I feel like I'm watching our child starve but I'm not
I feel like a prisoner but I've got freedom and opportunity minus inclination
I writhe and shudder but I walk around on two feet and do my taxes every year
it's a very painless process
I feel like I'm watching our child starve
this soft bundle of flesh out in the street
under the rain
under the snow
flicking locusts off its head
but hey
not at all actually
but why all this feeling
I know the disease and the antidote is time and distance
no magic pill no magic beans
just physical therapy and routine practical application of established principles
positive routine
repetition
positive routine
repetition
i'm in the mirror now bracing myself:
you will see her and feel something
you feel something now and it's dread
now mockingly
poor you
boo hoo
how dare she not nurse this joy
the gall is too much
so you scoop it up and hold it to her breast panicked
but it's not a child
it's a bundle of rags
a potato wrapped in wilted lettuce found in the trash
you're acting like it's the apple of eden
but it's not
not at all
it's not the thing you think it is
you are a maniac
i am a maniac
i think our child is starving
but it never was
not a stillbirth
not a missed period
just a pretty little idea we had that one of us fed and one of us starved
i was a fool and i still am
the errors and missteps now painstakingly clear of course
our ballet of innocence and adoration really
drunken footsteps baked in clay along a fossilized riverbed once passionate once actual passion now dried under the sun to be remembered for ages like the steps of weird ill-fated fauna in the awkward age between dinosaur and man
all I can think about are the afternoons and mornings we spent
hearts racing, my graceful hands and her clumsy mouth
the thrilling taste of skin and salt
somehow polluted with three words she spoke first
that simple series of sounds that made me feel soulless for lacking sense to say it first
and now, again, here before you I'm watching our child starve in the street
but I'm not
it's a bundle of rags and I panic while it perishes from neglect
and i have been shivering under the sun since spring
feeding scraps of my flesh to this bundle of rags
cherishing it and keeping it warm
rocking it softly to sleep
me, a human being
once royalty and now a vagrant in the city of love
starving and ashamed
cradling a heap of cloth
I can see things clearly
I'm longing for something still
still
despite everything
despite the foul air and the dreary solitude
hope grew in me like cancer i could not excise
but i thought my heart had grown two more chambers
that was false
and I am here
standing before you
now
here
today
look at your watch
today
i'm almost ready to tear it out
no time for tools
no time for a quick swig of alcohol
i'm here
i am breathing quicker
nervous and excited and scared
this is what i've been training for
here
now
shallow breaths
sweating
like the throes of passion but not alike at all
ready to tear everything out
and there's still more fear than excitement
until there's neither
there's only my obligation to myself and a wooden scalpel in my hand
then seeping in from somewhere, concern
not for what I am about to do
but what I let this turn me into
Thursday, August 15, 2019
out in service
Saturday mornings to a kid in the typical American household are sacred. They're for cartoons, maybe little league practice, some sort of sleeping in, etc. That's what they're for. Eat some cereal in front of the television and do whatever else you pretty much feel like other than what you might get dragged to by your parents. Every Saturday the sun goes up on the sleeping faces of America's children and lights the way forward for whatever they'd like to get into.
Personally, I can't say I ever dreaded Saturday mornings but I never really looked forward to them either.
Most, maybe not most, but a lot of those days for me were filled with something all children adore- proselytizing. The dictionary defines proselytizing thusly- it's the one thing every kid wants to do that only a few lucky ones actually get to do and it involves knocking on strangers' doors and asking them if they'd be interested in accepting some bible based literature written to let them know about god's plan for the Earth- Armageddon.
Proselytizing.
Yes, friends, I was one of Jehovah's Witnesses. Did you pick up on the grammar there? I was one of Jehovah's Witnesses. Not A Jehovah's Witness, not a Jehovah, but one of Jehovah's Witnesses. So truth be told I often referred to myself as a Jehovah's Witness, but being older and wiser now I can remember the phrasing to be 'one of' rather than the indefinite article 'A'. Very important stuff I'm happy to drag you through.
So Saturday mornings me, my older brother, my younger sister, would all get woken up by our parents to go out in service. More jargon, "out in service." That's what they called it when you go knocking on doors at 10am. Probably still is now but to be fair I haven't checked in on the happenings of the Christian congregation in quite a while. I actually don't believe in god at the moment. Or maybe I believe in god and hate god. Any way you slice it, my soul is up for grabs.
Here's a little more to set the stage- my father is Puerto Rican having moved to New York City around the age of 8 and lived in Park Slope for many years. My mother is mostly Irish and got more than her fair share of abuse out on Long Island in a town called Ronkonkoma smack dab in the center of Long Island. They met at a district convention for Jehovah's Witnesses held at Yankee Stadium in the early '70s. They were both serving punch to thirsty attendees and one of my mother's first memories of the man I call Dad is him making a fuss over how concentrated the punch was or whether people were handing out too much or some other triviality. They wed quickly, as religious youths are wont to do, him being nine years her senior. Part of that was my father's wish to extricate her from her abusive environment and part of it, I'm sure, was the flamboyant dexterity with which my mother served punch.
