Reflections

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Toll Booth Holidays

It’s Christmas time but not Christmas, the Thursday before the Friday when my whole world turns blue, black-bruised, faces cracked through, my eyes lose to swells and skinned knees leave lips busted where sidewalk scuffs show carpet struggles against every excuse to leave and never believe. Ten year old boys know how to lie, smile to make people think they don't cry sometimes, easier gone the other way than said out loud, felled instead, down when you can’t stand walking out one more time. It's no good, the good of temporary salvation when dawn brings the senses back and sobriety makes car keys find locks driving at all hours in the dark of trying...sighing. Roads know that in order to go to and fro you have to know hospital emergency room glows, the taste of jail cell metal bars ringing closed and sneakers sliding across linoleum shiny floors. Lonely knows only that grocery store orange makes shelves all the same color except the stock you already forgot, children during the unbearable reason you're glad you didn't keep yours when you stopped bleeding. Filled to choking, chimney black smoke knowing this way that don't have anything to do with having, normal knowing you don't own nothing, no prepubescent identity crisis when someone don't come around after your adolescence got robed to pay rent so you can watch your nighttime soaps so adults don’t make wallboards crack, leave lasting impressions, body shots and permanent blues that don’t survive no matter how much we block them out inside. It's them lines not the lines connecting times that make kids the kids in other peoples living room pics, kids doing the work of picking up after storms have chased men under the spell of cop-light-red and might not be-blue scattered in wet wood fruit orchards black with rain and misremembering. It's the cord wood in my memory of stacked wood like staircases to the hereafter of family battles taking lives much later, the victims of circumstances in the muddy soon after when talking tries to make the happening black not right another time talking about the same hiding. The more you make it less the harder it is to be Christmas, the less lights make warm rooms inviting and, stuck on remembering the harder it is for take-offs, replaced with crash landings. The less you count the clock the more time there is to move in a little closer, let go a little farther, enjoy five feet and rising, not ten will get you twenty for reminiscing, held up at toll booth holidays that don't make change this time of year.

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Some elated..others still worried about the future.

Fortunately you came with the power, red hot heat where I never thought I'd be warm again, words wet-wrinkled forehead colored answers for the Jeopardy of unmanned disasters. I imagine the same people gathered in kind tired kitchens, living room dark hiding carpets but not the smell from leaky toy poodle incontinence; shoulder-bent strangers make lounge hours together where radio dial glow makes hard shadows lighter than thousand pound questions like why don't they make blankets for thin skin shiverers or pretty jackets pull-able over warmer inside kind of durable instead of hugging greasy fat faces and stubby finger places reminding me that moving is sometimes like standing still, sometimes waiting, sometimes ending before the inevitable misrememberin'.. Sitting here in the orange of morning coming, blue-black cold colliding where I was only a little while ago in dreams dreaming I could do anything when I was younger and better at upright, fighting alright, needing to believe I can somehow get back to being just OK no matter how far I've come or gone or hope to belong, it's getting harder at pretending to be living when I've always been so much better a lover seeing, until now, this is all so very much wrong, coming and going in the same lines leading to never being here with the tears - when did I get so good at almost not quite never again? Here in the waning years, October gone, November falling all around, December looms and voices collect on the news, me needing to warm up to wake up to get up so I can claw my way through to the middle of knowing I can do this again tomorrow only better, I can live again instead of all this dead kind of being, long gone from who I used to be when I thought I'd never be, this aging, this bent to breaking, the boy from all those years long gone who used to stand on ditch banks looking far away, lost in alfalfa fields and corn stalk scattered squares for rectangles, setting suns and blossoming orange mornings, I don't know where I've been or how I'm going to get away from knowing this is broken and it has to be different even knowing, deep down in my wounded all, I know what it has to be going on even if not long, now or maybe ever, dreaming and going to be.

Friday, November 09, 2012

...

No other outlet looks like this, no place to lay down, no way to make the air less uncomfortable, sand. In the having of no way of seeing, in the dark like kites and kittens and trees, like stray shards of clarity calling bottles and cans clattering, make-shift containers emptying, you are the lost, erect, the bludgeoned and bruised, the talk out loud noise desperate to be heard instead of knowing the truth: there in tall grass shadows in making believing you could have been catching instead of traffic signal heading for red, green, yellow, red gone instead of dead. Wanting more doesn't make you more than anyone else running to catch up to running but, limbs don't work that way, you can't stay, I've been watching you leave since you got here even when I wanted you to stay. More than you is less than ever having had this escape clause space ship audible buzz, the rumble one more time when it was never all that inescapable, cemetery stones aren't for marking they're for saving, names in stone feel like we have a place to go when no one else will show, hallowed uprights spell nighttime culprits, you stole more than I had to offer, deep down, deeper still where these broken limbs make poor shadows pretending to be porch light, one more like last time, the old man's voice coming to chase you away but I can't even do remembering that right. Not any more. Not here without you. When I want to go back there, gone to the really gone, I turn my dreams off, shut down the quiet that seems so silly, smudges in dark carpet of heel to toe might not show it but always seems to say it, tipping past crumpled beer bottles past potato bag chip might, lost when we're caught up in the illumination, same sort of reasoning, making forever last until there ain't no one left, except, nine months line lights up, what's a bastard anyway you ain't been waiting for, no place to lay down, no way to make the air less in my remembering.