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.