the knife in your hand, a set of teeth pressed deeply into someone’s shoulder. the hand around your neck, the nails along their spine. the cruel word heard in a moment of passion, the spit in your face before you leave. the pinch in your lungs as you run, the pinch of the needle as it breaks the skin. the despair of abandonment, the ache of mourning. the cradle, the bed, the grave. ultimately you cannot escape: inflicting and being inflicted upon, by your hand or someone else’s.
live and rejoice: at least you fucking feel everything.
freeze out
if you freeze me out, i’m frozen. if you push me out, that’s means i’m out. i’ve never chased, only spoken. if you slap my hand away, i won’t try to touch you again. if you block me, i’ll walk away. i do not know how to beg, i’ve begged too far often and i was never heard. i can only remain here, staring at your back waiting for it to turn.
the man with the boils
we’re so used to hearing him, the man in the parking lot, the one with the boils on his feet and the lice in his hair. we’re so used to seeing him as he trudges by us, rusty shopping car rife with cans and plastic shopping bags, grunting as he goes along on three good wheels. we’re so used to spitting on him as it suited us when he asks for spare change. what we weren’t used to was setting him on fire, fifth story item on the evening news, between the president elect and this year’s hottest selling toys.
the place where i am not
Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas -Baudelaire, “Les Fleurs du Mal”
(it seems to me that i am always happiest in the place where i am not)
the place where i am not, the place where i am out of my skin, out of my mind, the place where i stand indivisible and without a sound, where i have forgotten every step of this life, every crack of every sidewalk i’ve tread upon, every playground i’ve broken a bone, every school whose windows i’ve broken, every pool i’ve almost drowned in, every store i’ve stolen from, every subway car i’ve pissed in, every liquor slicked barroom floor i’ve slipped on, every concert stage that i’ve thrown up on, every house i’ve snuck into, every bedroom i’ve past out in, every car i’ve gotten into too drunk to drive, none of it, all of it, some where i used to belong to, any place where none of it has ever left me.
stray and gray
stray and gray hairs on the keyboard tell me i’m past the halfway mark.
morning after pill
the morning after pill, where we bitterly swallow the dreams from the night before and cough up cobwebs of strained relief
in the middle of the early morning hours
in the middle of the early morning hours because i could not sleep i whispered to her, i think i would be better off far and away in the woods, far and away from anyone i ever knew.
antiparos
i can see through the gray of seagulls, the kelp and firmament, crash of the tide on rocks erupting along the shore. i dreamt of my hands cooled digging into hot sand. i saw crystal blue and sparkle throughout the horizon and nimble bodies much younger than mine lazy and about on stitched cotton, baked by the sun. the sounds of the city were part of some other foreign land, years ahead or behind me, it no longer mattered. i closed my eyes and finally slept it all away.
snowflake novel writing
i tell her of an article i read, about writing a novel. it’s a step by step guide that centers around the idea of a snowflake, starting from a simple shape and developing the corners exponentially until from a triangle you get the snowflake. and i explain to her that there’s so much prep work, it’s organic in of itself, but i wonder if i really do have it in me to do so, to commit to such a task. and she responds with an idea, i test her by pointing out it has to be in 15 words or less. but what she comes up with isn’t half bad. what a story, she says, about you and your mom, starting from her childhood, your father up to the point when he left you guys, then imagine the rest. and i had something like that years ago, a convoluted thing bereft with repetition and imagination but died soon after. it is appealing, although, where to begin? always the first question.
purple and black
there is a purple wall he stares at sitting in a purple chair in a purple room of a purple house. the street is purple, the cars are purple, the trees are purple. only the sun is as black as his heart. he stares at the purple wall and grips the arms of the chair with a fierce determination lest he fall out of it. he has been falling for quite some time, there are deep scratches on the floor where the pulp beneath the finish feels naked. it sounds very much the way hands do rubbing along the brick wall of a building that has had hands much older build it from scratch. he gets up from the chair and walks up to the wall that takes as forever to reach the way wrinkles take a great amount of time to leave their impression. he leans on it and it, in turn, shudders. the whole house shudders, the street shudders, the trees shudder down purple leaves that curl into crackling things when they touch each other. the sun cracks, a mirror without shade, white light bleeds through but everything remains purple except for fragments bled with static from a radio in the bedroom above him. a conversation over a very short amount of time, beginning-middle-end, end-beginning-middle, end-end-end, a loop without a station. through the window he hears her, he lets go of the wall. the wall falls, the chair falls, the floor above him falls, the building falls. everything into broken pipes and split frames around his feet, standing in the middle of a purple square of rubble where the streets have turned suddenly black into this sound.