Thursday, August 25, 2011

Tony and Justin cross space and time beating epic song lyrics out of; Alien Seed Planet Architects, Pre-Zen Monks, Proto “Dark Ages” Knights / Merlin, Sand Wrangling Zoroastrians, Demon Worshipping Persian Dervish, Pre-Human Sub-Antarctic Labor-Bread Jellies, Demi-Gods (all varieties), Hardcore Vegan Saurials, Scheming Illuminati Think Tanks, Swamp People, Toltec Nagual Pairs, Vladislav of Walachia, The Guy Who Designed Irvine, Severian, Ungoliant, Bad Ass Old Testament Prophets, Lemmy, Gogol Bordello, Lincoln, Sony Chiba and Whitman.

CHAPTER 1 - MUMON

“Dude, I need a fucking PEN, and paper. This is neither, this is still wet, what the fuck is this, is this skin?”

“Just remember it.” Gully says and mumbles something about beggars and never being satisfied.

“Remember it.” I accuse. Mumon is missing a nice square patch of the biggest organ off the middle of his back. All that Zen shit, all that one hand clapping bullshit, he fought like a beaner in gradeschool.
“Remember what?” I say, “停止!”

When his students got there they didn’t say their king fu was stronger than ours, they stood and screamed from a distance, the older ones prayed. Others who didn’t care watched, were shocked, held each other, none of them looked away.

Once his skin hit the dirt, that macabre pie dough covering, that tarp of flesh, that unreparable correction to his health, once I dropped it butter-side-down in the ancient dirty earth, once it got “dirty”, well, we just walked away from it.

“This isn’t really happening.” Gully tells me. Does it matter? Can I kill in a dream and not feel the tarnish on my soul, see it in the light moving elsewhere, to a better home. We give him to them in that we leave him. Man, killing for lyrics, there has got to be a better way. And we continued thinking that until all the hardworking types who had jobs back then and could not afford to stand around and cry for the dying and the dead or people watch all day in the market, basically the twenty or thirty men who the entire city was built upon, built by, their sweat and determination; a baker, cooks, farmers, guys who’s occupation could not be guessed by the uniqueness’s of the dirt patterns, variations of clothing, scars, men who’s appearance would make sense were we to have seen them at their good work. Men who seemed almost outrageous as they were now, covered in flour, brine, etc, all armed with tools they were capable with, tools you will never find in a picture book of ancient or modern warfare, all of them here to kill us for what we did to the old man who stood up for them when the gawkers and the flamboyant, the weak and the undeserving would ridicule them, call them menial, call them laymen, stupid, poor, say to others who were as flamboyant and meaningless as themselves how no one should be like them. His army assembled now, it had its way.

Tony and Justin go to the hospital because one of them has microbials (and its not Justin)

“What kind of food poisoning doctor?” I wait for the Doctor to begin then I stand and exclaim “You can’t expect him to take this laying down Doctor!” only I pronounce it Docter. He can hear it. I am reduced to a dialect, a symptom of poverty in that I have found my way to him through Tony’s illness, without a four year degree and incomplete sentences, expectations, guff. I am reduced to the lobby waiting room next by a man who has made some compact with the man in the white coat, to take care of all the real business in the camp, the business of ass kickery. And I listen to him because he tells me to get the fuck out, not because of the man in the white coats instructions. I image the havoc Gully would wreak were I the one with microbials.

At the desk I ask a woman too fat, ugly and miserable not to take me seriously, I ask her what I should do If I felt my friend was being handled inappropriately, sexually. What do I do and could a woman, could a nurse make sure he was supposed to be doing that, that he could tell me to get out, that he could keep touching her like that I mean, we are here for an earache Mrs Artheson, is it?
She leaves like a bomb dropped from a diesel guzzling sky giant of world war two. Gully has been walked out behind me. He won’t change, he takes his clothes in his arm like a football, ass in the wind, everyone afraid of the mood, the obvious anguish of an overweight man with microbials. We have valet parked the beast and the valet cannot start her to give her back. There is pot on the seat and the valet hits it with us. Nice flag he says. Yeah.

(I was going to add a picture of an ugly nurse. All that came up was porn, so here is a picture of a dead (silent o)possum.)

Tony and Justin join AA to explore personal irony (Tony does not say much in this one)

We twelve-step at the Y on Tuesday evenings. Were giving back, we just dive in and heal. Gully (tony) is ecstatic with the perennial reincarnation of his helplessness, its metamorphosis, daily, into his faux what-ever-the-fuck. I want to make a joke about how fast we are stepping, how fast we are to admit we have a problem and with all honesty, moving forward to seek that god damned help and agree that yes, we are powerless, and yes, we need something, mainly them. It was my idea really, but it was too abstract for any of us, you know, not being serious about it and all.

He smokes at the meetings but something about it, something about the way he smokes, well its looked at like he is drinking right there in the meeting, like enjoying it as much as he does is bad. I mime smoking. Raise my hand, drag, exhale slow, lips pursed for the noise of it, how it sounded when it was real. I tick at the butt compulsively with a thumb nail shooting scales of ash off, it’s what I liked best about smoking when I really did. It’s not overdone, I play it calm, I do not exaggerate. My smoker movements are conservative, they trace an economy of effort inside a groove in the body of my mind, it’s remembered now though it is just a ghost of the meaning it once was.

Tony does not say hello. “My name is Tony and I am still an alcoholic.” he emphasizes “still” plaintively, almost sadly. There is personal discovery in his voice and if there is a note of triumph it is the tang of the triumph of the sickness, it is not pinned upon any willfull act on his part, like a paper tail on a real donky by children blindfolded and blind to what will soon me a kick in the dick by the same donky they are giving another tail, a paper one, wait for it, any second now, thump!

The class holds a little back from us. At night I think about them, each of them, holding back from us. They are letting the vague doubt of our commitment simmer on their flesh like a flung but dilute acid. I ask my sponsor to spell alcoholic. I tell him it’s like saying he’s a Christian never having read the bible when he spells it incorrectly after doubting that he could and being right about that he couldn’t. I ask him what the fuck is a Christian when it comes up that he is one. I say it just like that, what the fuck is a Christian? I never walk away, I make them end it, all of it, but they can’t, I am committed.

Tony adn Justin make a poorly planned trip back to Tenochtitlan and are stuck there

“No say.”

“No say?” I say, then, ”Tony, did you hear that Tony, He said No Say. I know what that means Tony!” Tony will not look me in the eye. He is not subordinate to me.

“Tony, I just don’t have words for this.” I tell him. I refuse to call Alejandro (Don’t pronounce the j as an h or I will kick your ass!!) by his birth name or his whatever the fuck name he is having people call him. I’m tough on Mexicans.

The time machine is not here. I think it just shit us out here. Tony has not cracked yet and he may never which is suprising for a man that hates TJ as much as he does. Alejandro will come out of all of this a bit better than either of us I think. Fucker.

“So he doesn’t speak Aztec then. I guess we should have thought of that.” We don’t even get to see a fucking pyramid, were dead that quick.

Tony and justin show restraint after their abduction by aliens

“Can you pee?”

“No, you?”

“No.”

“It’s hard to fake hair.” One of the guys on the other side of the room says. We both look at him. Tony whispers now he’s talking, I whisper back yeah. I have to keep telling myself to relax, physically. Its just like this natural reaction to push against this shit, or I’m just doin it. I look at Tony. I imagine him doing it too, resisting.

“Dude.” I tell him, “You have to relax.”

“I heard that there are these giant computer brains, brains as big as cities just full of them.” Another guy says. I can’t see him but Tony can. He’s just around a corner. He sounds like some stupid old guy.

“It’s not a brain.” I tell him. “They were talking about people, alien people getting so advanced they created the world they lived in, like in a computer. That they only worried about real life things like avoiding asteroid collision and natural resources and shit, that they wouldn’t give a leaping fuck about anything outside the world, the universe likely, of their creation. He was saying that they would not be on the lookout for us. Why, they have everything they can imagine in an artificial world. We would think of it like online gaming and having rent and electricity paid for and someone bringing us in food, you know, like being a kid. No giant fucking brain, idiot.” I hesitated to throw the last part in but the guy, his tone, it just pissed me off. All I could think of was the rageful endangerer type in every zombie movie. Fuck him.

