he wore a robe of limbs and fingers, with a crown of intestines and femurs for sandals. he danced to the beat of a heart strapped on top of his chest that had long since stopped being his own.
i look at you and it all floods me, washes me anew, shoves me out of place. what a terrible, terrible thing your eyes could be.
after anarchy
after the fall, after the break down, after the deconstruction, after we go about the business of taking everything apart that’s been handed down to us and found offensive, which is everything, what do we do? what is there left?
we cannot, after all, live only in rubble. we would be covered in soot. we wouldn’t be able to breathe because of all the dust. we would cut our feet. our palms would bleed. our children would starve. our old would be forgotten, history lost. we eventually would need to build. and in building anything, some fundamental principles would need to be applied or no structure will hold, nothing will withstand our weight. there will be no comfort or shelter.
in other words, in order to be safe, we would have to come up with some sort of code to live by. the question then becomes, how much of it will be borrowed from the generations before? how much of it will be driven by biology? how much of it will be made straight out of thin air?
then, of course, we return to the beginning, after all that, after all this, how do we withhold what we’ve made, how do we maintain in the world we sought to destroy and make anew? how do we avoid all the traps and idiot nonsense that comprises both the margin and the center? how do we go about living as our own and only?
this after thinking about LaChappelle’s Rize, the reality show about tattoo artists in “L.A. Ink”, and my ambivalence to my own culture
your anger
your anger is so lucid
broken a kind of stupid
i was talking to my friend the other day and he said, there’s something wrong with the way you use the word broken, the way you refer to yourself, over and over, as being such and such, broken this and that.
and it unnerved me a little bit because i did not know quite where he was going with this and he continued, you see, broken implies that you are not whole, that there are pieces that will always be missing, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way you are right now.
i could see his point, i could see if you stretched the horizon of it even further, broken implied a certain sense of stupidity, a certain kind of culpability.
damaged on the other hand, he laughed, damaged would be right on.
she twists
she twists against the rope that he wraps around her.
he tells her he loves her and loops it over her neck.
she tries to tell him she loves him as he sets the rope on fire.
her hair aflame she spits, “when are we going to wake up?”
and i watch this with a certain kind of tension,
as if i was the rope and the victim, the sadist and the fire.
fissure
on their bellies, looking out over a cliff. rocks and sand, red and brown like some alien planet.
“i think… there,” the grizzled man said and pointed out into the distance. “can almost see it.”
the younger man squinted his eyes, strained in the sun. “what? what’s there?”
“where the fissure begins,” the older man snorted. “there’s always a fissure.”
“i think i can see it, behind the rocks, the sand barely covers it,” the younger man took a deep breath, “almost looks like a trap.”
“the fundamental divide always is son.” the grizzled man rolled onto his back, fished out a cigarette from his shirt pocket. “it always fucking is.”
she does have tumors in her head
and it takes him a while to say it, he’s been pacing around the office floor, getting up without speaking, ghosts his way out of the maze of cubilces and into a conference room. there in the dark he hears the results of the mri, things have been pretty bad so far, the inner lining of her lung had detached, and when they thought things were getting better, she hemorraged in her brain and now there’s numbness down one side. he says these things with a detached curiousity, as if he himself is also hearing it for the first time, but he’s heard this all before.
at my reaction he says, it’s funny how your facial expressions are much more animated than my own.
fifty more
“ultimately”, he said, lighting another cigarette, the last still smoldering inches from them both, “there is no shelter. you cannot escape you.”
he leaned back and dragged deeply and slowly exhaled. i itched for a cigarette for the first time in years. he stared at me as if he knew, “buck up son, you got fifty more years of this to deal with.”
begin-again
“try again. fail again. try harder. fail harder.” -Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
begin-again the breathing again, in the dark again, alone-dark again, silent-dark again, like a cracked coffin, like fall before the cold sets in. like pushing against empty space, running through velvet and cloth, like the way air must feel when trapped inside a drowning lung, slick and with no way out.
begin-again the dream again, the living again, the sweat-skin again, the sweet-skin, like salted molasses, like summer at its pitch. like a lazy patch of grass, like two bodies under the cover of a tree, like two entwined in the shade as one, like hands opening and closing but pushing away.
begin-again and again, again without stopping, without breathing, run through it, survive this as well, survive it all, run it all into the ground again, have nothing again, alone again, forever again, never again, own and only again, as always again.
comfort fall
she tosses and turns. little limbs splay to the left, then the right. she rubs her eyes, stares at the ceiling. she wakes up asking for mommy.
mommy’s at work, i say. she asks again. it goes like that sometimes, as if she’s still dreaming and she doesn’t know she’s awake already.
mommy’s at work, i say, want to go downstairs? and she nods and wobbles up and climbs into my arms and just hangs there, goes limp. i would think she fell asleep again if not for her giggling as i bound down the steps, always with the horrific thought that because i can’t see the stairs because i am holding her in my arms, i will miss a step and we will tumble and i will snap my neck or hers most definitely, so i wobble down kind of quickly, kind of slow and she laughs because she thinks it’s a game when it’s this horror show in my head but we get to the bottom without incident like we always did.
and after the whole bathroom routine, i convince her that she wants eggs and hash browns for breakfast and even a little bit of juice too and she does just that without complaint, like we’ve been doing this every day all along when in actually it’s literally been months since i cooked for her, months since we sat up together in the morning at the same time.
and sitting with her here now, eating, helping her eat, her mad hair from sleep clipped back and away from her face, watching bugs bunny, i have my daughter back after such a long drawn out summer, and we fall into the routine, we fall back into comfort.