Month: September 2011

Disclarity.

These last few years have been a matter of both physical and psychological winnowing. Nibbling away at the flesh to get to the bone.

It’s this thickness. It’s like standing in a vat of gravy. Wading in days-old soup. This sidewalk is walled in on both sides. Arms out, stout traveler. Cede your path to me. Rails press in until I’m through the door. These clothes, these fucking clothes. I kick my shoes off and step through the hallway into the large space I have allotted for music and books. Tearing the air apart with flails and hefty breathing. Out on the balcony I can still feel wood beneath my feet. I bend the front of my feet over the edge and it’s only one more step until I’m free.

I’ve never been good at countering baseless insults toward someone I care about. Any rationality I possess goes out the window and I get the urge to punch a motherfucker in the face.

No one discusses power. People fear it like the plague in an era that has seen officials take and wield the power that ought by rights come to the individual. This is as it should not be: in my hands.

Things mellow out when you accept that most of the people don’t care about you except for a small number who are inexplicably there for the rest of your life.

Someone explains a personal problem: “Alright. How do you plan to overcome this problem? What’s stopping you from overcoming this problem? How can I help you overcome this problem? If you aren’t happy with your plan it’s time for a new plan. Why haven’t you come up with a new plan? What do you want to do? Why aren’t you doing it? What will you do after you thought about it for a while?”

Just shut up for a moment. Can you do that? No one understands losing control of one’s mind. It’s this torture. It’s moment after moment of thoughts and fears that aren’t rational. This is what no one can grasp. Not even me. It’s fear of everyone, especially the people who love you.

Keenly aware of the risk with words. Fucking keen as a fiddle. Never know when a bunch of words said in earnest might be taken as a lie, do you? Nah. It’s bound to happen after too much saying. Tell me this, say that. Flat voice don’t make the words any nicer.

Contrapostal. You are fine. Let’s fuck.

I am not yet beyond hedonism.

No one believes when it happens again.

I suffer from this condition. Perpetually bad memory. I’ve forgotten many things. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to earn my first paycheck, money earned for my hard work. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to be able to buy something for someone I love. I’ve forgotten the nervousness of that first time with a special girl. Holding her hand.

You like the things I write.

It’s the poet boys who ruin the women I love.

My initial problem with orgies, back in the olden days, was the awkwardness of it. The people who invited me to these things were friends. People I saw fully clothed on a regular basis. The thought of showing up, probably getting drunk and high, and then fucking some girl I’d be discussing U.S. History with the following week while surrounded by others who were also in the throes of coitus was too much for a repressed kid to handle. Now it seems like a healthy, zesty enterprise.

My father was never in a war, but he was shot in the back. He carries the bullet in his flesh to this day. He was beaten mercilessly as a child and forced to leave his home at the age of fourteen to look for work in a country that was unkind to foreigners and brutal to innocents. He could have died many times, he says. The only thing that kept him going was the drive to work and survive. Eventually, he became focused on family. His mother and once sadistic father occupied his thoughts. He sent them money as often as he could while he idled away in youthful indiscretions. These facts have been revealed to me slowly, timidly, with the passage of time. I do not know his purpose for telling me, but I suspect his age is beginning to catch up with him. He has to wear glasses, which he is not fond of; and his hands, the hands that kept him employed for decades, begin to fail him. Every now and again we discuss these matters of aging and adulthood. He interprets these discussions as self-doubt on my part. Searching for guidance from him, lost in a world he has never understood. He doesn’t know what I do, who I associate with, where I plan to go. He fails to understand the man I have become. The father becomes limited and human. The son asks the same questions of himself.

A man is always in the shadow of one who came before him.

Forceful, violent, and unwavering. The word no one likes to say is rape, and with good reason. Unwilling participation voids the intimacy and reduces one person to a loser, forced to copulate by any means necessary, and the other to a victim in a culture that supports guilt and shame for the victim but not the attacker. And yet that sense of “taking” is undeniable. It is a sexual tour de force.

Sitting in a car not in my control, staring out the window. I am there a man in the sense that I am fully aware of the weather which I can feel on my crisp golden arm, see in each pair of bare female legs beneath khaki shorts and fluid floral dresses, and not feel a moment of hesitation nor florid thought about either. In that present I am aware of what is, and only now do I bother to interpret the scene.

All meaning can found in expunged fluids. Sweat, urine, shit, mucous, cum, and so on. I want to remember where these words came from.

In considering and writing about the past year (volumes at this point), I proposed that some people are little more than human databases. Anyone with working memory can remember facts, of course, but how to utilize them? How do we interpret the information and make use of it? In my case, the information is collected. Details that shouldn’t matter are filed away in a database for some future purpose that may never come and is almost never immediately accessible.

The valley between your hips and the wrinkles of your armpit. I could live here. I could dwell in this place, in the present, and forget the sunrise ahead. It could be lying in the darkness of blind certainty. The tremor of melancholy would do little to shake me.

Relax. It’ll better or it’ll get worse. You’ll find your way there regardless.

Minorities

As kids and adolescents of mostly African-American and Latino descent we were always guided to prepare for a fight. There was always adversity. We were never told we could not do anything, in fact the opposite—we could do anything we wanted. Like the proverbial boy who cried wolf, we heard about adversity and the possibilities so often that we ceased to pay attention. School meant nothing and work was required for disposable income. Everywhere was that infernal cry: “No babies! No babies!”

We were minorities. Most of us didn’t give a shit. It was just the world we were placed into.