Tony looks at me and shakes his head no like I shouldn’t have said it, kind of like we might get in trouble, not physically but, you know, like with the wife or something.

“No I’m not gonna.” I tell him, “I saw the same show and this guy is retarded. That’s nothing close to what they said. This guy is, hey guy! You listening? You’re an Idiot!”

“Dude.” Again with the head shaking from Tony, I don’t know, maybe he’s right. Maybe we’ll need him before the end.

We did.

Tony and Justin partake in a battle royal in hell

“Hey, isn’t that Sharon from marketing?”

I look. It is. She is standing next to a real hard ass of a demon, luckyducknadon we call him, sounds like its real name at least and there is that thing with its face, anyways, it’s a nickname.

“What a bitch.” tony says.

“Oh yeah well, there’s a reason god never trusted you with tits.” I tell him.

“Huh, what does he know.”

On the other side of the valley their team was lining up. They were organized for shit, some had guns, others, well, weapons, hand weapons like knives and stuff, no order just a couple big crowds. Our line looked like it was drawn in whip cream with a hard dick. Some of those idiots were firing, I think Dick, the guy from that movie, and yeah, his name is Dick and he’s a real douche, he caught an arrow with his face. Couldn’t have been a called shot I mean really, they were just too unorganized to influence any chaos in our ranks.

“They drug me out of hell for this?” Tony yells. They did. We were walking now. Some of the guys up front were already sockin idiots. This one guy, all I can really see is the tear in his corduroys, he’s got a chunk of hair missing and he is deep, I mean DEEP in our lines and lost like fuck knows what, just looking and spinning around with his dukes up and every now and then someone trips him and everyone laughs, but then someone just up and parks a knife in him, it’s like a joke right, he needed a weapon? Too funny, anyway he’s trying to grab it and pull it out but he just gets too tired. My buddy is yelling again.

“Hey Janet!” I look, its Janet. Were stepping over people now, and then in another minute were stepping on em. “Hey Janet!” he yells again. He has grabbed hold of his junk and is shaking it at her like a fist. “How’s this for date night!”

The players, the real heavy hitters, you know, the demons, not the battlefield promotion types with skin, they go early. Not sure why or how that works, either they just leave cuz of the whole, Wings are made for Flying bullshit or they get taken out fast like how you tend to want to take out a tank even if you cant, like stay close to it and maybe pee down the barrel between shots, anyway whatever. Soon I’m sucker punching and knee kicking and then I get a hold of this whip, its torn. How do you tear a whip? Tony is cracking up at me. He’s got a fist full of hair and its working better than a gun, I mean, just imagine their faces. Whould you run up to a guy who’s only weapon is a handfull of the last guys hair? Me neither. I turn the whip around and try to use it as a one sided extra long none-chuck but I suspicion if I had learned to crack a whip without tearing my face open, back when I was living, you know, before Hell and all, that it would have been better, you know, more effective, at least the noise part of it.

My buddy is landing these haymakers on a guy that I swear is in a Bunny suit. He just takes it in like rain ya know, he doesn’t even flinch. Some one behind us is on fire and throwing dirt on himself and you can hear music somewhere, like from a speaker, it might be unrelated. Other people are looking for it too.

It’s hard to tell who’s who sometimes when a day like this wanes and melts into a kind of myopic thrashcade. I tell Tony, I say, ”This kind of killing feels more like a rape.” I have to yell it and just like that he goes for my eyes. He says he mistook me. Twice I have to grab him, hold him down to stop him cuz he is going for me, for my eyes again. He doesn’t make it, he doesn’t get my eyes. I’d guess I still had some luck left but if I didn’t I sure as fuck would not be here.

Tony and Justin road trip to a shit town in Mexico looking for the New Gods (aliens)


They promised us it was the end of the world but no one is that lucky. I quit, drove back home towards the coast to get my friend.  I pulled over in the Mojave at about four am, slept like you do in a sports car, got into the beach cities after eight, drove around looking for the sorry ass bar he works in for forty minutes, found it, parked and got out of my Z like I just had surgery, walked in, he’s wiping glasses, the bars full and he’s got a giant cup of oj on the counter and a cigarette hanging out of his head. His eyebrow raises and he stops wiping the glass in his hands.

He quits too, he said he knew I was coming. It takes a week to get into Mexico, good news bad news is, they say money goes farther there.  My car is stolen in Tijeras and there is no walking 800 miles to Guanajuato where the new gods are even if he wasn’t shot. We had spent our last twelve dollars American racking up a fifty dollar tab in a great little shit hole of a place we’ve named Playa del Fuego, we just kept saying that name over and over and taking those napkins off the tops of our beers. When they found out we have no money, or not enough, the night ended. I never saw him again.

I get as far as Leon, just 30 miles from the hole in Mexico’s ass where these fuckers came back to but the whole party has moved north already. In a corner pharmacy at four am I watch Phoenix burn on a black and white TV. The guy who runs the pharmacy here has family there.  He locks the door after pulling in a lawn chair for me to sit on and we watch what the Mexican anchor keeps calling ‘fuego azul’ but it just looks white to us on his tv.  I think of the bar where they killed my friend, everyone smiling and raising their beers to us, laughing at the crazy, rich, white kids, cuz were all rich kids to em I bet, at least until the money runs out.

Well, they see me and get in.  He tries to stop them from taking me but I tell him it’s ok. I think for a second that they’re gonna take me to the new gods but those bastards have been gone for days now, it’s a comforting thought though.

It ends quicker than I give them credit for.  No one is shot, me that is, I am not shot; its a low energy killing, no shouts or shoes to the head, just a firm tap with the old Ma-che-tay to the neckers and whump, whump, whump, out with the blood, body in a ditch with others, good view, stars past some wild silhouette of high leafy trees, everything is black, even if it could be other colors, mabey soon we'll see 'em, maybe soon we'll get to make our case.


Tony and Justin rob a house for miss lady

We get a new mandate from corporate. An email. Gully is at my cube, doesn’t say anything, were both heavy into coffee now that we stopped drinking, now that I stopped drinking. Where does he find those fucking ties? I am doing the partial ignore. Then I open it, the email. BURGLARY. This is all it says. I look up at Gully and as I do he has tossed the keys to our car onto my desk. “You’re driving.”

We get gas at the last full service in Reseda. There is an arcade there. It only has two games and we disagree about the quality of a plural. Hamish is a one of the good Arabs. His shirt says “I Hate Arabs”, he’s a Sikh. Now that Gully is working he tips everyone fives. It sucks for the waitresses but Hamish, I bet he tells a Gully story to his kids.

He stills smokes but he works harder than anyone. Once I tell Greg, I ask him, I say “Hey Greg, why can’t you be more like Gully. He has a fucking handicap but he works harder than anyone.” Greg flips me off, he still does that even though he is in his late thirties too.

Were here, where we need to be. “Your reading too much into it.” He tells me, “What does it say?”

He’s right. His head does not get smaller with the ski mask. It’s something about his hair, like how a hair cut can make you look like you have lost weight. Only it is the opposite for him.

Back at the office we dump our sacks on Miss Lady’s desk. She puts the phone down. “Were going home” Gully tells her. She nods after looking just briefly at the items that have taken up a new semi-permanent residence on her workspace until the cops can show up and tag everything.

“So I guess well see you tomorrow.” He says to her and we both walk out. “Initiative” he tells me, “These people aren’t looking for the right answer.” And he was right cuz she totaly bailed us out.

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

And then they just let me go.

