Years of Tumultuous Truths and Silences Kept

your currency of the moment:

This has been a year of terrible, tumultuous truths - the kind that don't stop at lowering your jaw but relentlessly continue, right past the point of breaking, hands clutching and greedy mauls chomping your air and the air of your dreams while demanding more than just a mere once-over, more than the ol’ in and out and be off with ya, almost requiring the subjected one to fall to his or her knees and proceed to lose all semblance of sanity.

You know this truth, this bedeviled kindness - Big muscled half-truths that cruise the back alleys of your psyche waiting for that moment when they can pounce, like cats nimbly-pimbly unsuspectingly, relentlessly mugging, slamming into bone and flesh the same, fish dinners and T-bone steaks, extracting all previous truths that pass as your currency of the moment, stopping only when all hope and all beliefs are stomped, trampled and hopeless.  Left to yer’ own devices, all breath gone, all eyes on the calling in the night for your mommy even though you haven't thought (really) of the fuck that took her in years, finally having her memory all to your recollecting alone in the middle of terrible, terrible times...but somehow you come to the conclusion that you're all the better for knowing you’re together in the everywhere through the thick and the thinner.

Then you're yelling that you're sorry but you don't even know what you're fucking sorry for, just that you all want this here and now bullshit to stop, this avalanche of despicable lies and deadly faces half-laughing you to tears but you can't fucking take it, you won’t, not any more so you find yourself at the end of a long, dank shaft and those beliefs are pocketed by thugs with nimble fingers skull doddering your soul from the inside to the zipper sounds and button snaps of those who are about to use you up, those who dwell where no one else can get at  (yes, the ones in your head, mother fucker), the ones who be never obtained again, even if the most skilled surgeon could be called to the scene, lights flashing, sirens blaring, a regular Rescue 911 situation.  Sitting there, half shitting here, imagining a proper send off, the unspeakable speaker crackles to laugh, crackles to death, “..roger, this fuck is fucked,” says the man child with last nights depravity on his breath, “..fucking bloody hell this one, don’t think it’s worth trying to put humpty dumpty back together again..” And then the voice is gone like it weren’t ever there to begin with, gone like memory in blue bottle dime store liquor but that inner self that you relied all these years says otherwise, she don’t say much but it’s otherwise for certain.

You know like you’ve known it yer’ whole life, you’ll never be like them because you can’t stand anythin’, the fucking same again – ever again.

These are the truths I wrestle with each time I sit down to dinner with ghosts, meals of seconds at a time of crazy, bat shit scary - sometimes emerging triumphant and eager to face the next one, some so devastating that further inspection and reflection simultaneously fucks you as you’re fucking the thought of it, ordered as required and feared as loved.

I am not the me I thought I was- nor are you, the sometimes benign paused in the shadow of passerbys, the sometimes first billed star in my perception of reality, the you I once was so solidly sure you were someone I could trust implicitly.  Then the dirt filled in the fine lines betwin’ us, o’er the sound of night slapped the bitch out of the light and these black and blue bruise lines have been crossed and checker-boarded most, fateful the judgments that have been broken and remade in the same cloth but with a different understanding, blood runs rivulets of words in my stead.  

“I can honestly say,” says the voice inside, “..I can say without a doubt, certain as I am without, I will never look at things the same way again, because after exceeding round three and moving onto the heavyweight carpet of division with big arms and wrestling, I am slowly learning to let it go, slowly learning to see my opponents side, slowly learning to ignore my instinct of pure rage and back the fuck up.”  There are places that seem to say what I’m looking for, the look of things that make no more over than, the hissing of wind to dismiss those snap judgments and - to reiterate - LET IT GO.

I have become adept at spotting the problems of those around me, as well as my own. I just can’t seem to solve them, for all the worry they’ve brought me, not knowing what’s worse, the seeing or the not being able to choose them.  I am learning to pinpoint my faults and apply amateur psychology with accurate precision, to carve away the indecision and laughing faces in the dark, to chop and hammer and cleave them the better as to think this is it, this is all of it.  But I ain’t no closer to learning what I have yet to learn is me, this game of shadows that the me I've always known to be me is somehow a dealer of good intentions with piss poor consequences, call em' a cheater's hand in a room full of cheaters with or without scruples to do anything right ever again.  

Despite my pride (albeit, short lived and totally misplaced) at being able to do so, i must finally admit that I am only n’ the first stages of becoming - and this "milestone" i thought i had come to is really just a dip in the fucking road. So in order to fully understand myself, I will attempt to recreate for you this past year of mine, but keep in the back of your chagrin, way way back in the hall closet of your imagining, a little bird of misremembering in a cage made out of forgivery – that thing we allow and manufacture, that forgiving as to forgery-ing, the mind that shapes the ultimate truth – we’re all floating in the either of boiling water, way down to nothing but anecdotal fodder...

