Tag Archives: poems

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Pulses of anxiety run up my legs and rush up my spine towards my brain the way squirrels climb up bird feeders out back. They collect tiny peices of my mind and run away out into the yard. Every morning I am confronted with the awareness that there are despicable things waiting, and every morning I wake up with less and less of the pieces required to place logic and reasoning in between me and the fear. The Earth feels entirely hollow beneath my feet and inclined to crack and give way at any moment. I’ve spent the better part of 20 years stuck in that tiny bit of helplessness you feel when you go to pay at a restaurant and suddenly discover your wallet missing. 
Vertigo is my consort.
What a repugnant companion.
What an uncharming life.

I lay in my bed and listen to the overwhelming silence and try frantically to discover any type of distraction. I begin to focus on the sound of my cat patting around a small insect – Indifferent to its demise.  It reminds me of being a child in Jersey and all the times I used to bring jars of fireflies in from the field. My mother would smile. Even fully aware that I was destroying all these undeserving little things, she didnt say a word. Innocence is so endearing even though it can mean the destruction of another. A child kills something and we feel empathy, an adult kills something and we feel rage and sickness. It becomes forgivable when we know not our trail of ruined things or countless inflictions. That’s the basis of a lot of poisonous relationships in our lives. Its also the basis of a blissful, childlike existence.

My mother crept into my room each morning and threw away my jar of dead things and smiled. As if I was a cat who dragged a lifeless mouse in as a deplorable gift. To give thanks. She understood that its better to pick the mangled rodent up with a glove and a trash bin than to tamper with that type of innocence and instill the kind of messes within a child that no disinfectant can clean. Thats what we do when we are young – our selfishness and innocence is the most admirable and preposessing thing, even through the complete destruction of all else. 

My only goal in life is to never stop being capable of this. Everything else can drop dead behind me and I’ll hardly notice. I’d like to playfully rip the world apart limb from limb between my claws like an insect and then move on to another without any recollection.

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6:35am

I am surrounded by black ash. This is hindsight. Its clear as day now, but I don’t remember any flames from last night. In fact, if it wasn’t for spending my morning wafting through these fading embers, I wouldn’t have any inclination to remember anything at all. I must have said too much last night. I must have drank too much. I must have taken it too far again. But.. Too far? Is there even such a thing anymore?  Wherever “too far” is, I’d like to go there.
In fact I suppose I will spend the rest of my life looking for it.

But is “too far” a person, place, or thing? I’m intrigued by the possibilities.

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Sometimes you meet the most distasteful people who have an amazing, almost admirable disregard for themselves and others. And you sit across from them in a Tampa parking garage and listen to them lie directly to your face and its evident that you know it, but they dont break. You stare them directly in the eyes. As deep as the eyes allow. Which is surprisingly pretty far. 1000 miles, and yet still no signs of a bottom. Just a dark empty hallway with an endless amout of exits that lead you right back to the beginning.  And you begin to wonder…..Is there even a life in there?

Where did you come from and how could you possibly have made it this far?

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After the rain, the streets are impossibly smooth here as if they were composed of silk and not crumbled brick. They twist haphazardly throughout this city like ribbons strewn about, like they were dropped from the sky and left here by some lazy god.  In my own town I feel alone, but out here these ribbons drape around my body like lovers limbs.

I’ll never sleep alone out here, but in my own home, not a single tongue has ever took the shape of my name. Not a single arm has ever formed the curve of my shoulders. If I had touched you the way I touch these old brick roads, I would have never had to visit this place.

But its probably far too late. I dont know. My mind doesnt think clearly these days. I have an empty bottle and a birthday card with my name spelled wrong.
I have expletives and hard words in my memory and a couple of songs that make me feel as if the future is bright, man.