99W

I will admit to you that I expressed false interest in a For Sale property down off 99W, somewhere beyond Tualatin. I’m bad with names after the fact. What I can tell you is the day I showed up was a hot and humid day, so hot that the fabric of my t-shirt’s underarms and the space between my scapulae was significantly perspired upon. I parked my jeep in a gritty driveway that crooned when I drove along it. The foliage of the lone tree in the front yard should have been on its last summer legs, ready to give in to the coming fall, but it was bare, likely dead.

The man’s name was Greg. He was an older white gentleman, clean-shaven and sagging around the jowls. Greg let me into the farm house where several other people were already walking the halls. The paint was on the verge of collapse, swelled in some places and stained a curry yellow in others.

“You’re free to take a look,” said Greg. “Let me know it you have any questions.” I thought to ask about the tree, but given I had no real interest in purchasing the property I went on my way. I wandered the halls, weaving through an empty living room, kitchen, dining room, and bathroom. The toilet was immaculate, which made me wonder about the severity of its state for it to require replacement.

There was a smell of wood that became stronger in the foyer, nearest to the stairs. I lingered there for a minute, feigning interest in this wall and that, then wandered up the surprisingly noiseless steps. They were warped, scraped, and would take much work to repair, but as I would not be living there I put it out of my mind and moved up to the top floor. There were several open doors. I could see cardboard boxes stacked inside one of the rooms, what must have been the room above the front entrance. I sidled in, again as interested in the strength and state of the walls and ceiling as I was in eating okra, until I was beside the cardboard boxes. I looked back out into the hall and saw or heard no one. When I lifted one of the flaps I noted that it was a box full of colorful clothing. The box beside it contained the same. I thought of further intruding upon the privacy of the boxes. My senses expressed that it seemed in poor taste.

It was time to leave. I approached the West-facing window. I could see out across the yard, past the dead branches of the lone tree, and toward the vineyard that stretched along the rolling hills on the other side of the road. I could see a small tool shed beside the vineyard, and beyond it a large white building. I considered living in a house near a vineyard and the endeavor became fruitless to me. I thought of fields in Greece, razed and trampled. I turned back inside and thought about sitting down for a while, but I had absolutely no intent to purchase the place, and so I walked back down to the jeep and departed.

Portraits

Portraits line the hall. I see them all. One is quite mature, or stoic, which is mature enough at this point in your life. He is unlike the boys to whom you still apply that word. He is likely a guide or mentor being, creative in his pursuits but still tangibly successful. He listens, consoles without coddling, and most certainly entertains. He makes you feel like you are not the child you believe yourself to be. He leaves no question about what he wants, and knows how to get it. He doesn’t need you but you need him. A challenge—basic human need. Someone of a higher level. A soulful gaze for a soulful gaze, you have nothing to lose.

I move along to the next painting on the wall.

Portraits

Portraits line the hall. I see them all. One is quite mature, or stoic, which is mature enough at this point in your life. He is unlike the boys to whom you still apply that word. He is likely a guide or mentor being, creative in his pursuits but still tangibly successful. He listens, consoles without coddling, and most certainly entertains. He makes you feel like you are not the child you believe yourself to be. He leaves no question about what he wants, and knows how to get it. He doesn’t need you but you need him. A challenge—basic human need. Someone of a higher level. A soulful gaze for a soulful gaze, you have nothing to lose.

I move along to the next painting on the wall.

Shack

Nice little shack somewhere. Wind song, stray rays of sun. New book waiting on the shelf queue. Good woman waiting for me in bed, naked as the night she chose to be mine. Jug of water, bottle of whiskey. Fresh story in my head.

Shack

Nice little shack somewhere. Wind song, stray rays of sun. New book waiting on the shelf queue. Good woman waiting for me in bed, naked as the night she chose to be mine. Jug of water, bottle of whiskey. Fresh story in my head.

I might be the demon you need.

I spend much time alone these days in spite of words about physical presence. I blow people off time and again and, realistically, I can’t expect them to be around forever. The expectations regarding my own loneliness, happiness, and sadness are adjusted accordingly. I am not in the kind of hope that causes a heart to rise and crash. My hope is a lingering thread, one I follow from day to day as I engage in my work and find contentment in simpler activities. I am obsessive about waste. Wasted time, wasted energy, paper and plastic I don’t need to throw away. I obsess about my power, who I can overwhelm and in what manner. I think of myself and write of the same.

“I,” like no other pronoun is important enough to write down. Most of the active names in my head are far from where I am.

I will not be published this year. Not for lack of submission (I’m not even there yet), but because the work is not good enough for my standards. All of this unfinished work reeks of a lack of social consciousness. I read instead. I think of Gogol (obsessed, perhaps) and his death from malnutrition at the age of forty-three. I wonder if I am too restrictive in my elimination of the unnecessary. I do not foresee this as a possible future, but I do reflect on alternatives. Fat sugar daddy dead from cardiac arrest at the age of forty-three. Father and husband dead from inhalation of carbon exhaust at the age of forty-three. Man reported missing and presumed dead in Aruba at the age of forty-three. Possibilities can make one’s head hurt. It is no wonder that I keep such tight reins on my destiny.

Reflecting on a social life: there are readings I’ve stopped attending. I derive genuine joy from seeing people stand up and read their creativity, or their honesty, especially the shy people or those who don’t know what to expect. The blood always races, even my own after all the times I’ve read or presented in front of crowds. I project certainty when I can. I’m listening to you, up there. Shaky hands are incredible. The pause to swallow a lump in one’s throat is a moment to reflect on what’s missing, such as a good friend or a cold hand seeking my warmth.

I have a rare headache. The balcony is covered in cobwebs.