Saturday, August 29, 2009

I Will Give Them Singleness of Heart and Action

Joe, he was angry as fuck. You should have seen him. That fucker spit blood like lava and wiped that lava from his volcano spout, and Joe sayeth onto Robert with a great mountain of knuckles, you shall devour the Earth. And Robert did. And it was good. Pay-Per-View good. And men cheered Joe's wrath. Men would change their lives for Joe, they would pray to him, worship him. These men were afraid.

This Dream Has Stayed With You For Some Reason

The thing about this beach house is that I’ve never been here. I am here now, but I have never been here before.

A small cottage home on the Bonita coastline on the Gulf of Mexico was my uncle Gary’s every summer and we lived there and solved crossword puzzles with the smell of suntan lotion and sand all over everything on the second story patio for a week. It was ours. We read library books and laid in cold bedroom sheets with the smell of aloe vera and the cool burn the sun left on our backs. In the other room beers were drank and conversations were loud between Nana and uncle Gary about whatever the ocean breeze brought to mind. When the lights were off in the bedroom the conversations kept on, and the light of the livingroom shined in from the alcoves atop the wall. Their voices crawled under the door and banged against the walls.

This beach house, this one here with the rear slider, with the fancy oak and glass things, with the sad and empty playground out back in the dark of midnight, the solitary swing, this isn’t our beach house. I’ve never been here. But my family is here; not uncle Gary. At least, if this is his beach house, like the one he shared with us and made our home on the Gulf, I do not see him. Dad, on the couch. Sean. Nana. Mom’s upstairs in the bedroom. Let’s go for a walk, Nana says. Sean says, Okay. The beach house with strange oak and glass is set back from the water; the old metal swing is in a back yard, with green grass, and a sidewalk to the right leads to the sand and black licorice water. On the coast, to the left and right, are buildings, high-rise condos and multi-story homes. This beach house is nuzzled behind those buildings that Nana and Sean are walking toward. They left the slider open, so I step out, watch the moon a moment reflecting soft white on the buildings and the sidewalk and the water and sand. The breeze sways the swing a bit. But there is no breeze. The swing is swinging alone. I go inside quickly, afraid, pit of my stomach knoting as I slide shut the door to this strange beach house where my dad sits on the couch.

As the door slides in front of me I see him; reflected in the glass but not a reflection, transparent but real, on the swing. A dog. Dark, black or a dirty dark brown, short hair, I don’t know if he has a collar, if he belongs to anyone, if he has a home.

Push me.

I’m frozen, looking in the glowing tiny embers in his eye sockets. They are the eyes that take me from my quivering body and an inch to the left. Dilate my pupils. Jackhammer my heart. They are sickening, orange tiny dots sunken into alcoves on his face that are grotesquely too large for them. Yet, they are sad, frustrated, alone.

Push me.

I can’t push the dog. I can’t walk to the swing. I can’t open the door. I can’t move. I’m sorry. I can’t. I break eye contact. Walk away. Breathe and feel sick.

Something’s wrong. A deep, guttural horn roars. This is not our beach house. Dad sits on the couch, staring at the television. Sean and Nana still aren’t back. The horn growls and shakes the air. Mom’s upstairs. Mom.

I run to the upstairs bedroom. Mom’s sleeping on the bed, atop the covers and comforter. Everything in the room is nautical; a life preserver hangs on the wall with red stripes. Mom wears a sailor’s suit. Mom, wake up. Wake up. Something’s happening. Mom rouses. Something's happening.

Out the window, there she is. Her horn groans wildly, and then it is quiet. She glides in silence, the monstrous ocean liner called possibly Titanic or perhaps Lusitania. Ghost lights dotting her sides like stars stare dim on into forever.

There is no sound, it is calm and windless.

Mom. I hold her in my arms, against my chest.