...don’t do this but this is cool, the ISMS of the preacher in the school of the school of your earliest education, the preached is to preach as cauterized is to socialized – you know the know that is the pretend kindness, the fake of faking where you're three sheets to the wind and out of your skin but you show-enough look good doing it because you don't give a rats fucking ass if your audience is heard -- you’ve got a better story before the last word and goddammit you're gonna just go ahead and watch them point your finger and show you how you’ve been wrong all your life and laugh.  Because when you can't cry you gotta show some damn awful emotion from the inside or they win, don't they?  They ask then demand with pretty please and sugar on top and you listen yet again to these stupid stories that even you don't believe anymore.  That’s the boil, the rapidly - that's all that will be matter-factly, down to nothing more, nothing less. For the one thing I am certain of is - nothing in this world actually means anything.

And then that little voice pipes up, all quiet and not, almost squeaks if it weren't so damn weak:

"…of course I remember you, they’re my stories too, not all but some, at least a few, OK mostly however distantly, always cared about catastrophe, even colored fire..."

To which I can only say you never said whether you think He ever gave me more than I could handle...and liked the results.

[For S]

Sometimes all you want to do is run.

Until you run.  

It doesn't matter if your legs weigh a ton and your feet have sores on top of sores, toes bent and irregular, misshapen discolorations people say is nothing no matter how much time they spend staring at them.  The thought appears like dawn light in the slightest cracks in your sky.  From a dark room you can’t help but search for it, scan and retest the distance between the doors and windows since the last time you opened them.  

Calculations escalate to near random numerical values that both make sense and leave you utterly breathless.  

Finally after years of seconds have elapsed, collected in a pool of infinite reason, swirled like a cocktail of colorless sins, it all resumes in heaping quantities of purposefulness that erodes the senses and leaves you questioning the universe.  

September Trials and the Misdemeanors of Family

When I get around to finding you

among the empty automobiles and vacant buildings,

the groves that will surely shrivel and die-

I might have a bottle of beer with me

to chase the memories of yesterday

that refuse to join the sky.

I used to look forward to seeing you,

the way you held my hand

and spoke to me about making

something of myself.

Now I sit down in my usual place

and I watch words become pictures inside my head,

 the last image of the ceiling before the lights go out,

a glimpse of the neighbor next door in skimpy panties

calling her dog from the back porch.

Once in awhile things turn into something

gentle reminders that the moments matter,

the beginning and the ending of what we think and how we struggle

to change the unchangeable, 

how we put together little pictures from broken memories 

hope of doing more 

or doing less 

than yesterday.  

September 30th, 2000

..and you were gone.

So I copied your personal essay today

So I copied your personal essay today, had to, needed to make it bigger cause my eyes are blurry from too much sleep or not enough. So I’m looking at the words now, after the fact, font size large, screen size larger, and I’m thinking your first sentence tells it all – being alone and realizing you’re alone are two completely different, but connected things. The baptism of voyage, the rain and all make miles I’m guessing, not knowing if you’re talking about driving from Oakland to Nashville or some other beginning and ending. I like the water metaphor. It rains a lot in my personal stories too only I can’t seem to get the windshield wipers to work right or keep the road in focus. Is that what those white lines are for?

I keep tripping over myself. I check my shoes even though I bought them precisely because they didn’t have laces. I think my uncertainty makes me twice left footed because I don’t know whether to keep on through this inspired ramble-on or just tell you how much I’ve enjoyed reading about your happenings.

So I continue like I didn’t just write that. I tell myself writing is part of breathing and even if this gets lost somewhere between this, what, place, this make-believe place, I don’t think so but I keep going back to it like an Oakland sidewalk I haven’t seen up close before, just passing by to somewhere else. But I read on and write on because right now it’s eleven twenty-two and I can’t get back to the finding the job thing right now.

So I’m following you, alone in a car full of people. I like that thought. I often say it similarly but with different people, in a room not a car, in a situation I know I can walk away from but choose not to until it’s too late and I have to answer to someone, anyone. The idea of being closed in seems right, the kind of place I mean where you meet people, find relationship people, even end up attached people but I think it better to avoid that old cliché because there are some parts of your life where being alone is the best it is ever going to get because you don’t know any more than you hope for.

I haven’t made the effort to know your age but I remember nights like that, Arsenio’s big ass smile, not Oprah though, couldn’t get that, eluded me though I can see where she was then as a direct comment on where she was heading, is. “If I can’t see you, you’ve gone too far,” words to live by for sure no matter what kind of upbringing you have to keep your memories in – like a worn out old box, dog ears, torn and tapped too many times but not enough to keep your things from spilling out.

I cannot go to Carnton, I have no business there and realize in my realizing, I must return with dusty steps to what the Spanish call the “apple orchard” for some kind of some kind, here in California’s Owens Valley at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas. Manzanar, sixty some odd seventy years ago where ‘we’ put the Japanese, where ‘we’ employed the term ‘forced relocation’ like it didn’t mean what it meant and someone wasn’t going to remember enough about it to write it down for later, for shame.

Damn right words there, “no sense of home, no sense of where I belong.” I find your words again and then let them go. I have to continue this journey you started, this journey you shared and keep on with my own now because I have to share, because twenty-one years is a long time but my ten years seems longer, no Florida relatives here though I spent a handful of years in Belle Glade some decades ago.

Best in your quest just beginning after this one. I’m mid-road and stepping, I’m listening and wondering when the rain is going to leave me the way it left you.

Inspired by http://inkwell-masterpiece.blogspot.com/