They lived in the city, then Jersey City, and then on Long Island in a town called Centereach even more smack dab in the center of the fish. So smack dab they called it Centereach. Not a rich town, not a poor town. Maybe a little poorer than surrounding towns, but everybody did OK. It might have just sucked a little bit.
I think everything sucks for everyone no matter where they lived or where they grew up. Poverty is only that in comparison to comfort and stability and everybody does such a good job at keeping up appearances that it always looked like everybody was ok. Hard to say in retrospect how good or bad we really had it out there but I grew up without a Nintendo and one year the school gave us food for Thanksgiving. Weird to get that from school because we didn't officially celebrate the holiday, but I think it was just the matter of my dad being unemployed at the time. We ate it with neither ceremony nor mention of the holiday it represented. Probably on a day other than Thanksgiving or as we called it Thursday.
We didn't celebrate the holiday because we were Jehovah's Witnesses and they don't celebrate holidays or birthdays, but you probably knew that already because you have probably made fun of me at some point. I'm sorry, I'm sure that's not true. You're a good person. You have tolerance for other religions and are respectful to all creed and culture. You have that in common with everyone from Long Island.
Ever met a Long Islander? Most likely they have charmed you with their accent or their nail art and regaled you with some endearing and heartwarming anecdote of volunteering at the local children's hospital or soup kitchen. Just kidding, they probably disgusted you with their accent and nail art and told a story of the time they didn't care about something they definitely should have cared about. All of everyone is exactly that. If you're from there I am talking specifically about you personally and we have a problem we can discuss later the way we were taught in keeping with the tradition of our people by cursing and screaming. Internet sensation Bagel Boss guy is from Long Island, and that's how all of us are, all of the time.
Long Island is one suburb after another from Queens to central Suffolk. It's not awesome. There are beautiful beaches but they're chock full of obnoxious townies. Once I went to the beach on Memorial Day and there was a fight. It was ignoble. I stand before you as a mournful ambassador apologizing for all the human backwash flooding up from Penn Station into the city on days like Santa Con or any given Friday. I'll pause and admit that not everyone's experience out on the island may have been as miserable as my own and I will happily admit that there were and are good things happening out there, but for a while, for me, it was really touch and go. If there's time I'll tell you about the kid I played street hockey with who robbed my house with his pals in the summer after 8th grade. He turned out a minister somewhere in Florida and tried to reconnect with me via Myspace friend request years later. Or the first (in fairness first and only) time I saw cocaine at the high school lunch table or the kid I was best friends who wound up in jail for manslaughter or something for shooting heroin up his friend's arm and the kid just ups and dies. I know, these things happen, but it's important for me to provide a complete picture because I'm sure your vision of Long Island is a wonderland of beautiful homes and Saturdays filled with lawn mowing homeowners and well-intentioned religious apologists meandering through friendly neighborhoods touting the promise of a paradise Earth via Armageddon to grateful and receptive friends they haven't met yet.
Now as far as all that goes, I was one of those friendly apologists and I did that until age 18ish on most Saturday mornings. Saturdays would start with waking up and putting on clothes for church. We called church "Kingdom Hall" but for convenience's sake I'll say church. I went to church three times a week. Church three times a week and if we were lucky some bonus door to door time. We called it that colloquially, "going door to door". I'll say that again, I went to church three times a week and got to canvas Long Island neighborhoods every Saturday morning and I turned out fine and never wondered what it was like dress up for Halloween.
Who really needs Halloween, when you get to go door to door proselytizing? And we did it every Saturday, or Sundays, or Saturdays AND Sundays, or really any given day on summer vacation. Typically two hour stints and an average of 4-10 hours a month. I was what they called an 'unbaptized publisher', and as such my father thought it best to shoot for about ten hours a month of going out in service. Plus church three times a week. Every week. For 18 years.
Okay, so wake up, brush teeth and hair, put on some church clothes. All my church clothes were well fitting, classy, not handed down, and smelled great, especially during wonderful wonderful puberty. Again, simply false. I stank and wore whatever I could scrape together. I remember having a lot of church clothes because we'd take whatever anyone would give us, and I also remember nothing ever fitting right or looking totally normal, and we're talking 1980 to 1999 when fashion wasn't really that fashionable. All a kid really needs is a tie, a button down shirt, some slacks, some goddamn slacks, maybe some penny loafers or those leather shoes with the two tassles. How hard could that have been? Moving on, I'm dressed in whatever was lying around, smelled like I was dressed up in whatever was lying around and we're in the car and we go to somebody's house to meet up.
Time for the inside scoop.
These little meetings were well organized, mostly. We'd meet up in a group ranging from five to twenty or so and we'd know what neighborhood to venture off into because we had maps. We had little cards called 'territories' that were basically just maps split up into little cards and we paid attention to where to go because we didn't want to inundate any particular area with too much of god's truth, unlike my brain. So if it ever felt like that, somebody wasn't doing their job. So we meet either at the Kingdom Hall or somebody's actual home, organize ourselves according to who's going where, somebody prays, and then we go out into the world, usually carpooling so there's not a parade's worth of vehicles on any particular road.