“I wouldn’t have it. I’m telling you I wouldn’t have it. If they could talk, if animals could talk. I wouldn’t have to do anything about it though. Really, your putting water in the cat dish, it splashes, you don’t do it on purpose, but some of the Surf ‘n Turf gets wet and there she is, but there’s no meow, there’s just ‘wow, hey, watch it buddy, jesus. I’d get my own water but fuck, you know that gallon jug you got weighs more than I do. Hey, don’t look at me like your pissed, I’m just sitting here relying upon you for food, oh yeah, and water, thanks. No, don’t worry about it, I’ll eat it, I have to right, I’m the cat, I’ll be ok, it all goes in the same hole right, it’s not like you’d do something about it if I couldn’t talk anyway right.’ Only it wouldn’t stop there. The shitting would be incredible, it would be like, ‘he, um yeah, excuse me, hey sorry, I know your watching a movie, yeah, um, I’m done in there so could you just you know, could you take the shit away please? Thanks, love ya.’ but it would never get that far, all their fucking talking! it’d be way back when. they’d be like No Way. We’d be telling ourselves stories like to our kids, the’d be incredulouse. We’d insist, no realy, once, animals talked, and the kids’ed be like, What happened?, kids like the idea of talking animals really, I mean what are they anyway, but anyway I’d say to my kids Id be like, what do you mean what happened?, we fucking killed them all’s what happened.” im thirsty.

“So she asks me, ‘Was this a dream?’ she asks me this. This was her response. Can you believe that? Of course it was a question officer, thay ALWAYS ask you questions. She was not psychological, I mean she was a shrink, but not like that, I mean she sucked. She had a colorful sweater, it was grandmotherly right? You know. There was a desk in her office, that was a point for her right, but it faced a wall, get it? I made excuses for her all day like this. I was always looking for soemthing to give her credit for, FUCK!!”

“I would like some water now please.” I ask him, cuz you don’t tell a cop anything. He nods his head to the other guy and makes a pointing gesture with his hand but it feels more like he is making it with his finger. Its like he threw something towards the water he wanted the guy to get and the guy fetched it, you know, the thing he threw, it was the water, he brought it back too.

“As I was saying, she didn’t look uncomfortable, neither of us were. She was the recording type, not the note pad type. Like these fucking things.” I toss towards the note pad like he did to the other guy for the water. No one moves. the pad just sits there. “Anyway, Im not writing this shit down, I mean, tape me right, like she did. Thats ok, Ill say it. It’s ok to tape this instead alright.” I say this to the window, but I don’t think I warant soemone behind the glass, not for this at least.

“I mean officer, or detective, anyway I mean I wish someone was there to see it. I wish that there had been an imartial witness to my expression, to the expression on my face. An impartial witness to see my face when she said that, when she asked me if it was a dream, if I was telling her about a fucking dream. Was it a dream. That bitch. Did I say it was a dream!”

The water is good.

“‘Do you want to talk about something else?’ she tells me. No I didn’t mean she asked me, she told me, they tell you. Thats how they do it. I swear, it was like she was being paid by someone else to say all of this unbelievable shit to me, to really fire me up and then send me out into the world with a gun and two boxes of ammo.” I don’t smoke but thats when I would have put out my cigarette. I used to smoke and there is nothing better than a person who knows when to ash and knows when to put that fucker out. ”Do I want to talk about something else, hmm, let me think about that I tell her.”

I wait.

“So she doesn’t say anything for like a minute. A Minute!” I emphasize with them. “Thats a long time to eyeball a fucking shrink, anyways she was telling me again, ya see it? Of course you do. She just sits there and lets her last question just float and shit and fill the air in the room like a crap in the pants. So I say, hey, I mean, I’m talking about it right? Now I feel all gay, I tell her this, exactly, I say I feel like I need to, like I’m saying hey, will you talk about this with me? Like.” But its still hard to talk about. I don’t want to even think about it, about loneliness.

“So she tells me, she says, ‘Isn’t that what were doing?’ she didn’t cut me off or anything, its just hard, it, I was there for stuff. Its just hard. Anyway so I realized what I wanted to say to her but I stopped because when I realized what it was I was getting to, you know, I realized how ashamed I was for wanting it, for expecting it, from anyone. Thats when I made up my mind. So I ask her, ‘How much time do we have left?’ and she tells me half hour or so and we can go longer if I need to and all that shit and I say Good! Good, cuz I may need to. You know? I tell her that I wan’t to spend the rest of my time telling her what, you know, calling her names and shit and just realy telling her what the fuck, that shes a fuckign monster and all that shit, all this, you know, what I’m telling you, all the shit she was doing, the just mercilouse shit she said to me in there! I said, ‘Im gonna tell you all about the fucking bitch that you are and anything else I can posibly think of, its my time, I paid for it, now shut the fuck up, right? Is that ok with you? Any ways so I don’t even get that out.” I tell him. The other guy in the room has become a non entity. Thats what they call it when someone doesn’t mean anything. So then the door opens and some shit walks in. He’s in uniform. Total side story here but, when youre like out on the street and you see a cop and the uniform and all that and it’s just so official, its like, thats a cop, do what he says and all that. Inside a presinct, or jail or whatever, inside the police department, thats it, inside the police department, its the guys that don’t have uniforms on that got that, in charge feeling, that they are the ones that tell the cops what to do. Those guys come up and its like, oh shit, this guys in charge, do what he says.

Mostly now he is just sad

I put a collar on him so that he can’t say alcohol anymore, so that he can’t say the name of it or any kind of it. You should of seen him at first, when he was learning, oh man it was great. He said Sambuka, that was his first time with the collar on. Holy shit, he just kept trying, like it was a problem with him, oh my god I laughed. There are bugs of course like maraschino and bon bon, but it makes me happy to think that much thought went into the collar. Anyway,

Colorado

“Look at this!” I shout back to her. I see her head turn towards me a bit, tellingly, but not completely, not like she is looking at me.

“Remember this!” I say. I am laughing. She started wearing a baseball cap when we left. That and shades. Her cap was a faded red, really faded but it had not gone pink, it was more a bleached maroon. The bill bone wore through in a spot. How do you wear out a bill?

She nods to me to get down and come over. I do.

“Up there.” She says with her face. She has never been around the Navajo’s but she does it perfectly, intuitively. She does it so she doesn’t move her hands or give some clue or sign. At least I think that’s what it is and I’m pretty sure it is. “That’s where we’ll stay tonight.” She tells me. I nod ok. I will always be younger than her.

Things went better immediately for me, when we left, with her there, it’s like she found herself. She hid our fire with cinder blocks. There were no traps we could set so she laid cans and bottles all over the steps in the stair well. “This is where well jump down if we have to, the matress is right there, see it. Its covered with dirt, right there. Drop this rock on it so I know you know where it is. Ok.”

Try to carry a weeks’ worth of food with you. Now try and do that for two people. Mostly I carried our shit but she carried a lot too. It’s not like what you may think. There was no division of labor. There was me fucking around mostly, fairly, and there was her helping me, keeping me safe. I remember telling her we should get back to where I lived, when they were gone. Before that it was different. We all were different. Not a day goes by that I don’t think of them. Not a day goes by that we talk about it. She didn’t ask a question or argue, it’s like we just skipped the conversation about agreeing what to do and moved onto the doing it as the first order of business.

“Tie this, tie that end. Ok.”

I brought her a package once, a wrapper of a wet-knap. It was old, opened. I could see her face crack a smile. Behind the shades, those mirrors she put on, they only worked on me, who else was there? I could see her smile behind them. I dropped it. I just never thought there would be so few people left.

She never made it with me. I think of her a lot when I hold my child. That morning, that one morning when I got up before her. “I named her for you Kasha. I miss you so much.”

But she still believes we go somewhere.

“It’s not the end.”

There is still shit on the radio. It’s past the point of hot outside and I am using the wind to cool us. I won’t tell her that I am hungry too.

She asks where were going then leans back into the door, pulls her feet up and falls asleep again. There is no one else on the road.

If you could stretch it out to make it go as far as it could, If you could turn each day into a week by giving something, by giving everything,

I slow through the intersections with an inseparable feeling of guilt. Of the greatest things that remain to haunt me now, it is the fear of her wanting and astonishment at the world, that it ended, that this is what remains.

