when i'm not available by phone or email, he comes by to check. finds me passed out on the floor of the bathroom. this time, alone, i hit my head. hard. and my ears ring his words senseless while he shakes me back into lights and puts wet hands on my face. he's crying and rocking me unmoving. tears fall in my ears and down my throat. if they're mine. his. ours. no telling. wraps me up in blankets and leaves when i can't stop sobbing and asking for you.
passed out at the dr's office this morning. straight drop onto the floor. gravity opened up and swallowed me whole. smelling salts and all. it's an awful experience to feel yourself getting weaker and weaker every day. vulnerable. terrifying.
instead of whatever it was that i was supposed to be doing and after i said into his stupid ears that this thing that never was -- isn't -- i smoke-it-out with val and christophe. they let me talk about you. and love. and we laugh intense longing. because we're moved by the sense. oh, god, eff. and. slurr. light it up, light it up, flame on. and on the return my dimple hurts and remembers you in the heart of this heart of the way our spoons drifted sleepy headed so many nights into you being the thing that always made my smile wry and easy. just like sunday mornin.
because in the position that i've created, i don't get to be that selfish
maybe i mean selfrighteous
i'm leaving that last post only for my own edification
without cracking the cover.
i should have known i wouldn't stay your favorite poet
forever
likely, never was.
01. Sandalwood
02. I Know What You Want
03. Chill Out (Things Gonna Change)[John Lee Hooker]
04. Sullen Girl
05. Oh Me
06. Three Babies
07. It Feels So Good To Love Someone Like You
08. What Happens When the Heart Just Stops
09. Easy
10. Mandy
11. Alcohol
12. Touch Me I'm Sick
13. Meteor
14. I Suck
15. Never There
16. Camel Walk
17. At My Most Beautiful
at work, after the sickness, i sat at my desk and drank mt. dew and ate snack mix and read comic books
a stranger's toilet and bathtub, a locked door, 4 empty wine bottles, 7 cigarettes, and a few hours, i sit still and press the phone hard against my lips. dial the combination of numbers that correspond to your voice. only half a ring of courage. disappear again into people.
my right hand smells of strong coffee and blood because sometimes things take time not yet medicated only potentially diagnosed still weak incoherently stumbling days into nights i scream and scream at the floor and the blood and the strained way things take time sometimes leaking out from everywhere i am nothing but being nothing would be better than this and i keep seeing her--on the overpass her tiny pink hands rising out of the pavement waving at my empty space aluminum bowl insides--another morning like a sickness she lies locked in the storm drain plastic baby girl hand next to the white plastic tip of a smoked cigar like trash she and i cut and i run cry unspent memory destroyed into quicksand pavement life--she finds me at home rising out of the ashes surrounded by smoked cigarettes and the lonely shivering street lamps at night she finds me at home drunk and waiting for the way things take time and i want to pull her out of me like smoke into lungs but the locks are broken and even though we both have keys and we've walked through fields of crashing crickets like dancing girls the man says there's no way to mend that harm and then i crash and fall and break skin like memory and hear your voice saying words you've never said to me that things take time
something happens in the span of time between words. a simple pause for breath. long years of silence. the distance from we. dissonances that either sustain or betray. no longer sparks of anticipation that make my finger tips buzz. make my head rock. just the slow steady deepening of a bruise like the malaproptic quality of love.
The first post I made on this blog in February 2002 was this quotation:
"The story one has to tell won't be anything important.
So one can just as well write it down. Take the edge off this incurable propensity for writing, simply by giving in to it without taking it seriously. If the trick works, one is saved for the time being. I close my eyes and what do I see in my mind? Nothing important, as I said, and you can tell it's not important because it comes of its own accord, effortlessly, without being forced, no pattern, no significance. A page is torn from a notebook; once again the work schedule isn't followed and you make no progress in the grammar book. A few titles scribbled down, tentatively, as they come, something already worked out in the head, as it turns out, little stories, for later. When, if not now?"
-- The Quest for Christa T., Christa Wolf
One is saved for the time being. Yes. But in the last three years it's evident to me, in this moment as I sit here drinking cold coffee and sobbing tears I don't deserve, that I haven't reclaimed anything. And that even though I could have, and I had my chance -- I haven't constructed anything at all.
during a brutal and grueling battery of tests and blood draws and drinking nasty fluids and waiting and going through the whole thing and not eating for forever, my doctor asks to listen through my back. hike up my shirt a bit in the back and breathe into the cold circle roaming my back. i'm already only half there and terrified when i hear her say, horrified, -- what is this? because in consequence of all of this, i've forgotten about the blue black bruises peeking out of the tops of my low rise jeans swelling its own concentric circles around my lower back. and i stammer, pause, look blankly into her face. and easy lies like i fell or i had an accident won't occur to me until several hours later, instead all i can see is you and me on the hard surface of my bathroom counter several days ago now and how sometimes in the roughness of the way that we are we sometimes leave these visible reminders of ourselves. later, i pass out in the chair, and hope that the blood letting will, this time, be one of the last. ~
right now
the wind howls like the ghosts of lonely holidays and the atrophied knees of giants. behind the glass i shake and shake like dogs at the shelter waiting for homes. inside the dark-as-dogs glass eye, i. of the memory of my larynx and of aluminum skies. soundless bridges. generators of nothing. cold howls the shake; my firecracker skin.
certainly, in my life, i've hurt a lot. i've been hurt. i've hurt other people. sometimes intentionally, mostly not. i've watched myself in memories underneath the heels of boots and fists. i've watched my skin seared by the tips of cigarettes. i've watched myself in the mirror and wondered why those memories look so much like me.
there they stick, like memories do. and yet can't compete with the hurt i cause in other people--the way i alienate and maim so many people that i love so much more than i love myself. i am so much damage to love. until i turn and turn and that mirror me becomes nightmarish and small. hideous. unmanageable. something to be caged and left alone in a very dark room.