That's where the fun begins. We park our minivans or whathaveyou and soon the neighbors know we're coming and they're out on their Long Island porches with pitchers of lemonade on small patio tables and the ladys of the houses are in aprons standing with trays of tall glasses to welcome us and our bible based tracts and magazines. We barely ever had to knock seeing how the good news of eventual Armageddon travels faster than we can walk. We'd get lemonade from one house, brownies or cookies from another, maybe a glass bottle of Coca-cola cracked open from an old timey coke machine in the garage of some weekend mechanic fixing up a Shelby Mustang. So many soft drinks, so much appreciation for the truth of the one true god, all happening on pastoral Long Island. Such a familiar scene to me I forget that most people never got to experience the joy of coming of age as a young disciple of Christ who didn't celebrate his birthday, didn't say the pledge of allegiance, knew Santa was bullshit, and smelled like other people's food.
Again, there was actually very little lemonade. I can't actually recall any lemonade, but to be fair we weren't dodging garden hoses or water balloons either. People were either polite or they weren't. We'd walk up to doors in pairs, with one person taking the lead and the other providing some sort of support, or even better it was me and my Father. I was a kid and the script went something like this:
"Hi, my name is Jeremy and this is my father, and we're coming by offering a bible based publication called the Watchtower, this one's called 'Do All Religions Please God?', and if you'd like to read it I'd leave it with you."
Easy-peasy.
That's an actual title of one of those magazines from September 1996. Not easy peasy, the 'do all religions please god.' I googled it. For many years we would charge twenty-five cents a magazine, but that changed at some point, then they'd get it for free and we'd ask for a small donation if we felt it appropriate to do so.
My dad was a little more wordy. He'd ask some actual questions, maybe make some small talk, no big deal. It would be somebody's job to write down who wasn't home so we could come back and find them some other time. We'd also write down who took a magazine so we could follow up and see how they liked it. It was serious business. There were lives at stake and as such, there was a lot of accounting. Every year, in a Watchtower magazine, they would publish how many hours were spent door to door in each country that had people spending time going door to door. It's a lot of countries. It truly is. Our good friends at Wikipedia tell me that these humble bible students have grown from their inception to number somewhere around 8.5 million members.
The best part... ahem... the most godawful insufferable part of doing all this was doing it as a kid. I'd get real anxious about knocking on the door of a house where somebody I went to school might have lived. Kids can be mean, even on Long Island. They can be mean to kids who do different things, like not say the pledge, not decorate Christmas things, or not sing Christmas songs because they were "against my religion". That's a line I'd serve up pretty frequently. Against my religion. Anyways, I only had to knock on doors of a kid I knew's house a handful of times but I'd always be on the lookout for bikes, basketball hoops, any sign a child might be present in the house because if they were and I went to school with them well that would just be the worst goddamn thing in the goddamn world. Worse even than being out in whatever weather other than rain or snow, worse than missing cartoons, worse than not celebrating anything, ever, even the things we did celebrate.
Kids would ask me if I knew how old I was. I actually was asked this the other day but it's OK, I handled it gracefully as I've been answering it for years, but I'm bringing it up because it's a real question I would really get asked. They'd ask what I did on Christmas and I'd shrug. Christmas was just another cold day in December. Like my birthday, December 6th. You have almost four months to think of a gift. Anyway, you're not really different until someone let's you know, and they will let you know.
So no Christmas presents?
No Christmas presents.
No birthday cake?
No birthday cake.
I heard you guys can't take medicine.
We can take medicine we just don't accept blood transfusions.
Why not?
Bible says not to eat blood and it's like the same thing I guess?
Once you guys knocked on my door at like six in the morning and my dad yelled at you.
Nobody does that that early.
It was really funny we chased you with a hose.
Of course you did.
Who is Jehovah anyway?
It's god's name... it's in your Bible too I thi...
So what if I got you a Christmas present would you take it?
What about a birthday present?
Do you guys not celebrate Halloween because you can only go door to door to give things and candy is Satan's vegetables?
What if you got in a car accident and needed a blood transfusion?
What if you accidentally eat blood?
Can you eat your own blood?
Will you go to hell?
No hell? Is that because your life's already hell?
How about next Christmas I bake you a birthday cake and give you a tiny glass of delicious blood and maybe we say the pledge of allegiance a few times just for fun. I can bring over some pictures of what hell looks like and you can see why my God can beat up your god.
You get the picture. I still wind up making apologies for their beliefs and my parents still actually believe in them as much as they are still practicing. All of their children have now defected. The religion has a retention rate of about 37% and I am a proud 63 percenter. I've made my peace with everything. I simply song and danced my way into convincing them to let me go off to college and got a tattoo. That was 1999. Twenty years ago almost to the day. More time out than in, actually, and I never thought about either of those facts until today, August 15, 2019.
But let's be clear-
I really feel like I escaped something. Not everybody has it as easy as me. When those kids turn about 15 they start getting baptized. That's a symbolic ceremony with water and everything where they commit their lives to god. If you fuck up then, you're disfellowshipped. That means nobody from the Kingdom Hall can talk to you except your immediate family. It's very stigmatizing seeing as how there's already a world of people you shouldn't be associating with and the ones you are allowed to associate with aren't allowed to anymore. I was never baptized, so I dodged a bullet there. Never baptized, never married young, never got beat with a bible, never touched by a priest.