This is not my beach house. I didn’t push the dog with the ugly, tiny, lonely eyes burning orange. He wanted to be pushed. On the swing. He asked. I didn’t push him. This ghost ship is his frustration. These ghost lights are his loneliness. These cheeks with the tears are my regret. My shame of the fear that froze me. Kept me from grabbing the chains and pushing, back, forth.

She’s gracefully crashing up the beach, crushing palm trees, smashing condo high-rises as she clears her path. She is poetry and she does not blow her horn to interrupt my terror. The bow looks at me as I hold my mother in my arms and I look at the bow, the ghost ship’s supple breast, no longer crying, just waiting. The nipple offers her milk and she collides with the beach house I’ve never been to.

Cradle

Cradle the child in your arms, the child me, the child that is us and we might make it through this one. We’ll make it through this one, this soggy wind, this shingle shamble, it’s dry and warm and we’re safe in your arms. And I might sleep with the dust of you in my eyes, and I might wake up with the grain of you under my skin, and I might listen to your voice for just a minute.

The nightlight, it sends the past shooting like rockets exploding through our very souls, and it fades to teary eyes but don’t cry, oh no, puddles all muddled in the present, a wet walk to the future surely.

Just touch me, I miss you and I love you tonight like never before and that is true from the depth of it all. Just try to see the bottom. Just try.

Read the bedtime story with the sleepy lids please tonight

Carpe Gutter

Frozen starlight filled her eyes, echoed long through ivory remembering.
Vast and eating is blackness in its final stages of nothing.
Starting over.
Starting ov
er.
And was it anything to wonder, to watch lucid and night-eyed.
You tickle in my throat through ventricles and twitch the edges of a smile, a drop down face skin.
Blueglow touches the edge of everything, but we own black, so it is ours.
The blue, the glow is tomorrow and it is not mine, it is not yours.
But we own the black, so it is ours.

December (the cliche)

Dying isn’t so hard, look away and it will pass.
Glass is brittle as bone trees, breathe out she says.
Snowflakes are just like everybody else.
A clear sky, overrated.
If my fingers could find the bottom of this bathtub or the conflagration of this chimney top.
Wouldn’t that be something?
Yes.
And time and minutes and moments and forever and never.
Ever.
Snowy, isn’t it. I can see my breath I can see my breath I can see my breath.
All misty on your silly smile, melt.
And the world dies with you.

Is It Raining On You?

Yesterday can't be taken back and tomorrow can't be taken yet and today is.

Coming from dreams. In. Deep depths maybe never.

Only real thing worth sleeping finally is a tear from you.

For the taking, my one.

For the taking

451 and Something Wicked in Green Town (in brief review)

Men selling lightning rods in storm colored suits. Wild adventures between book pages and the smell of cotton candy and licorice, the sound of a calliope. One boy Ying, the other boy Yang. Contrasts in poetry, uncle's carousel of darkness comes to mind. Brilliant.

The temperature at which paper burns isn't the only Ray to catch the eye.

I Think I Saw Myself in This Puddle Once

The walls are different now, but they’re as empty as the ones 150 miles from you. In these moments of innumerable depths and dark sadness, I catch glimpse of the nothingness of being without you. It makes me sure, it makes me steady, it makes me found.

It makes me look at the sun setting, filling the sky with orange soda and all the beauty in the smile of a star, and realize how absolutely fucking ugly it is without you to smile back at it.

It pulls through my throat, my heart, my eyes, it pulls me to you. It’s always pulled me to you.

No matter what, no matter where, no matter when, it’s you and it’s me and all those songs, all those words, all that sadness, all that emptiness, was a place in my arms you were meant to fill.

I want you as my wife. I want you as my friend. I want you to twist inside me until there’s no letting go.

I want you to know that I know who we are, and I want you to know that who I was is almost yours and nothing more.

Please come home soon.

