April 2007 Archives

Daddy liked to laugh. He would laugh when mama got in the car and stormed out the top of the hill. He would laugh when he told us the dirty jokes we were too young to hear. He would laugh when he should be crying.

I wish that I could be laughing. Laughing all of this off, but it bites me down to the core and I find the humor hard to find. I cannot laugh. No jokes are funny. Not even donkey dick. I don't like to tell the old standards.

How can there be a joke when we can treat each other as horribly as we will treat one another. Of course we can attack another country, of another religion, and kill thousands of innocents when we can treat people we love like absolute dog shit.

We are such selfish beings and despite the fact I have argued differently, I do believe we are utterly broken little pricks - boys, girls, women and men.

Ha ha ha ha ha!

Millions of diamonds and the clipper ships out on the water tonight. All of the dreams of a nation, or at least a nation of two, hanging in the balance belief gun blasts and random expletives in foreign languages. Appeals to heaven fall on deaf ears. God has not been here for too long. Yet we still pray, and pray, and ask him to deliver us from this. In the morning the sun rises high and the men on the TV promise something better as they tell of something worse. Children with guns, our innocents, take aim at our hearts and lives. It all was not supposed to be this way. It was all supposed to be a field day. It was supposed to be kids playing soccer. Poor kids, but playful. The ingrown toenail feels as if it fills my boot tonight. I want more than this continent can offer, and it can offer more than my home. I felt love once, but I gave it up for passion. The heat rises. The desert swells. It is the dry season and I will only think of you on occasion as I try to sleep alone.

Chocolate cream cheese muffins on Sunday mornings
and baked good smells all other days,
aging hippies and younger hipsters,
and Bobby at the market and
that place where all the initials are carved
in the sidewalk's concrete
and the House of Nine Cats and the
AA meetings at the Methodist Church,
and runs around the park, and walks
past the big houses bordering the park,
and then the lady with the longhair cat,
walking with it around her like a mink stole,
and the trick or treating teenagers, and
a house filled with ghosts, friendly and other,
and the mural that the kids did, and festivals,
and cyclists, and flowers, and the Jamaican man
I gave too much money too, and the one in
makeshift robes that I ran from the porch,
and the crazy neighbors I know, and the crazier
ones that I don't know, and ground zero for heartbreak,
and ground zero for coming into my own, and
a place where too much money was spent, and
too much time was wasted, and where my heart felt
at peace so much, where I thought I could spend
the rest of my life, I must leave you soon, as well.

Tonight the ukulele cannot play latin tunes,
the flamenco band has all bedded down in the third wheel,
Chad coddles his daughter who cannot sleep for want of her mother,
and Robert half-sleeps hoping the men will not come again
to steal his money, and take his cigarettes.

The ten dollars from earlier in the day
has been used for one Big Mac, a regular fries,
one bottle of Wild Irish Rose, and a new pack of cigarettes.
The rest was given to a friend who seemed
like he could put it to better use.

All of the beer bottles are empty and
the refrigerator can offer no more.
There is nothing left to say
so you and I sit across the kitchen table
and stare at the wall behind each other's head.

On the answering machine awaits messages from strange men
trying to take what's left of the money.
The moon seems full in the sky,
even as it appears a sliver.
The knives are all washed and tucked neatly away.

When I was a child, on nights like this one,
we would run naked through the woods and down
to the little tributary full of crawfish,
and even further through the briars,
torn flesh flapping, down to the lake shore.

The sliver of moon then, no matter how sad,
would prove to me the night sky smiling at us.
We never ran out of things to say back then,
even if I don't remember any of the conversations now.
The quiet of that wilderness left no room for silence.

Now my legs hurt too much to take that walk.
My tongue is swollen stiff with talking.
I just stare at the wall behind your head,
thinking of the wonders of paneling and paint,
and wonder when you will get up to leave.

Trying to fight off the sleep that seems to only come when not wanted and then never again. The stomach tonight will begin to eat everything including the actor, starting from the inside. What movie will it be now, now that the whole library is in the piece of credit-card-sized hardware. You could not make this, up, the lineup looks like The Man from Laramie, Say Anything, Bright Future, Husbands and Wives, Ulysses, Moby Dick, White Noise (book not movie), a self-portrait of John Irving done in cursive, the most recent issue of Reader's Digest. And there is the man painting pictures of Jesus, and Mary, and the disciples, and Calvary and the Cross, and the dream finds me in the church, then in the hotel and then running from the man with gun that wants to steal my stories, but they can't be stolen. "They are my stories, you fucker!" I give him all of the paper, but there is encryption and invisible ink, and he talks like Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, "G'head! G'head!" and Jon Voight is dreamy but not so much as Jimmy Stewart, and I play all of the parts, especially Hoffman and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, in this dream of this movie of these movies in my dreams, I play all of the parts except Jimmy Stewart, I could never hope to be that good.

Know my friends that you are valued above all, that so many of you have come to me out of these bad circumstances, and where I once stood and viewed this all as sheer horror and detriment, I now see as a whole new opportunity, another step in growing up and growing closer. I value you all in your kind words, and sympathetic sulking, understanding bitching, and well-deserved, mutual, bitter humor. I felt for so long that I was alone in the feelings I was harboring over my stupid fucking situation, but I realize that we have all been drug through the horse shit before, your testimonies have shown me as such. Thank you so much for the wisdom you have imparted, and for the constant reassurance that saying "fuck it" is not bad, in fact it is preferred, and for being there to show that there is so much life to be had after moving on - that waking up from the nightmare can bring such joy, hope and promise just from realizing you are finally awake again.

Was playing: How Fucking Romantic by The Magnetic Fields

"In Israel, nubian ibex prepare to duel over a mate... These are actually young males, but their fights are dead serious. The loser may never get the chance to breed."

- Discovery Channel's Planet Earth: Deserts episode

We were never truly happy

Do you know how to pronounce it? It is Or-y-gun not Or-uh-gun. Does that side of the country seem like a dream to you? If he had arrived after a letter of arrival you would not have had the charge as much as you have had. If you had not protested as much, I would not have known the extent to which you love him. I have made myself available for random babysitting rendezvous. The occasional frozen pizza and mix-up of heartache. Did you ever think we were practicing, or at least auditioning for some role that we wanted, but no longer believed we would fulfill? I could feel so many things, and fill so many things, including yours, if you would allow. But those places where my body has been exist in a world more adult than childhood dreamers, fairy tale fantasies. I wanted that too, foolishly. I will roll around on this chipped wood carpet, and wait, and wait, and wait. YOU ARE NO LONGER EVERYTHING. You may indeed be nothing at all. A blip on the screen that never landed. I can feel the movements. The dance numbers have begun. The world has shifted. I have been asked into matrimony, and I do believe my response may be yes I will yes, I say, yes, I say yes, yes!