I have no obligations on Sunday or Saturday mornings and I believe there is no life after death. I have nothing worth saving my neighbor from. In fact, I don't really belong to any organization other than work. I don't really belong anywhere. I've been wandering the desert for half the time Moses did and with about as much to show for it. What do I have? I have this. You. Us.
Thank god.
Personally, I can't say I ever dreaded Saturday mornings but I never really looked forward to them either.
Most, maybe not most, but a lot of those days for me were filled with something all children adore- proselytizing. The dictionary defines proselytizing thusly- it's the one thing every kid wants to do that only a few lucky ones actually get to do and it involves knocking on strangers' doors and asking them if they'd be interested in accepting some bible based literature written to let them know about god's plan for the Earth- Armageddon.
Proselytizing.
Yes, friends, I was one of Jehovah's Witnesses. Did you pick up on the grammar there? I was one of Jehovah's Witnesses. Not A Jehovah's Witness, not a Jehovah, but one of Jehovah's Witnesses. So truth be told I often referred to myself as a Jehovah's Witness, but being older and wiser now I can remember the phrasing to be 'one of' rather than the indefinite article 'A'. Very important stuff I'm happy to drag you through.
So Saturday mornings me, my older brother, my younger sister, would all get woken up by our parents to go out in service. More jargon, "out in service." That's what they called it when you go knocking on doors at 10am. Probably still is now but to be fair I haven't checked in on the happenings of the Christian congregation in quite a while. I actually don't believe in god at the moment. Or maybe I believe in god and hate god. Any way you slice it, my soul is up for grabs.
Here's a little more to set the stage- my father is Puerto Rican having moved to New York City around the age of 8 and lived in Park Slope for many years. My mother is mostly Irish and got more than her fair share of abuse out on Long Island in a town called Ronkonkoma smack dab in the center of Long Island. They met at a district convention for Jehovah's Witnesses held at Yankee Stadium in the early '70s. They were both serving punch to thirsty attendees and one of my mother's first memories of the man I call Dad is him making a fuss over how concentrated the punch was or whether people were handing out too much or some other triviality. They wed quickly, as religious youths are wont to do, him being nine years her senior. Part of that was my father's wish to extricate her from her abusive environment and part of it, I'm sure, was the flamboyant dexterity with which my mother served punch.
They lived in the city, then Jersey City, and then on Long Island in a town called Centereach even more smack dab in the center of the fish. So smack dab they called it Centereach. Not a rich town, not a poor town. Maybe a little poorer than surrounding towns, but everybody did OK. It might have just sucked a little bit.
I think everything sucks for everyone no matter where they lived or where they grew up. Poverty is only that in comparison to comfort and stability and everybody does such a good job at keeping up appearances that it always looked like everybody was ok. Hard to say in retrospect how good or bad we really had it out there but I grew up without a Nintendo and one year the school gave us food for Thanksgiving. Weird to get that from school because we didn't officially celebrate the holiday, but I think it was just the matter of my dad being unemployed at the time. We ate it with neither ceremony nor mention of the holiday it represented. Probably on a day other than Thanksgiving or as we called it Thursday.
We didn't celebrate the holiday because we were Jehovah's Witnesses and they don't celebrate holidays or birthdays, but you probably knew that already because you have probably made fun of me at some point. I'm sorry, I'm sure that's not true. You're a good person. You have tolerance for other religions and are respectful to all creed and culture. You have that in common with everyone from Long Island.
Ever met a Long Islander? Most likely they have charmed you with their accent or their nail art and regaled you with some endearing and heartwarming anecdote of volunteering at the local children's hospital or soup kitchen. Just kidding, they probably disgusted you with their accent and nail art and told a story of the time they didn't care about something they definitely should have cared about. All of everyone is exactly that. If you're from there I am talking specifically about you personally and we have a problem we can discuss later the way we were taught in keeping with the tradition of our people by cursing and screaming. Internet sensation Bagel Boss guy is from Long Island, and that's how all of us are, all of the time.
Long Island is one suburb after another from Queens to central Suffolk. It's not awesome. There are beautiful beaches but they're chock full of obnoxious townies. Once I went to the beach on Memorial Day and there was a fight. It was ignoble. I stand before you as a mournful ambassador apologizing for all the human backwash flooding up from Penn Station into the city on days like Santa Con or any given Friday. I'll pause and admit that not everyone's experience out on the island may have been as miserable as my own and I will happily admit that there were and are good things happening out there, but for a while, for me, it was really touch and go. If there's time I'll tell you about the kid I played street hockey with who robbed my house with his pals in the summer after 8th grade. He turned out a minister somewhere in Florida and tried to reconnect with me via Myspace friend request years later. Or the first (in fairness first and only) time I saw cocaine at the high school lunch table or the kid I was best friends who wound up in jail for manslaughter or something for shooting heroin up his friend's arm and the kid just ups and dies. I know, these things happen, but it's important for me to provide a complete picture because I'm sure your vision of Long Island is a wonderland of beautiful homes and Saturdays filled with lawn mowing homeowners and well-intentioned religious apologists meandering through friendly neighborhoods touting the promise of a paradise Earth via Armageddon to grateful and receptive friends they haven't met yet.