I watch her sleep like I always have, knowing I have loved her more and that I still do. I wish I could hold her, pull over, get the blanket out and just lay down in the gray snow together.

Endings aren’t about places.

...and soon there will be no one left to keep telling me that it isn't.

The first time I shot someone I was five. It was a dream. It stays with me. I articulate the death with cheerios and milk, mourn the villain with a flower jerked like he was from life, cry because I wet the bed again. In class I do not act out, I do not rage against an inflated menace nor tare the face of a child who is like me, innocent, alive and yet somehow still unborn. I do not look at the bullies with crazed empty eyes, I am pushed down and do not rise up with a rage too distilled to be contextual, I do not stand in front of traffic lost behind a face with no tears or will.

I am ten before I hold one. All of them, even the small ones are heavy.

At fourteen I kill something with warm, red blood. And when I kill myself I tell myself, this is different, this is not a dream, but no matter how many times I say it I can’t take the gun away from my face, I can’t remember anything else because this is a dream, right, this is still just a dream…

Tiny hole

To answer your question; No, I am not the one driving you crazy. Had I been, speech would have been one of the inaccessible motor functions for communicating the craziness you would have been experiencing “by my hand” as it were, brought on no doubt by various “end Stage” psychosis scenarios on both practical, medical and metaphysical levels. Further evidence to preclude the need for affirmation of the cause of said “crazy” affliction would have been a rare muscle fatigue brought on by extensive, un orderable self mutilation / damage in an ad-hoc form to be further defined by a calamitous area of effect as “anything within reach” leaving largely, yourself. The extent of injuries would be a collage of wounds inseparable from each other, and so, all somewhat the same through a degeneration of the causal relationships until, not unlike an abuse cycle, the beginning being ancillary to the behavior of the cycle itself, usual relationship i.e., the cutting of a bruise or the shearing of lacerated flesh with lacerated fingernails, should it be determined that the nail can be, in fact, lacerated, supposing of course, the nail remains on the finger at all, would render all wounds, coincidentally family. This would contrast the even, measured strokes left from an ordered mind that “cuts” on oneself, in rows, neatly, to engage an endorphin cascade for intended, though arguably subconscious results. Hair would be missing like grass from a prairie over grazed by sheep. (It is suggested that a mild amount of research into the grazing habits of sheep vs cattle be done before reading further) To further complicate said communication of the redundant, or as you put it; “Are you the one driving me crazy?” would be the bruised, exacerbated and quite possibly “hyper extended” vocal chords preventing anything but a rasp. I say, not even a moan would be evidence of the level of damage self inspired to cope with the level of “crazy” that you would be experiencing and hence render mute the desire to verify its cause as no doubt I would have been turned into something, metaphorically speaking, akin to an Alien abducting you, or the space ship where you were taken to for, no doubt, a battery of rectal examinations, by your subconscious mind, and so further eliminate the possibility of a corroboration with me on the subject for any reason, in anyway, by anyone, most of all you. Do you hear me. You would not be hoarse from untenanted screaming, instead, your voice, or the capacity to, would be disengaged, removed, litteraly, from a caliber of energy funneled through that means so overwhelmingly beyond its cabability that I can only think of Hard vacume, and a spacestation full of atmosphere moving through you, at all costs (and taking you with it no doubt) through a “tiny hole” (pun intended) in the wall of the space ship you would, no doubt, think you are still in, by comparison.

Stay

I think I will get a ticket, that we will get a ticket. I think that I will take her there, her and the cancer she claims like an adopted child. I think of the three of us on a plane but nobodies even sellin tickets to over there anymore. I still work, she still wakes up before me, stays up after, way after, never goes to bed, never leaves it either. I could understand not being able to afford a trip to the hospital, not being able to get medicine, you know, health for the wealthy right, or at least second chances for the wealthy, anyway, it’s something else feeding your wife ramen, when she’s sick, but it’s not like she would keep down a twenty dollar steak either.

Cables out, TV, we never got TV, I couldn’t make it work, her dad came over tried too. We talk less but are together more. I come home and wash in the sink, everything, dishes, my face, her night shirt, our cat, everything. You don’t tell the woman you have failed that you hurt your back, you just stay in the chair and pretend to fall asleep in it. You don’t tell her your cold, that the hole in your shoes has put holes in all of your socks, all in the same place. You tell her the snow is beautiful, the sun is warm, you ask if she wants you to pull the curtain and get the window open, you ask her if she is ok, you know the answer, you listen to it, it’s always worse than you think it will be.

You don’t let her smoke inside, she just does and you don’t say no, you don’t do anything but love her for it, you think, you think you will smoke too so she feels less worse about it, about smoking inside, about not being able to get up, to get outside, to hide it, but you stole the cigarettes she smoking. You think, you hope she rations them out, enjoys them at least a little and maybe uses them to erase less, right, forget less? There is no walking away from the past. My memories, dreams, what ever they are, theres no leaven em behind. Whats gonna happen won’t go either, just keeps comin like a tiny reflecter on a long turn during a long night drive. She used to take them without me. I imagine her lost like she is now, smoking, any song playing, cool air, her beauty hidden from her but not from me, not even now.

“Go home and be with her.”

I think things will change. The new gods have returned. All those wrongs, and the ones I’ve done too, I see em like them needin to do a little more work on a Monday cuz of the weekend, right, the new gods, that’s all it could be to them right, a little more effort, catchin up on wrongs, setting things right, fixen our hearts well again, takin her cancer back, laying it back upon the wherever it came from, a mossy cradle, a cradle of stars, the thing come to kill her.

No one knows anything. For the best I can sit on the roof of the apartment and look east, though I might as well look west for how far they say they are from us. I try not to think about it like a prayer, like they are listening, waiting for the mustard seed in my brain that must be there by now. I don’t know why it’s gotta run out our love like that, lookin at her, bein with her like this, all the time, her hurtin, me doin nothing in gods damn hell about it, about anything.

Is it wrong if she goes quick or stays like a shirt wearing out while worn. When will she not be everything anymore. I don’t tell her that she should be dyin with more, with better. That someone should be there when she’s cryin and getting sick, that She should have something for the cold and the fever, the pain and the vacancy, that If not I then god and if not god then the new gods. I don’t tell her I wish there were treatments and comfort and understanding cuz what I want is her happy, what I want is her standing there lookin out from the laundry room, smiling at me, or layin there, awake before me, curled up like a new pea, warm, bright, smiling in all the cold the greatest angel, here, with me, forsaking the same heaven I cannot rush her to now for loving in vain weakness and need this everything given to me and now dying.

Stay with me. Stay with me.. in the cold where our smiles are stiffening like feet. In the soot dark and sweat dirty sheets. Stay and lay and dream with me and still awaken to this, to us. Stay through the hunger, through the things I could not steal or kill for or bring back honestly. Theres is no pride for a man. there is nothing but her leaving and me holding her with what she holds onto me with. Stay til you cant stay, until you can’t even go, and then, love…

...and its all I want to.

We think they are taking people, I think they are taking people from their rooms. I don’t tell her. We sit on the balcony the first night the rations do not come to the door. We don’t go looking for them. We stare at a wonder of beauty in the sunset, the stars later and then the clouds of night, losing the moon.

I make us water cocktails from the plastic cups we took back out of the room trash and drink them stretched out like those stars, penultimate, dreaming with our eyes. She smiles inside at me I know she does.

We have made of our cave now a spartan place, cleared our heads from a litter of this new life upon a sea taking us secretly, where. “We may never be cold again.”

She notices it first, that the ship has stopped moving, but it’s not that, it’s the sea, that’s what she noticed, that things were staying. It’s hard to drop to the room below from the balcony, I think it was designed to be but I have not lived the way I wanted to and it’s hard to think it is not me, hanging there weak, threatened with death by my own weakness, my weak arms, hanging, dangling, I do not think about returning, it feels worse than looking down, worse than loosing my life, worse than anything.