I have everything I could possibly need and I dont want a single bit of it. I come out here because not a god damn thing in this city belongs to me and nothings more romantic than that. Everyone here moves without my legs and they build without my arms. They all kiss without my lips and the ladies wear the most beautiful sundresses. They capture my heart and keep moving. The sort of girls who get a little too tipsy on the first date and kiss you in mid sentence and then walk away due to embarrassment which is the most annoying and sexy thing a woman can do.
Here in this place, the mouths all chatter and I walk closely enough to hear voices, but far enough to not make out the words like the humming of hymns outside of cathedrals.  It all sounds so gorgeous out of context,  but to take part would rob it of all its beauty due to the simple fact that the truth that lies behind any noun is hardly as fantastic as the surface.  Like bright green, landscaped graveyards with marble and ivory placed perfectly makes us forget the rot placed below.

Logic always crumbles under the weight of obsession. This place bore through me and took place of all rational thought. It’s ribbons began to fray and tie themselves in knots around my extremities.  So how could I expect any type of reprieve from coming home when I can no longer even hear their whimpers for my return? No, I couldn’t be gone long enough.

The rest of the world is consistently in frantics. Trampling each other due to some sort of instinctual pull that has always eluded me. Pushing themselves further upstream and straight into the jaws of awaiting bears. The humor of one species deep rooted instinct driving it to become nothing more than plaque on the teeth of another. So, I stopped swiming and I keep floating away out to sea, here in the middle of nowhere, to this strange town. At first, I am enveloped in the deepest black, but every morning at dawn, when the rest of the world sits chewed in the stomachs behind the mouths of bears, the sun from above the surface turns my town into the most astonishing blue hue just like the sea and, similarly, I float slowly to the bottom of it with ribbons tied around my neck and wrists and legs.

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I dont fall in love with people. Not in the present tense, at least. I fall in love with absence – and the wonder and infinite possibilities that come with it. 

Theres hardly much passion left to the flesh. I lust after it, but I suppose that could be anyone. Thats too easy and its all been done a million times over.

You see, the outside world is terribly boring and it has its limits, but in my mind….

….. she goes on and on forever. 

When we meet, hardly anything goes right but at night alone, the Earth rattles when I close my eyes. So I’ve been awake for days. 

Months.

Years.

I don’t even remember.

I don’t even care.

I fall in love with memories of women long gone.  Memories that I’ve conveniently twisted to suit my needs.

Ideas, dreams, fantasies….these are my tempestuous lovers.

But they are all mine.

Perhaps because these things can be controlled and changed when I need them to change. They leave when I need them to be gone and when I’m desperate, they crawl out of the trees and tie ropes around my neck for me.

In my dreams, she can stay safe. She climbs into my chest and closes my torso like a child hiding in a cabinet from a monster.  She waits til the footsteps slowly fade away, and when its safe again,  she climbs out of my body and lays next to it but she never lets go. She holds me like a snail holds its shell.

But only in dreams – because there is no salvation to me in real life. I am not her shell, I am her anchor.

And I make her sick

She screams at the top of her lungs but I just don’t go away.

It’s 1:30pm

Im sitting on the floor spinning an old hair tie that she left here months ago between my fingers.

And im smiling. 

I’m smiling because shes gone, so I can finally fall in love with her again.

In dreams.

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I don’t remember the drive,  but I remember the feeling of being driven somewhere.

I dont remember looking out across the river, but I remember her smashing my head against the rocks.

I remember being dragged towards the black water.

And I remember waking up with her arms wrapped around my waist. My dried blood strategically burried underneath her fingernails.
Crying and apologizing.
Not for what happened, but sorry that she couldn’t finish.
And I spattered an apology through my torn lips as well.
For the latter.

Fuck you, (name removed)
Now I have to start all over.

What a tedious task it is to find such women that lack just the right amount of chemical compounds in their pretty little minds.

Because any less of a lover would be much too unimpressive, and not as horribly alluring.  And anything beyond this type of psychosis would be too far gone.

What a strange burden is it when you have the unfortunate capacity to intelectualize such a thing.
But I truely find it hard to conceive a more passionate type of rapture than to fall victim to one another’s relentless talons. The same ones that retract and bring you great warmth you by day, rip you limb from limb at night.