Now as far as all that goes, I was one of those friendly apologists and I did that until age 18ish on most Saturday mornings. Saturdays would start with waking up and putting on clothes for church. We called church "Kingdom Hall" but for convenience's sake I'll say church. I went to church three times a week. Church three times a week and if we were lucky some bonus door to door time. We called it that colloquially, "going door to door". I'll say that again, I went to church three times a week and got to canvas Long Island neighborhoods every Saturday morning and I turned out fine and never wondered what it was like dress up for Halloween.
Who really needs Halloween, when you get to go door to door proselytizing? And we did it every Saturday, or Sundays, or Saturdays AND Sundays, or really any given day on summer vacation. Typically two hour stints and an average of 4-10 hours a month. I was what they called an 'unbaptized publisher', and as such my father thought it best to shoot for about ten hours a month of going out in service. Plus church three times a week. Every week. For 18 years.
Okay, so wake up, brush teeth and hair, put on some church clothes. All my church clothes were well fitting, classy, not handed down, and smelled great, especially during wonderful wonderful puberty. Again, simply false. I stank and wore whatever I could scrape together. I remember having a lot of church clothes because we'd take whatever anyone would give us, and I also remember nothing ever fitting right or looking totally normal, and we're talking 1980 to 1999 when fashion wasn't really that fashionable. All a kid really needs is a tie, a button down shirt, some slacks, some goddamn slacks, maybe some penny loafers or those leather shoes with the two tassles. How hard could that have been? Moving on, I'm dressed in whatever was lying around, smelled like I was dressed up in whatever was lying around and we're in the car and we go to somebody's house to meet up.
Time for the inside scoop.
These little meetings were well organized, mostly. We'd meet up in a group ranging from five to twenty or so and we'd know what neighborhood to venture off into because we had maps. We had little cards called 'territories' that were basically just maps split up into little cards and we paid attention to where to go because we didn't want to inundate any particular area with too much of god's truth, unlike my brain. So if it ever felt like that, somebody wasn't doing their job. So we meet either at the Kingdom Hall or somebody's actual home, organize ourselves according to who's going where, somebody prays, and then we go out into the world, usually carpooling so there's not a parade's worth of vehicles on any particular road.
That's where the fun begins. We park our minivans or whathaveyou and soon the neighbors know we're coming and they're out on their Long Island porches with pitchers of lemonade on small patio tables and the ladys of the houses are in aprons standing with trays of tall glasses to welcome us and our bible based tracts and magazines. We barely ever had to knock seeing how the good news of eventual Armageddon travels faster than we can walk. We'd get lemonade from one house, brownies or cookies from another, maybe a glass bottle of Coca-cola cracked open from an old timey coke machine in the garage of some weekend mechanic fixing up a Shelby Mustang. So many soft drinks, so much appreciation for the truth of the one true god, all happening on pastoral Long Island. Such a familiar scene to me I forget that most people never got to experience the joy of coming of age as a young disciple of Christ who didn't celebrate his birthday, didn't say the pledge of allegiance, knew Santa was bullshit, and smelled like other people's food.
Again, there was actually very little lemonade. I can't actually recall any lemonade, but to be fair we weren't dodging garden hoses or water balloons either. People were either polite or they weren't. We'd walk up to doors in pairs, with one person taking the lead and the other providing some sort of support, or even better it was me and my Father. I was a kid and the script went something like this:
"Hi, my name is Jeremy and this is my father, and we're coming by offering a bible based publication called the Watchtower, this one's called 'Do All Religions Please God?', and if you'd like to read it I'd leave it with you."
Easy-peasy.
That's an actual title of one of those magazines from September 1996. Not easy peasy, the 'do all religions please god.' I googled it. For many years we would charge twenty-five cents a magazine, but that changed at some point, then they'd get it for free and we'd ask for a small donation if we felt it appropriate to do so.
My dad was a little more wordy. He'd ask some actual questions, maybe make some small talk, no big deal. It would be somebody's job to write down who wasn't home so we could come back and find them some other time. We'd also write down who took a magazine so we could follow up and see how they liked it. It was serious business. There were lives at stake and as such, there was a lot of accounting. Every year, in a Watchtower magazine, they would publish how many hours were spent door to door in each country that had people spending time going door to door. It's a lot of countries. It truly is. Our good friends at Wikipedia tell me that these humble bible students have grown from their inception to number somewhere around 8.5 million members.
The best part... ahem... the most godawful insufferable part of doing all this was doing it as a kid. I'd get real anxious about knocking on the door of a house where somebody I went to school might have lived. Kids can be mean, even on Long Island. They can be mean to kids who do different things, like not say the pledge, not decorate Christmas things, or not sing Christmas songs because they were "against my religion". That's a line I'd serve up pretty frequently. Against my religion. Anyways, I only had to knock on doors of a kid I knew's house a handful of times but I'd always be on the lookout for bikes, basketball hoops, any sign a child might be present in the house because if they were and I went to school with them well that would just be the worst goddamn thing in the goddamn world. Worse even than being out in whatever weather other than rain or snow, worse than missing cartoons, worse than not celebrating anything, ever, even the things we did celebrate.