Sheets. I take them, for what. Wine flutes, I don’t tell her about the blood, I throw them up with a hook of my arm, an intuition. Another clock radio. It could be safe here or not, either way I throw things over and clean a bit, throw over the things I cleaned with then help her down.

We hear them above. She hides in my arms like she could, I calm her, we are a mile away if a foot for the reasons and the will of it and I know we will be anyway, for real, soon.

At night we slip over. It’s like a pool only dirty, deep, implacable. We move away in the dark and soon it is like walking, we laugh a lot, more than before, more than before the trip even. It’s all I remember…

You should go inside and get that off your shirt. Part II

We’d go back to the spot of course, never together though. Why are we like that? I think she is buying cigarettes, that’s the look I get, like she’s hiding that thing, that act, the benefit, the release, she’s not even twelve. The next day I don’t hold back, I go there, I go straight there, I look for the blood, for whatever might still be there. I rule out a hemorrhaged black ellipse as gum. There are oil dribbles from a car but all I can imagine, all I want to see is a young boy bent over the ruin of his face, shocked at the dark stuff coming from him, going to the ground where it will stay. It’s hard to find, hard to look for too. I have never stayed to see things get this way, watch the red go dead, watch the blue eyes like alien crystals gray black. It feels like a revenge fuck, all my looking around.

She’s drawing. Everything gets the X eyes. Everything becomes a passive assertion, a sulk.

“I didn’t do anything” I say.

“I know” she says.

It all turns into the spot, like calling a weekend “Vegas”. I can go to a speed bump in the parking lot of the King Super where I ate shit on my Huffy when I was 15. I swear I can still find pieces of gravel with me on it. Or the rod on that weird looking fence in the alley of my far childhood, still there, I can walk you there right now and push you into it. I stand around now looking for the spot, for anything, a smell, anything but it has generalized into something easier to point towards than touch.

“Do you think he is in heaven?”

I don’t. I tell her so. I scream it.

You are not in this story though you should be

“I have a mannerism.”

“Hmm?”

“A Mannerism, th at’s why I’m here.”

The man with the polite blue windbreaker shakes his head yes.

“You?”

The man in the polite blue windbreaker now shakes his head no. He turns to look at the receptionist, but she, coolly beyond giving aid, acknowledgement, anything, you, me, pain, all of it beneath her, does not see any of us and for that matter might as well not exist, and yet, inexplicably and unfairly she does, and it is a painful triumph over the rest of us.

A woman enters the office from that door. All heads look up. The man in the polite blue windbreaker who was moving deeper into nervousness stands, smiles genuinely, moves in one step toward the woman who has come from behind the door and kisses her on the cheek, hands her her lunch, an act that anesthetizes us all from hearing anything further spoken between them, or hearing it like movie theater talk, we enthralled now disdain and sublet his cast off anxiety from the room, take our turns with it each, until, like so many things, it is reduced, traded down for and against, lost in the friction of glances that puerile anemia of the heart, that grief, that stolen grief. And stolen for what? “And stolen for what?”

“I’m here for a mannerism too.” A smaller man who looks exactly like you think he does, says to me, I who only just exclaimed so openly about my own mannerism, confided and nothing short of hoped for an outcome of its communication, anything. I a man stolen from. He is looking at me as I turn to look though the glasses on his small sweat sticky face and I tell him, I say…

“Shut the fuck up.”

And the man who looks exactly like you think he does, does.

You should go inside and get that off your shirt

“Ok, so it’s a small person, what are you going to do?” I tell her. She is looking at it now in what I guess would be new light. The tiny new mechanisms of a cognition now her own, lurching and firing, I imagine the sound of ladyfingers popping, just that, no engine humming or roaring just a cacophony of false starts. It is clear to all that someone else has dressed her.

“Get away from him.” She is now standing between me and the small person. The small person is about the size of a mini candy bar, no really. I have heard of shit like this before, in the rainforest, it’s always in the rainforest right, well anyway, it probably walked here. That’s kind of like saying your 50 in dog years, or maybe that’s not what I mean to say, I guess I just mean it would take a hell of a lot longer for that little candy bar sized nude-kin to get here from Ecuador than it would me, or even Cindy Lou here for that matter. I would tease her but like so much else that is lost on a twelve year old, it’s just lost on a twelve year old.

“That’s right, now pick him up and hold him to your chest and coo and get your face right down in his. Yeah, show him the teeth when you smile, thats it. Listen, if that little fucker had a gun that could kill everything this big, he would kill everything this big, you have no idea. And if he was this big, as big as you and I, he would just walk away from you thinking you were a stupid little girl like all these assholes who have passed us in the last 15.” I know I am ranting but I can’t stop, I didn’t, thats important. She is begging to cry or has been and I have just noticed. It’s like a phobia, the crying, for me it is, and she is doing it. At least its genuine.

“That’s not true.” She asks me and looks at the small person being held, no pressed in some suborned refute of my accusation and I mean spleen rupturingly tight against her training bra trapped, rubbery, pre-pubescent boob-ola. That’s where they always put ‘em. I can’t see that small face from here. I assume there is a fluid on her shirt and a smell. If I was being viced into pre-tits like that I would have fluid coming out of my mouth too. Maybe his guts came out his mouth, I don’t know. I imagine my guts coming out of my mouth. She drops him, or swats him off of her, like when you are holding a bug you don’t think will bite you, letting it perch and what not, then it bites you or makes one of those hideouse terrifying hostile bug noise s, and maybe it did only it sounded like hello or i can’t breath, and too low to hear or even too high like adog whistle, and then maybe panick too, on her part, I know I would and then getting it away from me as fast as f-ing possible would be the only answer now, not playing with the afore mentioned and previously harmless well-seeming “bug”. It happens as I say it will, as I say it in my mind. I say wow out loud so that someone, someday… “Wow.”. Anyway, it moves a little on the pavement then doesn’t.

“It’s too big to step on.” I say. She nods looking at its little naked but. And by too big I mean it has eyes, arms it could raise to try to stop you, however ineffectually, a face that will show fear if you are close enough made more convincing/sympathetic by stain of guts on same face showing fear etc. In that way its too big, fuck, anyone can step on a candy bar.

So much beauty in dirt

It’s ok that I am going out like a candle. Clean metaphors like pressed clothes, all of them fine makes addressed, a permanently raised glass, love, on a ship perhaps, the world waving, or the best of them. It is not ok that it is the world that’s leaving me.

I hand my teeth down, no one takes them, there are no college kids left to believe in strangers anymore, take up their flags, ensorcelled by seeming context & strange nocturnal tuitions paid in dissent, rapture and yes, amelioration.

This place has stayed neat with me in it. I have protected things… things of which you can have no idea, things whose ideas will not come again, their valkyries fled, a diaspora of gods, kings and vassals, the whole parade of these my insignificant things. They were my wine, my rope to hang myself with.

I will not imagine you. I was imagined. I will not simper, the shakiest hand in the riot, I will not ease meekly, subdued to wait a time for meaning, for museum glass, nitrogen filled air, greater value indeed, greater than needed. You will pass me like so much meaning in dirt.

