Bird's World, Franklin Park Zoo, Boston, MA

Bird's World, Franklin Park Zoo, Boston, MA

broken things

Today,Topanga State Beach, CA

Yesterday's kitchen Floor, Los Feliz

And the Same is True of All of Us

As I drove back to work from a lunch hour that involved me not so much eating as watching my dog relieve herself, I put on my sunglasses for the first time on this lush and grey Thursday, the Sun finally coming out just in time to set. Just like every other trip in my car for the last two weeks, I was listening to Juno’s “This is the Way it Goes and Goes and Goes”. I started to sing along with his low, soft scream, and I thought of you. I don’t remember if it was something funny you said, or your laughter, or the shape of your face, but I thought of you, and that memory made me happy, and I wanted you to know that.

No.

You.

I’m talking about you.

You may or may not dance at nighttime through the dreams of others like smoke or candy or a great and monstrous train, but I can guarantee that during every moment of every waking daytime somewhere someone is thinking of you. Maybe it’s your mother or your boss, or maybe it’s the last heart you broke or that quiet special someone who can’t ever seem to get you off their mind, or maybe it’s your third grade teacher or some guy at American Express carefully monitoring your credit card expenditures, or maybe it’s me, but somewhere someone is thinking of you.

Don’t look so surprised. Have you seen you? Go ahead. Look in the mirror, close your eyes, and take a good, hard look at you.

You.

You are beautiful.

You are talented.

You are kind.

You are you and you are loved.

You.

You feel that?

You’re smiling.

Because you know I’m right.

literature man walks through town

patchwork

skull

A still-hardening skull crashes into a crib of gravel. It’s like a spool letting loose, the clattering of tension, a rolling that lasts from here to the hospital bed. That man, the one of whom you’re a parcel—an unanticipated exclamation launched through hollows—folds you over his shoulder. You’re six plus feet up, ears ringing like the testing of a tornado siren, and he’s murmuring to you, just barely, over the idling autos, pushing along his bike and yours.

The vacation has been called off. You’d been presuming sprung pup tents, the cool moisture beading over you—a storm, maybe, smothering the fire and relegating everyone to the lighting of flashes.

Where you are is named for saints. There’s no record of how you made it here, but this is where you’ve come to be entangled. You’ve sprouted tentacles. Their guts are as empty as your own, but they manage somehow to lend you cloying moisture at specified intervals.

He had a story that he always told on camping trips about a one-eyed banshee named Cy who’d taken an axe to the breadth of his family tree. Transient, wayward, county-hopping, Cy was always at the heels of your hiking boots. In the same way dreams inspire treacherous rebirth in supplicated combatants, dusk awakened the fury of termination in Cy. There were rumors that he’d licked the blood from his axe, so to say he had a taste for it was not just figurative.

Early summer, the smells and sun melting over everything. There is no way to retract the windows—the coverings are pulled tight most of the day. You have the vague feeling of nothing really being wrong with you, that all of this is just something into which you’ve been wrongly placed. They feed you into machines that swallow you whole. Blood is drawn; cards pile up, flimsy toys bought in the lobby below. There are other visitors, but what you’re aware of most is how he keeps watch over you, pacing back, sitting down, occupying himself by stroking your brow.

It’s all a rehearsal for the way that days can wind down. Statistics bob over you, incomprehensible charts. You’re just beginning to understand the significance of numbers. Percentages lilt. The doctor, who is covered with a field of exploded follicles that pause only at his eyelids, pays intermittent visits. He speaks a language that translates to silence—eventually he palms your crown.

As you’re putting your shoes on for the first time in a week, they come across with a menu. You’re horribly tired of frozen grapes. But you’re rushed out with nothing.

At home, still disappointed that the fennel-laced accouterments could not be yours, you take the glossy sides of Mylar balloons to the uncombed mess of your chlorine-wrecked hair. They cling to the wall and stay there until they pale.

***

It’s well known that lights kept on in skyscrapers prompts the collision of birds in the night. There is that sound, that smack, late, against the taut slant of the tent wall. The tapping of an axe. You crouch deeper into your pumpkin-colored sleeping bag and flex your leg out to make sure that he is still there, keeping watch, lungs expanding.

combat and ballet

marilyn (feather ceiling)

Marilyn's face would have kids lassoing around her, wide loops of wide and not so wide kids, the fat or bones dancing on their bodies as they whooped up and down, taunting Marilyn with weird constructions. "Helium buttons, balloon skin!" "Frosty the Snow Bitch!" "Baby woman, go home on the range!" "Knotty tree cranium, sick, sick!" "Scareilyn bear face!"

Marilyn opted out of caring. "It's a coping mechanism," the doctors (specialists, all) would tell her father, who loved her very much, and her mother, who buried her shame in thick, boastful gradients of pride. It wasn't that at all, the reason Marilyn more or less sealed her lips shut for anything other than to eat and drink the things she liked.

She'd kick down the country roads that lead like a cross from her house. She'd walk until long after her knees were sore and her shoes started to slope from outward pronation.

As she walked those roads, she'd listen to the wind scrape the leaves on the trees and the nearly blond wild grass until it all rattled, and tried to align cadences with the shuttering cicadas.

She'd take it all in. She'd gulp it down like it was lemonade. Predators swooping out of the sky to swiftly murder prey, the patter of chipmunks on mud, a branch smacking down, roaring. She'd reach up to her horrific face (they said that and she agreed so it must be fact) while continuing to walk and wipe away bits of sweat that the humidity of late August pulled from her.

The reason she blocked it out, all the theories and taunts, was this. This was all that really mattered, she knew, was all that was real. And the falseness of the rest of it terrified her.

Not the guitar solo for 'Love Spreads'

aged and grown...so far

I sit with me and I wish for better company
The horizon line gets near--
but I can't see it anymore
All I can see is your face in front of mine
songs will fill tomorrow.
but I long for yesterday--
when those hours lasted for all those days
and through all those nights
and the stars. i can't count or touch the stars.
but I want to kiss your face--goodnight.
I can't reach that high above the earth
where you shine so brightly among those stars.

It's all sharply defined
referring to the equivalent of me.
Elation fades past days
Let's imitate the real thing and
exaggerate our courage.
Fake pleasure in the details.
Let's create an analogy
for the purpose of understanding
keeps on spelling out the obvious...
nothing has the same effect as you.

Cut holes so you can see through
my windows and my words.
You were the best looking one in the room tonight.
Losing light with desire--
the dawn is lying to me again--for so many years in a row.
I think that dream was you.
moving in me.
Curiosity is overwhelming me day by day.
but I won't be killed again...
that cat died nine times ago.