sense of normalcy, a return, nothing i ever was, some new thing that is quite old. i am not who i was years ago, i am not the sulking thing who awoke from nightmares to catch his breath. some new terrible thing that is no longer resigned. some new terrible thing that knows that all kindness is a choice, that all hate is a choice. the favorite things, the loved things, breathing. constant, over and again. a power there, the only true one, once forgotten. some new monstrous thing, not quite as powerless as i thought i once was.
out and about
Life’s a bitch, but God forbid if the bitch divorce me -Nas, Affirmative Action
and so here we go out the door and onto the avenues, the boulevards, the mad yawning streets. here we go again with much trespass, armed and willing, kicking open the mouths of strangers full of remorse and stealing their tongues. it could always be better than this, we could make it better than this and we laugh hysterically because we’ve run out of liquor and our knuckles bruised from punching the bricks. and he says to me, wiping the spit with his sleeve, he says, i wouldn’t give this up for anything.