The letter i wrote DFW while he was still alive

my brother described you as transcendent and threw in another word and wrapped them both in a sentence that made transcendence sound like something gold colored and floaty even more so than it already does and yet still here all temporally and fleeting and what not which also made it even better. I want to write you and like be friends for coffee or something but really just for some other weirder reasons that have to do with loneliness and personality disorders. He is eighteen and he has read further into IJ before quitting than I have. He also has some cheater Wiki facts about you and the books plot. “Things like IJ do not have something stupid and slow like a plot.” I tell him and he agrees in a way that makes me wrong and it surprises us both. Also I never refer to it as IJ I just do not want to write out Infinite Jest. And those facts are thrown so quick I can’t forbid him to throw fucking cheater facts and then I know them and its good and it sucks cause it can’t be toggled off and the whole game is ruined now cause of some shit about fractals and junior college creative writing bullshit and anyway.. And I hope you know this is not some bullshit in the box because it is out of the box way to get you to read something of mine cause its just a letter and its how I think and stuff. And we talked today about loneliness and why we over simplify god and give him shitty intentions and why we are somehow outside of culture or at least enjoyment of it. And he thinks everyone is a douche bag and I tell him that is a good sign and we are sitting in Tommys eating shit food and volleying angst and you come up in most of our conversations and you’re the greatest person that has ever lived and that gives us hope cause you’re here and your out there you know with your writing and stuff and you are accessible through that and if the world could shit you out and we’re here than maybe some day my brother will meet someone that will take away the loneliness and we laugh about what it would be like to talk about writing and stuff with you and it would take a while to get past say how the Graven Image thing was just brilliant and the tripod in the bushes and the paranoid king which we both try to make posters of and he pays some online comic guy 20 to do a comic of you on a desert island and he does it and it is funny and it is sad for a bunch of reasons and I try and help you escape the caricature of your self in my mind but even this letter assumes in the way I hate being assumed about and so its stuck being crazy and who cares any way it will bleach in the mail. And Michael does this thing that’s so funny that I never call him on where he has like 9 or twelve books planned out and their names and stuff and he is working on them but they are really just titles of books and its great and we talk about them and about ideas and things. And I was thinking about writing what I would say to you if we met but that’s all shit. Tennis balls can find shit wrong with one another and that’s just the way it is. I just appreciate the hell out of you and I am one of those fucks that can’t finish IJ and yet it is my favorite book. I did some videos on you tube about it and deleted them all cause they were stupid. I told Michael to put himself out there and life wouldn’t suck so much and that is a lie kind of. He used to be scared of falling into the sky when he was a kid (until like two years ago) and I think I had something to do with that. He spells ok the right way. I used to think he was addicted to the internet. So certain people suck and we are all scary. And your great with words and that is like a real positive thing in our minds. You used up a lot of good word combinations and that kind of sucks but I would of never of thought of them so its cool! I pretty much am a consumer. That sucks cause I am also a brooder and have other issues so there is over eating and rage and shit that makes for good fantasy fiction. I just was imagining having a friend and you would be cool. My other friend smokes a bunch of pot and believes in shit like ufo’s and cover-ups and Mayan calendar stuff and it makes me sad cause he was pretty clear headed in his teens. In my Lotto dream my family all has to live together in a house and I have my own house next door or am always away in some other location just for me, like Dolores, CO or on a greyhound headed to Alaska but I don’t have those places anymore. There all changed and every one grew old and shit and now they just suck and feel lonely. I keep thinking I can find some new hiding place like school or work but it doesn’t gel and I keep pushing this fucking thing forward like a wall or something but it takes all my attention to move it and when I am not paying attention and even when I am it starts goin backwards and shit but not like its gonna crush me like danger, it just goes back to zero and at zero I am homeless again. I used to be able to write at work but I have to work more now and so I don’t get to write or I squeeze in words between phone calls. It would be great if I had to show up to work to write and had to sit there and shit while everyone was working but I had to write and not answer phones and write down credit cards all day. This is too long. Your cool. So is my brother. I understand why you don’t have a web presence. Peace.

Bebop


“Isn’t this the shit!”

Michael looks at the ship from the companionway. He stares with wonder and surprise, he laughs that way, my brother’s way, high, it’s almost a squeak, it’s great. I sit at a noodle cart just some yards from the telescope ramp that’s buoyed to our lock. It feels good to think it. We have a ship.

“Michael.” I call. He turns from one of those low portals you have to bend at the knees to look out no matter how short you are. I gesture to the noodle cart and he walks over. I tell him Gou. “and tea.” I say. he orders two. It’s a promise unspoken we have made, for me not to embarrass him. It’s important to him, that’s enough for me. He gave a shit enough to learn Juo or whatever the fuck they call it now. The paper bowl is just warm enough on my hands, and dry enough to give my fingers the creeps. I have been holding perspiring water bottles all day, hydrating, its all I do anymore. looks like I am a swimmer.

“That’s the one?” he asks me and I nod my answer.

“Seven?” he reconfirms it. This is the dock number, or name. Its actually A7a. I nod again.

He looks sad. He’s thinking about something, someone. I can never guess, I never give him credit when I do. I’m wrong. “I don’t know” he says.

I nod, flicking yaki soba in my pie hole and jacking whole haf-cups of hot black chop-wood-carry-water ontop and getting It down. I nod like I know but I don’t. I vow to quit nodding.

“Let’s check it out.” I say and ditch my dish in the tub swash down the last hot tea and take a hot rag from the noodle guy, wipe my face then hands, drop two zenny on the table and turn.

“I don’t know” he says. He is done eating too. He is reluctant. I am up and moving to the iris, the cold as fuck arm, and beating feet to get to the lock and the ship that’s been run up by some port master goon. I breath into my hands. He is still standing outside the Iris. I tell him to come on, then punch in my code on the pad, my fingers almost sticking to the cold surface. Hot air gushes out and I step into the dark gray hall.

“They aren’t our memories” he tells me. Like I don’t know. Like I think it was the two of us, all those people. I know it wasn’t. I am probably off point. I ask him what memories weren’t ours. He tells me none of them were.

“Well I fucking bought it. I guess we belong to them now, the whole thing, all of it. It doesn’t have to be ours Michael, we can be smaller. We can be small enough to belong to something else, to this.” I turn and point to warmth and light and a whole new life. I think it is sinking in. No word judo will get him through the Iris. He’ll come if its right, if it isn’t, fuck all be damned he’ll spin down planet side and go sit on mom’s grave till they take him away again.

“We don’t have to win Michael. This doesn’t have to be right.” He is fighting some war in his brain. “Dude, fuck. At least check it out, you know, like a tour or something.” I turn and go in leaving the lock open. In the living room I turn on Blue and speaker phone the gangway. “It’s an homage! Anyway, great fucking song.” i feed in. I wait an hour longer than I think I will have to. I wait a long time. We don’t talk for a while.

“When we can, we have to find another ship.” he tells me as he walks in and sits on the couch.

I nod to him that I understand.

I do.

Falling


“It’s not enough to be alone.” I tell him. He lifts his head in nod, an acknowledgement, to say yes, to say he understands, he’s with me. The wind / air or just our hurtling through the still skies, catches on the micro-seams of the hull and 30 degree temperature bleed variations in the 6000 degree range with callous rigidityt which despite all this technology, eludes the one and two micro second corrections in the air brake. It is a bumpy ride.

He has found gum. I never buy gum. I lift my head at him adding a double eyebrow lift and an observed glance at his mouth. He arches back against g’s and digs in a pocket where gum should not be kept, gets a stick and tosses it to me. It falls as though it were made of lead. I nod to myself. He is smiling, looking at me.

It really is not that loud for what is occurring just feet from our soft heads.

Run


It is a dull lullaby of an evening, vampires choke on their words, and I inherit an embrace from you. A new box of matches, you could be and you are, I know you are. You whisper in a minaret. There are no words for envy now, I will be you, and if I must tear this whole world down I will do it, then all you will be able to do is run. Run beautiful, run.

You tell me it’s a nice dream, you say it. There is no inferno where once a doubt can hide. I am in it. You kick at flames I wish I were. I have let myself go, I know it. No, I won’t even remember.

I am the face you have made. Can you feel it. I am the need you have formed in mud, your own tears are all, your hard work, your one small gift, your candle under a cover. You have kept me hid my whole life. It was worth it.

You walk me away. There is no hidden meaning in it. Come, feel your legs run for you.

Remembering


We lay in oceans of memory, drunk to be sure, I am missing you and yet you are there beside me, always, delivered as I hear them tell. I hear you say to me this thing you have called the truth of me and in this see we can neither of us be wrong, me denying, you defining.

I will hurt you with my truth. I clean it like a gun. Call them lies if they are to you. What is this rapture with the other thing, a queer reflection, singular in that you are the only one who sees it, more real than my distant bones in that you are the only one who feels it, and yet, I am here.

