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.

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.