These are the singular types of encounters that could only happen once in a lifetime since, through their insufferable dismantling, either one of us dies, or all essential pieces needed to ever properly comprehend such endeavors again die along with it.

And then we are too far gone.

But tonight we both know exactly what it is we’re doing.

She arrives at 7p.m.
And I know she brings a knife.

…and my mouth waters.

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I could sit and watch the lavender drip from the sky and watch roses cripple and sleep under endless layers beneath me. I could sow the bottom half of me into the soil and rust quietly.  I could count patterns of dying mammals and describe the hollowing of all sequoia and birch. My bones would slowly begin to splinter over millenia of dying land as I watch cities all fissure and fall back into heaven and the insects crawling about my limbs would evolve and then I would smash them all one by one.  My roots would turn and twist overcome this entire fucking world forever.

No god could shake me.
No history could fathom me.
And no earth could ever undo me.

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I felt a pull from offshore – from where I watched the sun press back into the earth just moments ago. A beckoning that felt as if it had wrapped its cold fingers around the bottom of my ribcage and dragged my torso into the waves. I felt my father out there among the tide, and layers of him surfaced and crashed back into each other again and again and nothing could possibly stop it – nothing I could fathom.  Every wake breaking into my chest was a funeral.  And the trees behind me howled in the wind and the lights of the hotels flickered and there was people along the boardwalk crying and laughing and fucking –  but here under the waves, under the creaking oak of haunted ships,  and between the endless limbs of leviathan – was the quieting of everything eternally.

Excluding me.

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Is longing only achievable with knowledge of a target for it? I wonder if a small bird kept in a childs room instinctively dreams of open skys even through its ignorance of them?
Yes. There must be something burried in the soul of all creatures which makes them feel unbearably culpable of thier disguarded fate, even when unaware of it. The same instinct that causes me to be crushed by the weight of places I’ll never go. The longing that makes my heart ache for passion and love, which I certainly know nothing of. Perhaps I’ve kept myself intentionally bereft all this for so many years that my daydreams have become deep-rooted and habitual. I wonder if maybe it is not a matter of instinct, but of compulsions born from continuously running from everything I secretly desire. Perhaps it is all my doing. Suppression is, after all, the main culprit behind all compulsions. So here is whats left; Twenty-nine years without fascinating journeys abroad or whirling, singular love stories. Twenty-nine years of self-inflicted disillusionment.

Outside my window, I can hear the rhythmic juxtaposition between the scraping sound of the wind against the top of the lake out back and the grinding of cars on the highway pavement about a half-mile down the road. Car alarms and birds chirp flirtingly back and forth to one another and burrow themselves into my subconscious – to be used in dreams at a later time. My desires and fears tangle into one another like the most insufferable fabric that separates life, awaiting just past my windowsill, and my all my years of abandoning it to pursue an existence compiled of nothing more than vivid daydreams with images taken from books I’ve read and pictures I’ve seen. Yes, even my fantasies are stolen.

I thought about writing her today,  but my body would certainly cripple and my fingers would snap in all cardinal directions. This is one of the many inconveniences Ive collected through life. How could I write her as such a tangled, broken mess? And what, anyway, would I ask of her? ‘I cant have you back, but please dont go away?’ The foolishness bubbles up beneath my skin and I may as well just smash my face endlessly against the blank page in front of me and have whoever finds me – snapped and splattered – mail it to her, still dripping dark red with my insecurities.

The inconveniences I’ve collected through life drape fittingly about my limbs.
I wear a hideous fabric that only she would adore.