I see your face in a flame.

“We start out broken” you say. There is no perennial memory, diverged, returned with alacrity and suffuse with evolved meaning, no longer sentence behind your word or my infamy. We eat our breakfast in the sun you and I, comet tails dancing, alone, always alone, seen like nothing else is seen and yes Michael, hated for it.

I dream of you today. Sequester the ash of this lie to me like some primeval hearth, its rumor of warmth no different than the name I call you with, falling where, on whom, who turns to say, to smile to show me all that love that has always been there, that I have known my whole life, to and from, taken, taken as surely as death has so much, still I pull it close as you watch a phantom you might know as the real me.

December is not today. I awake frozen in you, breathing only in what dreams I grow in weed fields of doubt and I breathe them like a vengeance, like a wound of love, like killing and being killed, like losing you again and forever, I say it aloud while walking away, “where are you”.

Fugue


We are not alone. Sorrow lifts us, carries us home with vapid regret. Gone the winds autonomy, gone all our sisters every one to this, unloving empty blue.

You are not the stars in your eyes, you are not the world we find you in, your street corner, your thin ambivalence towards those things to come, namely death, your own, wrapped like I am in your arms. Hold onto it.

You do not choose what you are given, what you give. I will not become you in the end, sad smiles, our same bed a wreck of weeks, strife, benevolent whispered open loving, my sad song, your wide smile and everything, everything wide awake and gleaming.

We are not forgiven. How could we be undressed for foul weather, naked from the fear of it. No, we are not forgiven, we would not know what to do with it.

You


I dream of collapse, sponge-like, extruding sympathies, misinformation, love. A funnel web spider, damned to be where he is come Heaven or all the world’s children. You don’t believe me anymore. There is no wisdom in it. You leave me untouched and yet paid attention too, discriminated like a sore, amended.

You are my cardinal points. Everything was you, interred, breasted, silly like a flame. Who cares for it anymore. I have been brought back to some other eden, no mark just these clothes and the doubts you wear when you look at me, yes, I see you, and now I wear them too.

You don’t take the car you say you’ll walk but your brother comes, too busy both of you to say goodbye, hello, but time I guess for other words. I feel him in our bed. Behind the kiss I get when you come home, holding some part of your attention away with a gay look, a needle sewn through your grin, but I am still week from you leaving. You are my rock to throw, my egg to crack on your own face, dried like I am in the same sun of all this bullshit scrutiny, all this calculation and intellect conjoined, post mortem. I should have given you everything, held onto you while you screamed, dragged you down into the inertia of that debt. I should have grown upon you in every sickness. You would have loved me more then and hated my work less.

I pass you twice a day now. There is no one in your car, not even you.

19 - Again


“I said I would.”

There is more trust now that the dark has been named, mutually, the two of us staring as if it was not ourselves, the thing standing now where everything else used to, like the acceptance of someone else’s friend, like the person that has found an accidental obsequious way between us into that line where we all stand, wait, and then when it is our turn, depart. I have no neck left for hanging. I say it. It sounds like how I look at her when she says 'whatever' and I don’t say anything.

It is a longing like a shark. I would hold her close like a stranger now, save her like I never knew her, like we were meeting again. I feel so empty. In time, we are dancing like angels on eons and I pointing at a life we left, the two of us, our bodies down there bereft of us.

Each time I would take it all back. I know the pain as this wicked mooring torn free to damn me on the rocks, or with this new pilot seek that old sea I left to find her. You are not come full circle in death. You are not reborn in whispers and in the apathy of your children. You are not come again.

She leaves the key. Every little bit, every joy I could not share with her because that joy was her. Every uneasy sight, every mild unpleasantness that were her gifts to me like any necklace, any foot rub. I am redefined and that is my vengeance. I am returned through a mirror once looked through as a child. I take my own hand as I should, knowing I am myself. What things are surrendered. What hopes so thinly sewn.

There is no abbreviation in leaving, no warm window with a smile, a tear and a wave. There is a look of so much pain. There is the ruination of a thing that will always be a ruin come healing and love back to each our separate and sheltered hearts. I will drink tea there and love her and when I say that I love her more she will smile, but she will always feel the ruins underneath.

18 - Tomorow


I have stopped caring. It’s not a sudden thing, it is noticing you are in a desert when you are a day from water or trees. It has surrounded me and found nothing left of what we all had called love so spuriously, concern or even constant worrying. No matter.  Would they want it now?

I know where I am going. It is out there like a sign, like a cross planted in the mud of my heart. I can’t escape it like I can her now, the possibility of it, that I can even think it, this is the ruin of its ever happening, a cold head raised like a sail above what, the pure ruin of love.

You would feel it, I would. Does she? I feel it with hands equally real. I look for the last word on our page and read it like permission. This is blasphemy. I look with my hands on her face. I feel for the crease of her mouth that once was so much more but there are no eyes left to see it. I have it like an idea only this inaction is more. It is a world waning into void, so near but soon, not near enough. How can this be a direction? We move apart. We are still here. They say we will be different but nothing has changed, nothing ever does. I do not hold the door open, I do not wait. If she comes through I will not know it. I do not honk before leaving, I am there, she is not, I go. I turn back down a life of sidewalks, return to the street, my car, living as only a memory does, dependent, foreign in its cradle and still this splendid thing, not held like this photo is, all that’s left.

“Wait.” she calls from behind me, and it makes me still here.

17 - Hands


Maybe it has been a long time. Inside, I hold the years to me like I once held her, like I once held all of them. Outside, only the parts of my soul I have never asked for, never wanted, feel that wash of time and are washed, a beginning taken away, always gone too soon, always leaving less behind than hoped for, even by me, willing to be rid of it all.

There is a thing that we both have made, she, for reasons I may never know or understand if I did, I because I saw what she was making and despite myself I built it with her.

She is holding my hand again. She chooses when. It seems like it should be this way. Where does my love go when it is not wanted. There are ruins reaching like my own heart to a sky, an imagined heaven, a safe place to lay down again without fear, to hold onto her, to hold onto anyone again. We never made these things. I look up at these beautiful, cold silhouettes but they are not ours. We have always built this other thing, the thing that we hold when we hold each other. The thing that we take with us when we leave. The thing we try to turn eachother into, regret that we aren’t, regret that they aren’t. The thing that will heal and kill us, love us when we lay weeping, bury us until we are dead.

16 - Walking


“I’ll carry that.” I tell her.

“I got it.” she tells me, so I let her. A child’s backpack, she drags it along behind her, somehow younger. She is small. I never knew my own age nor could I see it in another, never wanted to guess either. I keep wondering who dressed her and sent her out to school like this but there is no school, there hasn’t been for years. I ache so much my chest feels as though it is being torn in half, slowly by a god that does not exist. I touch the place on my body where they have said my heart is, it helps.

“I can’t” she finally says so I help her get the other strap off her shoulder and at first I carry it in my hand, carefully like a duffel bag then move it to my shoulder with my own drab ruck.

“Get down.. You should come down from there.” I tell her.  She looks at me, happy as though I have just told her we have ice cream, or it’s her birthday but she can’t know anything about either.

“You could fall and hurt yourself like on that piece of glass yesterday, and bad people might see you.” I tell her, but I have scared her. I shouldn’t have said anything. I should have just saved one of the rounds I have left, only fired six, the seventh would have been for her, If I knew I could do it, if I knew there would be no chance she would live even for just a minute …if they came.

She asks me where they are, the bad people, and I know I have made a mistake. I tell her that I don’t know, that they could be anywhere, that we need to be careful.

I may have been seeing things wrong. She tells me she is not a child. She isn’t. I have been stopping her from doing things, things that might have been fun, I don’t know, but that’s not it. She tells me she cannot be herself around me and when she tells me, it is like a long unused window has opened in my mind, or or in my chest and maybe both. It is like she has given me a vision but it’s not that either, I remember now, I have heard this before, a long, long time ago.

“What?” she says. I know she is not asking me anything so I don’t answer, I just look away, and for some reason I feel ashamed.

