he walks into a room he looks at her she weeps
he moves forward he says her name she moves backwards
he breathes
he touches her face she looks at his hands he closes his eyes
he moves a stray hair she weeps he draws his hand back
he breathes
he pulls away she opens her eyes she says his name
he weeps shes draws her hand back he opens his eyes
he breathes
ach, crap. let’s try this instead
he breathes her into a room where she is weeping and finds her beautiful. he moves a stray hair from her cheek and she touches his hand. she says, don’t. he moves across the room where she is breathing him weeping into hands that are calloused from rubbing sandpaper into walls. she says, don’t, again and he opens his eyes. she is still beautiful breathing and he pulls away into the corner where the lamp sits on a dresser. he says her name and she moves forward around the corner of the bed by him. he breathes her touching his cheek but he is no longer beautiful. she takes his hand and pulls him to where the sheets meet the bed.
what is it with this stupid mystique of writers and writing? every writer i have met has been maladjusted in some way. a bag full of quirks, an idiosyncrasy that slaps you in the face five minutes after meeting them. a history of broken relationships. tenuous relationships with family. addiction.
i had a friend who wrote dialog that was funny without being sugary. dialog that crackled and was sharp. could never end a conversation with him, it would go on literally for hours moving from one topic to the next. then suddenly he would just turn around and walk away. no goodbye, no see ya later. just like that. when i brought it up, suggesting perhaps he had lost a pet at a young age, he claims he didn’t realize he even did it. he just figured there was a lull and he didn’t want to waste my time.
i had another friend, brilliant poet, excellent teacher, was told that he had a choice of either to stop drinking coffee or to stop drinking bourbon or else he would lose his eye. he gave up coffee because giving up bourbon would most likely result in him being arrested for assault. he also pointed out that when he taught in prison he often wondered if he had any business leaving it at the end of the day.
and we seem generally to be curmudgeons, in tune with some other part of the psyche that makes us keen observers but also disgusted by what we see. we don’t turn away though, we wallow in it, we roll around in it. as if we never had a choice, as if the possibility of having any other choice would be obscene. we were made or are we born?
the day ends with a soft chill that traces its way up my leg and stops short. in the middle of the night i heard a thump and i snapped out of bed grabbing a leftover tool with a metal edge whose name i didn’t know. i prowl around peering into mirrors, waiting to confront some one, any one, to put these goosebumps across my skin at ease. i work through hallways the way a mouse burrows within the veins of a corpse. hungry and sterile, blurry eyed and angry. hundreds of times i’ve done this and it never wears out the tread. alone with a blunt piece of metal in the dark, waiting for an excuse.
within a house, silence demands rupture,
a surface tension always at a point
of no return but never leaving. the roof
holds the exterior together, just as the edges
of your lips keep your tongue and your teeth
from flying out. and the weight of each
floor presses the center into the ground
the way your foot does in the mud
as you stumble away. every night
pulls itself inward, a slow and steady intake
of breath before bursting into exhaustion. i run
my hands over dead leaves and listen
for the promises that a set of nails makes
before being driven into concrete. if only
the grass were as warm.
i dreamt of spiders coming out of my hair with lilacs and orchids and they each sang a song i once remembered and i tried so hard to separate the orchids from the rest as they rained down my face carrying with them the words i couldn’t put my finger on and a part of me wanted to cover my ears to keep the song out of my head but i didn’t want the spiders to leave they were so graceful and soft but they had much better places to go and sing their song and the lilacs kept sticking to my hands
alone, bottlefeeding him for the first time
my son gets into a staring contest with me
raising his eyebrows, then furrowing them
until a tremendous sound
fills the bottom of his diaper
& he embarrassingly buries his head
while choosing tombstones my friend asks
“are there going to be any maintenance fees for the plot?”
to which the salesman brightly replies with a smile
“only for cable.”