Don't Slow Down

Have you ever stopped to catch your breath and realized, OH MY GOD WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE AND THERE'S NOTHING I CAN DO TO STOP IT. YOU CAN'T STOP IT EITHER!!! WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE??? AND WHY AM I DOING ALL THIS SHIT TO BETTER MY DYING SELF??? HEY! YOU THERE! ARE YOU HAPPY? DON'T YOU WALK AWAY FROM ME, OOOOOH! IS IT BLACKNESS? IS IT BLACKNESS WHEN I DIE? IS THIS GOD GUY GOING TO BE MAD AT ME? I HOPE NOT. WHAT'S ALL THIS ABOUT FIRE AND BRIMSTONE? BRIMSTONE? I MEAN, COME ON WE HAVE METALS NOW. STEEL POLYMERS AND ALL THAT. HEAT RESISTANT CLOTH MAYBE? HOW DO I GO BACK? HOW DO I GO BACK TO BEING SMALL? I'VE GROWN FOND OF THIS LIVING THING. IF YOU DON'T MIND I'D LIKE TO STAY HERE AND....HEY! DON'T YOU WALK AWAY FROM ME, OOOOH....

I don't recommend it.

Yellowstone Road

I ASKED HER, "SO,YOU WERE ALIVE DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION?"

I asked callously, not because I was a callous child, but because I had been alive for less than two decades -- two decades which were securely distant from accountants jumping out of windows wrapped in ticker tape, or middle-class homeless people, or cities made of boxes.

To a kid that had been born in 1984, words like "great depression" and "cardboard city" were nothing more than size 10 print in a high school textbook. The apathetic nature of my viewpoint was not intentional, but rather an inevitable circumstance of the human mind in which experience can never be an equivalent of non-experience. My mind could not attach a genuine emotional response to the depression era, because I had never in my life experienced the things I read about this time period. It was interesting to me, but I hadn't thought twice about it when approaching her with this question.

Like a bull in a china store, or so the cliche goes, I asked with a big stupid smile on my face. Her reaction made me feel more foolish than any single event I can recall in my brief existence here on this planet.

She didn't speak at first. Her face tightened, eyebrows brought together and lips tight. She seemed to have quietly taken her leave of the present, as if where her journey ended was so vastly distant from the chair she was sitting in that the act of processing thoughts became delayed like a radio transmission from the moon.

She was quiet, and still. I waited silently.

I don't remember exactly what she said after that -- it was something like "I don't want to talk about it." But it wasn't really what she said that effected me so deeply. More accurately, it was what she didn't say.

Hazel Gallagher (or as we all knew her, Grandma Hazel) was a woman who lived for one hundred years in this crazy world. Although some of us knew her only briefly during that one hundred years, and couldn't possibly begin to piece together her entire life, we knew that she was a good person, and a caring person, and a strong person. We knew that whatever it was that she had been through in her life, she had somehow gotten here, and that had to count for something. Perhaps it counted for everything.

I didn't know where Grandma Hazel went that day in her mind when I asked about the great depression. Honestly, I don't think I'll ever know for sure what she was thinking. But I do know that Grandma Hazel is not and never was an old lady lying in a nursing home. She was not wrinkled skin or hearing aids, as we remember her most recent physicality. She was not a mentality of delusions and mirages of the past.

Hazel was many things which we know and many things which we don't, but she will never simply be a victim of a dying body, in the same way she will never simply be the victim of the great depression. Sometimes things that are brilliantly complicated are also beautifully simple.

Hazel Gallagher was my Grandma Hazel. You may never understand what that means, any more than I understood what Hazel couldn't bring herself to say to me about her past.

But I guess the point is that understanding and knowing are not the same. I don't pretend to understand Grandma Hazel's life, but I know Grandma Hazel.

I think it goes without saying that everyone who had the privilege of knowing Grandma Hazel loved her and misses her. But I also believe that the perseverance of her soul will forever outlive the longevity of the human body, and perhaps that is something we may all take comfort in.

Love you always Grandma.