She will not eat the cakes this morning so I save them then eat them later when we are walking. She keeps asking me for juice, is that it? I tell her we don’t have any. I think of how to make it, how I could. It would be easier to make ice cream I think.

I tell her to look for trees, fruit trees but I don’t think she understands. I tell her for the juice, that we can make juice out of the fruit and maybe some water. She gives me the look I have been getting a lot from her, like I am stupid, like I don’t understand, like explaining is beneath her. Like I am wrong.

15 - Her


I see her through the scope. She is sitting or looks like she is sitting, a wall is in the way obscuring her lower half, it’s always a wall. There is something about her pose, her position that makes me think she is petting a cat or something, but if she was she would have straightened up by now.

She is smiling. I don’t think I have seen her before but a part of me, well, anyway.

Who can be happy? I pack my shit. It’s so much to carry now you wouldn’t believe. I do. I take bearings, count obstacles, place perspective on what will likely become a maze when I descend the ten flights of stair that brought me here, above the ruin of all of our lives. I leave the roof like heaven, without the wings or the sword. Below, the street feels subterranean, and though it is not, it feels full of people as well, strangers, the ghosts of people, but I am the only one here. I am lost immediately. He left me the guns. Why did he leave me the guns?

Below I pass of all things an old ice cream cart.  I think. I am hearing everything now, hearing how it used to be. I know it is not real and yet, around this corner, behind that sign, life resumes, a person gets out of their car and disappears through a glass door. A radio in a car and a woman driving it pass me uninterested. Would they care now? Would they speak to me if I was thrown back there like a prophet, bringing doom. There is no one here. There is no car, no food to be had beyond what I carry and what I have not found yet, already on its way to dirt. There is no one but me and the world my mind still tries to hold onto within me, impossibly, is too real for me to ever leave for good.

I lower myself against and slide down a wall again, the one I have said is the wall now, the last wall between us, too scared to look around it, my plan still unformed, my hope so fragile it remains unborn and I cannot make those last steps in this storm of voices, encouragements, doubts. I have always wrangled with belief, I don’t anymore. I stay sitting. I build a fire. I know how to do this, I make cakes.

I guess she follows the impossible smell to me. Anyone would. I have let not knowing how to say hello stop me from trying. “Are those pancakes?” she asks me. I think too long about how to answer.

“Are you real?” she now asks. I nod to her not meeting a gaze that for some reason will carry all of the pain left in the world. I tell her that I do not have any syrup. I imagine her taking one cake after another from me, me placing them in her hand, her smiling, happy to have anything. Me smiling for the same reason. She asks me if I lost somebody.

I tell her there is nothing wrong. I tell her she doesn’t have to look at me. Still the tears come. At some point she has sat down and at another point I have begun handing her cakes at the end of the spatula. I see my hands for real now. I think they are real because she is here. I imagine the smiling and the laughter and for some reason grass and a yellow sun and though these things do not happen, cannot happen, it does not make this bad.

She tells me that she lost someone too.

14 - Gone


I leave before the smell returns. Something neither of us wanted again after the roof, the first one, after we left home. I leave him in a way I think may hurt him still after death, the one I gave him, as though the room sees him, will see him still, in a shameful way, a helpless way, indefensible, cowarded, the way I feel.

I remember someone some long time ago telling me, warning me about being lost. What happens, what you think before you say, before you honestly say to yourself, fuck, I have no idea where I am. I know where I am.

I check the place I took that asshole from, like I would see gum wrappers in the shape of an arrow or seeing pebbles or scuffs that my mind would turn into that same arrow, that magical recognition not knowing the mechanics of finding someone. There is no arrow real or imagined and yet everything seems to say, he went that-a-way. What kind of fire would he light by himself. whould he even of went to see the man he saved, the man I later killed. Where would he sleep. I am atop another roof, a higher one, at sunset. The roof of a building I would not let us enter, it being the obvious landmark. I am there now, waiting for what I think may be an accidental signal, a carelessness by him that will call me like a neon sign. There is no fire. There is NO fire, not one, and as I slump dramatically against the low roof wall, still imagining some audience, I hurt for real, for the first time since losing him, and I did lose him.  In the place where fires should be some hope against all this loneliness remains only the dark that same hope would have driven away, calling even accidently to all. I am here.

Without him I must build a fire for the aching cavity of black within me, my fear returned in full having waited, and patiently, so long for this.  All of it has returned. At it, squinting into phantom whispers and footsteps I eat the bread of never really having known my brother. It is the coldest food I will eat in my life. I tell myself that I will eat all of it, another grand gesture to that same invisible audience. I don’t. I pile it at his feet, his leaving, and though he couldn’t carry it if he were here, I call it his. Each day I sit in greater stillness a scream inside me for the burying of it and wish the wish of a crazy man, swap words in a tireless adjudicating noose of words, the what’s and the I wills, all of it terrifying, all of it killing him.

I tell myself I will mark the day by shaving, or by never shaving again. I make solitary pacts and cut my thumb and always hold back. There is poison in the bread. Though I call the water clean there is an oil like the oil on the cake pan, always there though maybe and most likely not enough to do what I need it to do, let go, stand between us, kill me.

I can’t find you. You leave me like a dream. You’re far away. You’re always there.

til the end


We make fun of the dead, mostly, that’s what we do. I can’t believe it’s snowing again. “Fuck the living.” I tell him. He still listens to me. “Do you wish you would have shaved yet?” I ask him again lighting my cigarette. I ask him every day.

He’s sitting huddled, I guess. Army jacket pulled tight, his beard the rascal he wished he was. He was never in the army but now, now who knows. The snow lands on everything but us.

“Do you think Kasha will come?” He asks me. I smoke my cigarette. At least I have that. “Where the fuck are we gonna get coffee at this hour?” He thinks I am starting in. His forehead is wrinkled like he is thinking strongly about pain. I tell him to stand up and he won’t be so cold, but he will be. I think about that. I wish I could make him warm again.

“Open your eyes for fucks sake. Hey, Michael! Open your eyes.” But it takes more than that, it always does. I have given into the fact that he fights things still, just because he’s my brother. He’s what, twenty five years older than I am. Twenty five years. I still see this kid, skipping through the sprinkler, wonderful, pure, full of the truth of everything, and he loves me, and I can protect him, I can go first, I can give him that.

I’ll always have this cigarette. God if I could pass that back, lordy god. I see that little boy now, in tiny blue speedos, barefoot, curled like a been in the snow, shivvering, all somewhere inside his chest. He grew up alone with siblings. I wonder if he sees me the same way, some greater or lesser self inside my chest or beside me thwarted or redemed. I remember his light, it would be like him to remember my darkness. I suppose I help him do it.

He sees the car pull up, feels it. “It’s not mom.” He tells me. Were both standing. First car I’ve seen. I know it’s not her either. He’s crying. His face, his beautiful face, dried and wrinkled like he died in the sun, his hair like his fathers at the end, flowing and grey. My god he was beautiful as a child and more so as a man. His arms are still folded around himself, never warming him. He tore all the patches off the jacket, that was cool. I won’t look at her, not yet, I can’t.

“She has kids.” He tells me, barely, weeping, he is sitting now, I think, at least I hear him fall. I hate god for hearing their voices, for seeing them, their laughter, god it hurts so much to be gone like this.
I can’t make out what their saying, and then, our names, she says them and it is so perfect.

“I’m sorry I haven’t come in a while.” and she is crying now too. I can’t tell who is with her, I think it is a man. “This is Amelia Elliott Goodreaux and this,” she says, halting, choking like we are on all this grief we bear in love, in limitless love, “this is Anne Kay Goodreaux. Say hello girls.” And they do, and it is so beautiful, nieces.

There is something so true about pain, and about loving. I would not wander going back, I would stay near those two champions of my heart. They’ve gone. “I know you didn’t have to stay.” He tells me. We’re trying to kick the snow. We think of them a lot. We fear for them, all of them. I put my arm around him. “We’ll be here.” I tell him,