I rummaged through my head for memories to live in.
     It was 5am the other night that I found her standing at my door. Im still not entirely sure how she got here. A strong current must have ripped her from her life and the undertow must have dragged her towards me, down to the bottom of the world where I make my home.
       I watched as she took a drag of her cigarette. The dull light from its end revealed her eyeliner, diluted and pooling grey beneath her eyes. I wished she wouldnt cry but it makes my heart ache for her. The only thing more lovely than her misery was her happiness and I felt greedy for wanting it all. It was her curse that she would have such a wonderful glow, even under duress.  The whole ‘rest-of-the-world’ surrounding her was pitch black and meaningless to me. Im amazed that shes here. Im amazed at her tangled, wet blonde hair and I’m amazed at the new cuts on her hands.  We sat on the dock over the lake and talked about the futility of modern romance, the deaths of our fathers and the dismantling of whats left of our sanity. 

These are the memories that allow me to live here alone. 29 years of nothing else suits me just fine. These daydreams – and my garment of inconveniences draped over me to keep me warm.

She spoke about a crooked, old, wooden house in the dark that visits her at night. A reacurring dream she had or, perhaps its a coping mechanism that allows her to participate in this world, but as she rests her head at night, she wakes up frantic in that terrible place.
The house represents a rusty safety-deposit box in the back of her mind and its inhabitants were thousands of traumas and tragities she suffered through life pieced together to compose scowling, putrid creatures that live in the attic and, at night, slither thier raw bodies down the steps to tangle themselves in her blonde hair.

I feel as if that is where I first met her, in the den of that creeking, old house.
That den was the eye of a great storm that streched the expanse of her entire life. We lived there – so temporarily – among the dusty books on the shelves, and we traded them as if what we couldn’t express through tongues or our bodies pressed against one another could be effectively spoken through those pieces of literature. But I knew I had to leave soon. I did not belong in her dreams no more than she belonged in the home I’ve made for myself at the bottom of the world.

That is the curse of a disobedient mind like mine. The drive that constantly lures me to her – To a life I know nothing of and a love that finds me unsuitable. Is the same drive that pulls me away, trembling and guilt-ridden. What was I doing in that old house? How did I find the key? What brought me to that den burried deep in her mind? Did I come there to dangle the illusion of safety in front of her?

I am irrefutably driven by the bleakness of this life and cannot help but to call out to her, endlessly, from below. From the bottom of the world where I made my home. I sing to her like a caged bird in a small childs room and what could I bother to expect?  Of course I could not expect her to stand outside of this terrible cage of mine and be content. And what would happen if she awakes in that forsaken old house at night?  My arms would fall short desperately reaching out to her through my rusted bars.
They would cripple and my fingers would snap trying to hold her and keep her safe.

29 years of disguarded fates and barren fields. 29 years of waiting in that den holding an old skeleton key and calling out to something I instinctively know awaits, yet am still unable to bare. Something that I somehow know of, but still couldn’t possibly fathom.

I threw the blank paper away and went back to the windowsill.

I still sing to her from my cage. Even through my ignorance.

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Monday.
The clouds have apparently grown suspicious of our actions down below and sunk down into my city. They peer into our empty streets and into our bodies, in our mouths and lungs, and spread themselves through town as if an obscene, thin cotton.  This sky-sludge has no business down here. In fact,  I doubt it could even bare life below and the curse of discovering its own mortality. No, it should stay put with the idiocy and ignorance above, far from this city and the terrible lights illuminating the far worse.

It makes me think of the fear.  Not to say that the fog instills fear in me, but that I suddenly fail to see a difference between what haunts me and the dark sky thats been dragged down here to surround me. They both start as a light, inevitable nusense but gradually tend to seep into every corner of the world, including those hardly yet discovered, and can grow so black and omnipresent that the world as you may have known it (even just a day ago) is hardly recognizable and scarcely perceivable.

Ah, so thats it. This thick paste of the atmosphere has come to mirror the pitch black of that which is happening inside of me. It’s come to crush me. Stepping out in this dark city tonight feels as if the god’s are shoveling the entire sky down the back of my throat. It’s the same feeling I had in my dream, watching K fall off the balcony, and hearing my dads voice outside my bedroom door saying “im sorry”. Its like the fog is not enough and I’m suffocating on the entire universe and all I can hear is a muffled voice from outside,
“Christian, I’m sorry. Alright?
…..Can you hear me?”

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