Kids would ask me if I knew how old I was. I actually was asked this the other day but it's OK, I handled it gracefully as I've been answering it for years, but I'm bringing it up because it's a real question I would really get asked. They'd ask what I did on Christmas and I'd shrug. Christmas was just another cold day in December. Like my birthday, December 6th. You have almost four months to think of a gift. Anyway, you're not really different until someone let's you know, and they will let you know.
So no Christmas presents?
No Christmas presents.
No birthday cake?
No birthday cake.
I heard you guys can't take medicine.
We can take medicine we just don't accept blood transfusions.
Why not?
Bible says not to eat blood and it's like the same thing I guess?
Once you guys knocked on my door at like six in the morning and my dad yelled at you.
Nobody does that that early.
It was really funny we chased you with a hose.
Of course you did.
Who is Jehovah anyway?
It's god's name... it's in your Bible too I thi...
So what if I got you a Christmas present would you take it?
What about a birthday present?
Do you guys not celebrate Halloween because you can only go door to door to give things and candy is Satan's vegetables?
What if you got in a car accident and needed a blood transfusion?
What if you accidentally eat blood?
Can you eat your own blood?
Will you go to hell?
No hell? Is that because your life's already hell?
How about next Christmas I bake you a birthday cake and give you a tiny glass of delicious blood and maybe we say the pledge of allegiance a few times just for fun. I can bring over some pictures of what hell looks like and you can see why my God can beat up your god.
You get the picture. I still wind up making apologies for their beliefs and my parents still actually believe in them as much as they are still practicing. All of their children have now defected. The religion has a retention rate of about 37% and I am a proud 63 percenter. I've made my peace with everything. I simply song and danced my way into convincing them to let me go off to college and got a tattoo. That was 1999. Twenty years ago almost to the day. More time out than in, actually, and I never thought about either of those facts until today, August 15, 2019.
But let's be clear-
I really feel like I escaped something. Not everybody has it as easy as me. When those kids turn about 15 they start getting baptized. That's a symbolic ceremony with water and everything where they commit their lives to god. If you fuck up then, you're disfellowshipped. That means nobody from the Kingdom Hall can talk to you except your immediate family. It's very stigmatizing seeing as how there's already a world of people you shouldn't be associating with and the ones you are allowed to associate with aren't allowed to anymore. I was never baptized, so I dodged a bullet there. Never baptized, never married young, never got beat with a bible, never touched by a priest.
I have no obligations on Sunday or Saturday mornings and I believe there is no life after death. I have nothing worth saving my neighbor from. In fact, I don't really belong to any organization other than work. I don't really belong anywhere. I've been wandering the desert for half the time Moses did and with about as much to show for it. What do I have? I have this. You. Us.
Thank god.
Tuesday, June 11, 2019
the will of the water
when do i get back to the project of being the person i am
when may i make public my miseries
in between flavorless chores wherein i realize my miseries must remain private
and all misery should be private
misery is the solitude of singular suffering
where even the most earnest efforts of others drift away
and again I see my pain is common
at the scale of all things it is nothing
just a stomach ache or skin rash from something only I am allergic to
there's the idea that the sum of all physical mass on earth has been constant since pangea
or that the infinite universe is still growing
and beside that my experiences now seem superficial
comfortably insignificant
a random concentration of energy perceived in either particles or waves
and me the sole observer
the one whose entire purpose is to feel and act
on the grand stage of
the show designed with me in mind
and it's when i'm at my most shortsighted
that i am the easiest to provide for
getting what I want
but never what I really want
eating everything and tasting nothing
so what about the project of being the person i am?
why give me this idea?
why the fuss about freedom and actualization?
manifesting a better version of myself?
too much incidental brutality for my tastes
let's just call it what it is
a funhouse with one exit and one way to get to it
i'm always willing to accept the truth or the next best thing
the idea that the trajectory of my life is predetermined
that i am a particle carried upon the crest of a wave
driven less by my will than the will of the water
don't poison me with hope
place me in a wicker basket and set me adrift
when may i make public my miseries
in between flavorless chores wherein i realize my miseries must remain private
and all misery should be private
misery is the solitude of singular suffering
where even the most earnest efforts of others drift away
and again I see my pain is common
at the scale of all things it is nothing
just a stomach ache or skin rash from something only I am allergic to
there's the idea that the sum of all physical mass on earth has been constant since pangea
or that the infinite universe is still growing
and beside that my experiences now seem superficial
comfortably insignificant
a random concentration of energy perceived in either particles or waves
and me the sole observer
the one whose entire purpose is to feel and act
on the grand stage of
the show designed with me in mind
and it's when i'm at my most shortsighted
that i am the easiest to provide for
getting what I want
but never what I really want
eating everything and tasting nothing
so what about the project of being the person i am?
why give me this idea?
why the fuss about freedom and actualization?
manifesting a better version of myself?
too much incidental brutality for my tastes
let's just call it what it is
a funhouse with one exit and one way to get to it
i'm always willing to accept the truth or the next best thing
the idea that the trajectory of my life is predetermined
that i am a particle carried upon the crest of a wave
driven less by my will than the will of the water
don't poison me with hope
place me in a wicker basket and set me adrift
Stop what you're doing and pray
The cat peed on the bed again but this time there was some blood. The stain was typical, peanut-shaped with a smaller red peanut inside the larger one. My response was appropriate. Concern for the health of the animal overshadowed the first frustration of having to do laundry, again, for the I don't know how manyeth time this week. How bad are things when you lose count of how many times you've done laundry in a week? Well, if laundry trips is the metric, we are beyond countable times.
