i sleep without dreaming, a restless pitch into darkness, into the void. i see nothing. i feel nothing. i am nothing. nameless and faceless. disembodied, all my bruises gone, all my scars a figment of someone’s imagination. there is no past, no future, no hope, no despair, no sadness, no fracture, no comfort, no rage, no desire, no strain, no peace. perfect and effortless, swallowed within my very own absence.
Category Archives: words
wordless clarity
the winter, although not fully here, has been slow moving. it’s been relatively warm, cold at times, but nothing bone chilling, nothing cracking the thermostat like years past. christmas is fast approaching, having snuck up on us like some sort of feline predator and we have yet to scurry out of its inevitable grasp. i awake some mornings with a clarity that i know is fleeting, where i am wordless and without that nervy restlessness that compels me to write. i can sit and have my coffee, smoke a cigarette and simply enjoy watching others make their way through the beginning of another day.
letting go
as we leave class, the little one says, i want to sit on your shoulders. so i hoist her up.
we cross the street & she says, i want to run. so i put her down & she runs, laughing.
she runs away from me, little legs dancing, she runs past our car. i say, where are you going?
she doesn’t even look back. she just laughs & laughs. i ask again, where are you going?
unadulterated glee, she runs even further away without stopping.
is that all there is?
i ramshackle myself the idea with pine cones that fit into my mouth whole and unmolested. i hold you close and yearn the fear even further away than seagulls diving through tufts of my hair for a promise. spigots and pipes make up rhymes that burrow and weave through veins bitter and leave me stiffened. nails polished cracked and weary find the seam of my smile folded and doubled but absolutely lacking. i walk through city streets and landscapes of grass and knolls and shores that stretch endlessly with bones washed clean. into the darkness of hills without stars or a moon to guide us by i tapped a twisted stick before me as my cousin and i cackled our hysteria listening for an echo that never returned. i stifle it all into the ply of cardboard pieces wet with vomit and you laughed, is that all there is?
city grudge
the city is, of course, brutal and unending, pure and ultimately relentless. circumscribed, the city inevitably consumes itself only to reproduce itself. the faces change, the strides, the fashion, but they are all the same, split apart and recombined, a gestalt of the city, of its desires and nuances, of its fickle and harsh method of living. it is infinite within itself, a fractal pattern that subdivides over and over until my eyes water from the strain of discerning the swirls from the limbs, the gesture from the act, the concrete from the skin, myself from it. i was born here. i made love here. i bled here. but i will not die here, i know this as sure as i know my own name. and the city most likely holds it against me.
split level
he says, it’s a good thing, in the long run, to be as shattered as you are.
and i said, why is that, you must be fucking joking.
he says, because if you tried to reconcile all the pieces you’d only find out that none of them fit, that you in the end do not fit.
and i said, i already know that, i’ve known that for quite some time.
he says, no, thinking and knowing are two different things. there is no way to unknow something, but you can unthink something. you can stuff it away, push down and stop feeling that. you know, the sort of thing you do everyday.
and i said, you’re mocking me.
he says, i’m trying to teach you something here, something about yourself. you’re no longer becoming, you already are.
and i said, i’m not done yet, you’re out of your mind.
he says, you realize, of course, you’re just arguing with yourself here.
and i said, yeah, you’d think i’d be used to it by now. how fucked is that.
standing & completely unabashed
the thing of it was, it had been standing. right there, right in front of everyone, standing and completely unabashed about it. like an erection on a monkey. a completely buck naked monkey with testicles the size of two walnuts put together and a raging hard-on ready for some savage primate action. that’s how it was, that’s how far out there it was with everyone looking at it. and it seemed to get even bigger the more it noticed people noticing it. talk about ego tripping, like a fat man bursting his cheeks into a wet balloon, that sick wet whoosh sound and the balloon filling up. it was filling up like that standing right there and i swear i was on my tippy toes trying to get out of there. it was becoming ridiculous. between these two metaphors of the fat man and a horny monkey, it was literally all i could stand and i had to find a chair to sit down. to sit down and, i have to admit, admire it for what it was and what it was becoming. i’d let it fill the room until someone burst my bubble, but i had plenty of time before that happened. plenty of time at all.
gay marriage
she orders herself a martini, shaken but not stirred. the barman says, that’s very bond of you. she smiles, well i’m not very fond of you at all.
her girlfriend saddles up to mister tall dark & handsome and even though he talks to her, he also makes it a point to flash his wedding ring. she’s not blind but she hasn’t spotted her next target yet either. their gay friend is just miserable, no one showing up even on the edge of his scope, this party was so utterly straight. not one lamb amongst these butchers, he mutters to himself fingering the straw of his pina colada.
they were at a wedding or some sort of fund raiser, she finally drunk enough to forget which was which. her friend had moved on to a balding man of forty three but only because he reminded her of a high school sweetheart whose hair was longer and thicker than hers. instead she cautiously placed her maritini on a nearby table, on someone’s half eaten dinner plate actually, and made a bee line for the ladies room. their gay friend interfered, cutting across her path and scooped her into some nonsense jig that could’ve been the conga but done with bag pipes.
this is the man for you, he whispers, spinning and tilting her hips into the right direction. she thought she saw whom their gay friend meant, but there were dozens of men, collared shirts with loose neckties, untucked and sweaty armpits in her field of vision that he could’ve been anyone but none struck her as worth noting, worth stopping the increasingly desperate urge to find the ladies room. she caught a glimpse of her friend now chatting up the barman, all youthful reminders now having been laid aside.
be right back, she tells her gay friend and resumes the necessary trajectory for urinary expulsion. she makes it and finds girls her age and younger dabbling in eye shadow and lip stick while two come out of a stall pinching their nostrils and blinking their eyes. if only it was that easy, she says to herself, going into the very same stall to piss it all away.
clustered brandishing & lick
i smoke nights like this into clustered movements of kittens mewling for an extra inch. she says, you’re thinking of her, aren’t you? i reply, i think of everyone underneath mounds of dirt and hiding from lamp posts deeply rooted in cracked cement and the passage of time. he says, even this has its limits, even you must realize what you are doing to yourself, and i laugh myself into another bottle whose neck i crack along the curb to climb inside of. my mother brandishes her caring like a sword that has no handle carving us both deeply as she plunges into talking me out of shutting windows from the stifling heat. i drive around streets that have lost all meaning save for their lack of arrival and seductive penchant for departure. my father had sat me on his knee to wipe a lick of hair from my forehead and i wonder whose hand i was ever more afraid of considering how brutal mine has become.
tunneling
panic in the tunnels, we are all waiting for the end, something abrupt, something like a flash of lightening. none of us want cancer, none of us want to drown. make it quick, make it when i’m not looking, make it when i think i’m going to live forever.
stuck underneath tunnels, we dream each other a friend to hang onto, someone to give us comfort when we have no comfort to give. we look around, looking for that face, someone familiar in the crowd and all we get are crowded eyes looking past us.
i’d give anything for a wailing wall, just one sheer moment of rage and pain and sorrow and broken teeth and split lips and skin cracked over knuckles and a single breath of exhaustion flung against a pile of perfectly set stones to take us away.