159.
I wait on the back porch and I smoke and stare, absent, at my reflection.
I thought I was waiting for you (in a way I was).
I waited on myself. Waited to come back around.
I grin, a grimace.
Luckily it’s lost in smoke.
There’s a hound ‘comes around.
He lives with me now.
Sirens pass and he sings along with long-lost, far-off friends.
He turns his back to me to sleep. More than I can say for you.
(Though I’m sure you’re behind me, just behind me, and not turned away.)
This was the summer you picked up junk and I worked in a kitchen, the only girl.
The world must’ve been trying to teach us something about hard work.
(The “world” and the “universe” are, of course, cheap euphemisms for God.
When I pray for you I suspect that’s to who, but I can’t be sure.
The world is a gentler concept. That I can handle. That I can use.)
I take long drags and you take short.
We talk at length in intermittent monologues of cautious optimism and tempered metaphors for heartache.
Not -break. Neither of us utter such a suffix.
At work I lean into the prep table, conveniently pelvis-height, as I ladle gravy onto plates, and picture every last one of the guys I work with bending me across the thin steel surface to fuck me from behind.
In these instances I spill the gravy down my hands.
New Orleans was the first and only trip we took together.
Remember? When I broke my wrist in a graveyard and (theoretically) no longer allowed myself to drink gin.
You said, “You’ve got to climb over the wall before the pain sets in”,
and later, in the car ride home (8 hours in an Ace bandage while poorly received Mariachi music played),
“Focus only on the pain. If you try to ignore it it’ll just come back worse”.
Fuck you (for being right)
You haven’t said anything prophetic like that for quite a while.
How could you? When you’re the prophecy.
A common adage is that addicts are narcissists. True, but too easy.
They are things designed to implode that invariably malfunction; they don’t mean to think only of themselves.
Self would have to be an entity worth considering.
Self, for them, is the feral cat that was supposed to have drowned in the river with the rest of the litter whose survival doesn’t translate into redemption but spite. And felines, they know vengeance. Their memory subsists on it.
What can one do when it paws at the door? Give it scraps of dinner, a bed, make embarrassing sounds of emulation, let it sleep on your chest and watch it rise and fall with your breaths, hope it forgets the mewling sounds made inside that drawstring bag from Wal-Mart that the very sheets you two sleep on now were packaged in, wait.
165.
A masochist can relax in a sauna.
The heat visions/sweat stings
give meaning to beauty.
Sacrifice the skin
slough it off.
166.
I’m near to tears on September 11th (2013), though not for them.
I’d like to have loved them but I didn’t know them and I’m no Walt Whitman. I am selfish. That doesn’t negate the fact that I have known loss. To what extent is questionable. To what end is unthinkable.
Plans, I had so many of. Filed in Dewey Decimal. Clutched tight in manilla folders.
My friend threw a party for the fourth of July where six people got stabbed.
She told Channel 2 news that, “No one was intending.”
We’ve got instincts instead of intentions-- let’s not give ourselves too much credit with regards to higher consciousness.
There once was a boy and a girl & they loved each other very, very much. They were going to travel the world. They were going to make music together; she would sing and teach him how to dance. She was the heroine of their story until heroin became the heroine and she the damsel in distress whose knight was too junked up to help her.
Junk, smack, dope-- nuh-uh, you are! Childish names for a substance jammed straight into the vein.
After she found out, she still called him Snugs and he still called her Scout.
“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”, so sayeth Snugs on their first date.
Many moons have passed since Scout thought to term anything pretty. Pretty is a pastel word. It would clash with this blood red Rothko of a summer. Darkly beautiful, perhaps, but that is mundane in its predictable tragic quality.
Novelesque is better and gracefully nods to the poetic circumstance that this month marks a year, that this date is reserved for mourning, that I grieve in tandem with a nation that knows nothing of my small personal disaster, that there is immense narrative irony in my anniversaries:
February 14th with my first love, September 11th with my lost one.
168.
I drank all the wine in Georgia.
So I had to leave.
169.
Carl Sandburg doesn’t write poems, he takes inventory with a faulty checklist.
I read him on the bus, so I can cross him off my itinerary.
Spencer’s at Peachford Hospital and I’m en route to Paris (via Greyhound to NY). Both of us shaking off some sorta sickness that’s rotting us up inside.
Our timeline, once uniform, has stretched to snapping by reaching into the recent past and far future in the span of several days.
Lovely Honduran transgendered gentleman speaks endlessly but can’t talk to me, though we try. I ask him if he slept well. He replies, “Julio.” Shows me a picture of a glamorous, gorgeous, if heavily-made-up, woman. “Me”, he says, spreading an elegant hand across his chest.
Julio has a boyfriend in each US state he had visited. The guy who hands me bag upon inexplicable bag of Doritos hadn’t seen any other place before he came to visit his cousin in my hometown.
“How’d you like Atlanta?” I ask.
“Too many faggots. Too many gays. Men come up and hit on you that look like females. It’s unnatural.”
“Oh.”