Laundry itself isn't an ordeal, just one of those things we have to do that we go and do and when we're done we sit down and think of a treat to give ourselves- some coffee, a bagel, coffee and a bagel, a little perk to get us through because even when the washing and drying is done it's home for the folding and sorting. Two hours in the day where you can't totally commit to anything and as a reward- clean clothes and you have successfully put off the doing of laundry for a week or two, depending on how deep your reserves are. I'm 34, I have a hard time throwing away clothes, I wash my pants about four times a year barring any incidental soiling, I shower four times a week, change my underwear four times a week barring any incidental soiling, potentially I could go a month or two without wearing the same t-shirt twice, but ultimately I'd be left with a mountain of dirty laundry and a molehill of will to get it done. So, there's a two week laundry schedule I commit to in order to get that perfect amount of clothes where it's not so little I'm wasting my time and not so big that I'm hanging folding sorting balling up socks all day. There be no coffee big nor bagel scrumptious enough to will me into that task.
This week we were terrorized with urine.
On the comforter and classy duvet last week. Audible groan, off to the laundromat.
Once on the bed a few days ago. Wash the comforter and classy classy duvet that we use because of how classy we are. Go to classy classy Bed Bath and Beyond, pick up a diapery sounding mattress protector, some perfectly accenting throw pillows for the couch and an impulsively purchased LCD track light that isn't gonna do what I wanted it to do but will definitely serve as a reminder against future impulse purchases from BB&B.
Again on the bed this time with blood. Inaudible groan, off to laundry. Wash the comforter again and take Fred, the cat, to the vet.
Back from the first vet trip and once again on the bed with this time my fuzzy dumpling clearly articulating his feelings on having been dragged to medical attention by strategically pissing between the four pillows, getting piss on each pillow, each pillow case, the top and flat sheets, but also testing the quality of the mattress protector whose integrity and function withstood trial by urine with great resolve making it a fine and worthy purchase unlike the LED track lights that were $19.99 plus the cost of ten AAA batteries even though it uses only six leaving me with four batteries to float around until I can lose them moments before I need them. Back to business, throw away the four old and soiled pillows, recase two pillows from the closet (welcome back pillows) and buy the last two other nice new fluffy medium-firms at Target for about thirteen bucks apiece. Bad news first, the bed is now a comfy, reassuring, pleasantly scented place for a cat to take a piss. Good news, if you've been keeping track, four new pillows. (If you've been listening as closely as you ought you may have noticed in this narrative, written in 2015, I had two pillows just sitting in my closet waiting to be recased and put back in rotation. Historians may debate the veracity of this statement for ages because who has extra pillows in a closet? Moving on...)
Today, fall of 2015, the day of the feline mass extraction, Fred, my darling child, relieves himself on the comforter alone. A gutsy move considering he did not have the bed to himself at the time. Perhaps speaking more to discomfort than guts but objectively a gutsy move. The comforter washing routine now dangerously assimilated into daily tasks. No big deal. Barely any groaning.
So now that that's been cataloged I guess it's only been five times in a week, but five times in a week for something normally five times in two months is a lot for a guy like me. And don't forget with a comforter you gotta wash it, dry it, move it around inside the dryer and dry it some more to dry it evenly so it's an extra trip to the laundromat and half an hour of bonus laundry time. Call it the labors of love, the joys of parenthood, probably a few other applicable cliches but who has time to think of them when another load of laundry is surely on its way as soon as Fred and the bed have time to themselves.
The first trip to the vet was a little like doing laundry. Cram the cat into a thing, bring him over, wait a lil bit, bring him home. [Gesture where you clap your hands vertically, the international sign for one and done. If you can't visualize it I'll do it for you in person.] Pretty much the only thing different from doing the laundry was all the feline misery and bad news.
Bad news first- the cat was of course miserable for the entire experience, the other cat has been hissing at him since he got home because I guess he smells different and he needs surgery. He's got a big ball of something in his bladder. They couldn't tell what it is because he, like a coward, emptied his bladder inside the carrier on the way there, but it's there, and even if they could tell what it was it would still need to be ripped out. Good news- we are rich yuppies (haha) who can afford rent, duvets, pillows, worthless LED tracklights and cat surgery.
So today in between trips to the laundromat to wash and dry the comforter for the final time for at least a few days, I bring the cat to the vet for the procedure. Good news- the vet is only a few very walkable blocks away. More good news- a friend let me borrow his cat carrier so I didn't have to stuff him into that over the shoulder catpurse thing that was a little too small for my 18 lb. feline companion.
