completely out of control to be torn to shreds to be everyone and everything to everyone and ultimately be nothing escape into smashed pieces where i can say anything about this i want anything but this one moment breaking lit alight kicked up and flung her smile her laughter her hands her tears her last words a cackle of ghosts everywhere wound pulled open at the edges never to heal what he said what he did promises never kept promises he should never keep over and over lightening like the madness of asking too much and the horror of giving too little and he knows this he knows this of course he fucking knows.
two pennies more
two pennies more and i’m out the door
neither rich, nor poor, not a penny more
i’ve had my fill of it, i’m sick of this shit
a sweet little ditty about a life that aint pretty
sweet lord jeezus christ
let you be my last vice
only children of the world
why are we all desperate for the approval of others? why is that? why are we still hungry for the attention of our fathers and resent our mothers?
how is it we are perfect chameleons and charmers and yet have trouble peering into our own souls? why we are driven by distraction and completely lack any discipline?
how is it we can love so quickly and completely and then turn away as if nothing happened at all?
(to this day i close my eyes and i see his last breath. i open my eyes and he’s tossing my mother across the room. i blink and he was gone, just like that. i run, and i see myself being terrified, bringing him coffee when i was four. i run out of breath, and he touches me gently, telling me he loves me, he will always be my father. i close my eyes, and my mother tends to her broken face in the mirror. i open my eyes, and i’m telling his brother they can have his body and do whatever they want with it after he is gone, until then he was under my care. i blink, and they are asking if they should re-inflate his right lung. i go to sleep, and i consent to take him off the machines. i am haunted, i watch him die again and again and he never sees what i turned out to be)
and the little one
just like that, sneaks up on me, dead slumber in the basement for the night ahead and it’s not so much i hear her but i can feel her inches from my tired eyes, the stuccato pace of her breath before she giggles.
and just when i want to jump up and scare the bejeezus out of her, she leans forward and kisses me, softly, softly. she asks, as i crack open an eye, “daddy, daddy can i stay with you, here?”
forever and ever, forever and ever.
and i woke up
when i woke up with her twat in my mouth i tasted all this copper like it had been bleeding,
“is your pussy bleeding?”
she laughed and ran snakes in my hair,
“silly, silly, boy. i bet you say that to all the girls…”
mechanical play
“goddamn this noise inside my head” -NIN, “the becoming”
wires and flesh, machine beast
mechanical heart strings, like strumming a guitar
finding the chord that opens the world, all hope
cold eye stare, hot steel, unfeeling pump, unthinking logic
depraved and loving, the circuitry of incalculable desire
the weakness of being, there’s nothing in being this way
absolutely nothing to the core, tin shell rust yearning, pining
to be cracked opened, to find a way to bleed
(and you want to crack her open to get to all the soft parts, to poke and prod, inside and out, find where it still hurts, to see what you can and cannot fix, to swap out this feeling for that, set this bone in its proper place and shatter expectations, to repair her and take what you need for yourself, swap spit, swap wounds, swap muscle for springs, gears for teeth, vampire mechanic asking for nothing, taking everything and giving it all in return, the blunt joy, the exquisite trauma, the mad laughter of sorrow, the beauty of the lie, something like love but more like mindless fucking, desperate repair, something at angles with everything you both know)
and for this moment, i will give in
i will give in for this one moment, i will give in to the pain and the sorrow and the cutting blinding light of this life, for this one moment i will allow myself to live outside of it all, i will walk outside of it and drench myself in this madness for once, i will breathe deep and hold it for as long as i can, i will give in because the pain deserves to be married to the joy for just this once, just for this one time only
there is no managing it
there is always damage control, only ways of exerting one disaster from happening over another. there are times i look at all this, all these people doing something, talking, dancing, casually passing one another, and i feel such disconnect, such amusement, i wonder, ‘where the fuck are you people coming from?’
where the fuck did you come from?
just that moment too soon, too late, when it’s unavoidable, burst of metal, exploding glass, tossed ten, twenty feet this way, completely out of your way, i was taken completely out of my way. as if you were the impending disaster to avoid, this car wreck made of glimmering shattered bits and sheared metal. of split lips and beaten bruised spines. of oil and gasoline and a smattering of blood. the elegant mosaic before pain sets in.
as if you were the victim and the driver, the passenger and the car.
you can be absolutely mad
and utterly someone else on the liquor.
it’ll make you lost when you already know where you are. it’ll make you say the things that you’ve never wanted to let loose from under your breath. it brings about the old pains and the throbbing and the desire. it makes you want to run into sprinklers in the middle of the night and run red lights until a bleary eyed morning. it can push you to a limit you never knew was there and suddenly find yourself at peace in the void. the liquor is like that. the liquor never lets you forget even when you do the next day.
it’s always only a bottle away.
and there the city
at large, this looming thing with its age and weight and a populace that goes off in all directions. it’s been years driving through the city at night. a slalom course of broken streets, desperate cabbies and workmen just beginning their night. people meandering, lazy drunk walks. every other block is being repaired, under construction. over constructed, the city steals the night, it grows over its people. i feel the urge to dodge and cut across town and say, ‘look here, this was where i was born’ or ‘look, that’s where i saw my first new york apartment: bathtub doubled as kitchen sink, communal bathroom but bring your own toilet paper please’, or say ‘look, this is where i fell in love with the night, this is where i learned to dance alone and not give a fuck about it’ . to see my home as it was, as it never was, as it will always be.
wild joy to be in the heart of this mad beast once again.