I wait on the back porch and I smoke and stare, absent, at my reflection.
I thought I was waiting for you (in a way I was).
I waited on myself. Waited to come back around.
I grin, a grimace.
Luckily it’s lost in smoke.
There’s a hound ‘comes around.
He lives with me now.
Sirens pass and he sings along with long-lost, far-off friends.
He turns his back to me to sleep. More than I can say for you.
(Though I’m sure you’re behind me, just behind me, and not turned away.)
This was the summer you picked up junk and I worked in a kitchen, the only girl.
The world must’ve been trying to teach us something about hard work.
(The “world” and the “universe” are, of course, cheap euphemisms for God.
When I pray for you I suspect that’s to who, but I can’t be sure.
The world is a gentler concept. That I can handle. That I can use.)
I take long drags and you take short.
We talk at length in intermittent monologues of cautious optimism and tempered metaphors for heartache.
Not -break. Neither of us utter such a suffix.
At work I lean into the prep table, conveniently pelvis-height, as I ladle gravy onto plates, and picture every last one of the guys I work with bending me across the thin steel surface to fuck me from behind.
In these instances I spill the gravy down my hands.
New Orleans was the first and only trip we took together.
Remember? When I broke my wrist in a graveyard and (theoretically) no longer allowed myself to drink gin.
You said, “You’ve got to climb over the wall before the pain sets in”,
and later, in the car ride home (8 hours in an Ace bandage while poorly received Mariachi music played),
“Focus only on the pain. If you try to ignore it it’ll just come back worse”.
Fuck you (for being right)
You haven’t said anything prophetic like that for quite a while.
How could you? When you’re the prophecy.
A common adage is that addicts are narcissists. True, but too easy.
They are things designed to implode that invariably malfunction; they don’t mean to think only of themselves.
Self would have to be an entity worth considering.
Self, for them, is the feral cat that was supposed to have drowned in the river with the rest of the litter whose survival doesn’t translate into redemption but spite. And felines, they know vengeance. Their memory subsists on it.
What can one do when it paws at the door? Give it scraps of dinner, a bed, make embarrassing sounds of emulation, let it sleep on your chest and watch it rise and fall with your breaths, hope it forgets the mewling sounds made inside that drawstring bag from Wal-Mart that the very sheets you two sleep on now were packaged in, wait.
165.
A masochist can relax in a sauna.
The heat visions/sweat stings
give meaning to beauty.
Sacrifice the skin
slough it off.
166.
I’m near to tears on September 11th (2013), though not for them.
I’d like to have loved them but I didn’t know them and I’m no Walt Whitman. I am selfish. That doesn’t negate the fact that I have known loss. To what extent is questionable. To what end is unthinkable.
Plans, I had so many of. Filed in Dewey Decimal. Clutched tight in manilla folders.
My friend threw a party for the fourth of July where six people got stabbed.
She told Channel 2 news that, “No one was intending.”
We’ve got instincts instead of intentions-- let’s not give ourselves too much credit with regards to higher consciousness.
There once was a boy and a girl & they loved each other very, very much. They were going to travel the world. They were going to make music together; she would sing and teach him how to dance. She was the heroine of their story until heroin became the heroine and she the damsel in distress whose knight was too junked up to help her.
Junk, smack, dope-- nuh-uh, you are! Childish names for a substance jammed straight into the vein.
After she found out, she still called him Snugs and he still called her Scout.
“Isn’t it pretty to think so?”, so sayeth Snugs on their first date.
Many moons have passed since Scout thought to term anything pretty. Pretty is a pastel word. It would clash with this blood red Rothko of a summer. Darkly beautiful, perhaps, but that is mundane in its predictable tragic quality.
Novelesque is better and gracefully nods to the poetic circumstance that this month marks a year, that this date is reserved for mourning, that I grieve in tandem with a nation that knows nothing of my small personal disaster, that there is immense narrative irony in my anniversaries:
February 14th with my first love, September 11th with my lost one.
168.
I drank all the wine in Georgia.
So I had to leave.
169.
Carl Sandburg doesn’t write poems, he takes inventory with a faulty checklist.
I read him on the bus, so I can cross him off my itinerary.
Spencer’s at Peachford Hospital and I’m en route to Paris (via Greyhound to NY). Both of us shaking off some sorta sickness that’s rotting us up inside.
Our timeline, once uniform, has stretched to snapping by reaching into the recent past and far future in the span of several days.
Lovely Honduran transgendered gentleman speaks endlessly but can’t talk to me, though we try. I ask him if he slept well. He replies, “Julio.” Shows me a picture of a glamorous, gorgeous, if heavily-made-up, woman. “Me”, he says, spreading an elegant hand across his chest.
Julio has a boyfriend in each US state he had visited. The guy who hands me bag upon inexplicable bag of Doritos hadn’t seen any other place before he came to visit his cousin in my hometown.
“How’d you like Atlanta?” I ask.
“Too many faggots. Too many gays. Men come up and hit on you that look like females. It’s unnatural.”
“Oh.”