That's how much my cat weighs. We know how much he weighs now because of that magic stainless steel tablescale the vet had. Ever see Fire in the Sky? That movie about the alien abduction? Did you know that cats watch that in film school and talk about how it's all metaphors and projections related to the experience of your human love-and-food attendant taking you to the vet? The strangers, the anal probing, unintelligible language, stainless steel tablescales, trauma and alienation from friends and family. It's all in there. Very deep stuff for feline students of film.
So my fluffy 18-pounder in the big awkward plastic carrier getting lugged to the vet. Ever lugged anything? It's joyless. Overstuffed grocery bags get lugged up walkups. Dead bodies get lugged into marshes. If there's no shoulder pain you're not lugging. Moving on...
It's a cool and breezy early fall day in the borough and the locals are out. The long term locals with plaintive faces ambling about; the middle and high school kids with their chunky headphones and obnoxious conferences at all corners; the new element with their Urban Outfits and semi-discreet white wired headphones walking with great poise and dutifully avoiding conflict by way of eye contact. A day without a riot in a neighborhood where the rents are either spiked or stabilized and the two groups mingling without incident. Easy access to alcohol, caffeine, transit, minutes from Manhattan, stainless steel appliances, minimal felonies, pet friendly.
Fred cries a few times and I give him my best cat voice to let him know I'm still there.
Me walking with my chunky caterwauler in a tupperware box with holes and a gate. The cool breeze and the Brooklyn noises.
A tiny mouse on the sidewalk so tiny and cute and I wonder if Fred can smell him or if he's busy smelling everything or even anything at all.
We make it to Eastern Parkway and I take a knee to rest my already weary shoulders and administer some more cat voice. "my boy, my boy... it's okay papa, you be okay"
Three or four more blocks and my arms are a little tired and I'm hoping someone sees what I'm doing and gives me a sympathetic nod, but no, and that's fine, and it's only a block or two to the vet, and Franklin Ave is the Franklin I have come to know and expect only there's me with my cat and his terror and his mass in his bladder and I am leaving him with strangers to be terrorized for reasons that a tiny walnut sized brain like Fred's does not understand.
He gets received like a load of laundry and I am quickly back on the street and his trials have begun and I am on my way home but first maybe a bagel or two bagels but the good bagel place is on Nostrand and I don't really feel like it so I turn around to the good coffee shop for an Americano and as the telepathic link between me and the love of my life gets stronger I am close to pouring my guts out like the dirty black shot of espresso splashed into the paper cup but I don't because I don't expect sympathy or understanding from this barista nor anyone I meet on the street plus and more importantly I am a rock I am an island and I do the things I need to do and I don't break my stride I simply do these things for they must be done and I am the man to do them and the idea of convenience or inconvenience does not cross my mind but still there is inside of me the sadness of the animal and it is clear now there is a bond we have created that a walnut sized brain is perfectly capable of creating and very quickly I am vibrating with fear and sadness and here's my coffee and let's go home and do the things we do on our day off and Brooklyn is still Brooklyn it is the Brooklyn that only the dead knew that only the dumb know now and here's me here's another dude another heartless gentrifier with a novelty t-shirt and an Americano almost crying, almost crying, feeling emotions perhaps not his own but very much his own, my own, me sad about Fred alone under extra terrestrial lights with masked aliens and oddly shaped instruments of torture, me walking south on Franklin, across Eastern Parkway even though the light was red but safe distance from traffic because he who crosses first is coolest and to be cool is to be on top of things, no emotions and if I am he who crosses first without having to Frogger my way from one curb to the other then I am cool and who cares anyway it's the kind of thing that happens a thousand times a day, people cross streets all the time no matter what color light looms overhead no matter if its a reddish hand or a white walking stick figure this is new york goddamnit and most of them make it just like most cats make surgery and live to pee wherever they want.
I'm on Franklin around the corner from my apartment and one more street to cross before the laundromat where my almost done drying comforter is in and I see the tiny mouse again and it is on its side and the eyes are closed and the funny little teeth show from the funny little slightly opened mouth and one arm twitches. It is either dying or already dead.
That is the story of the tiny mouse.
A story within a story standing shoulder to shoulder with countless other stories in a packed subway car circling the sun that thankfully is all a beautiful green brown and blue from the right distance.
The facebook status read as such: "I'm at the vet for my cat. Stop what you're doing and pray, you godless rabble." It was a little funny. Funny because you don't have to pray. You don't have to pray for the cat, you don't have to pray for the mouse, you don't have to pray for the plaintive faces, and you certainly don't have to pray for me. It was just a little scary, that's all.
He turned out fine.
We all did.
Amen.
Laundry itself isn't an ordeal, just one of those things we have to do that we go and do and when we're done we sit down and think of a treat to give ourselves- some coffee, a bagel, coffee and a bagel, a little perk to get us through because even when the washing and drying is done it's home for the folding and sorting. Two hours in the day where you can't totally commit to anything and as a reward- clean clothes and you have successfully put off the doing of laundry for a week or two, depending on how deep your reserves are. I'm 34, I have a hard time throwing away clothes, I wash my pants about four times a year barring any incidental soiling, I shower four times a week, change my underwear four times a week barring any incidental soiling, potentially I could go a month or two without wearing the same t-shirt twice, but ultimately I'd be left with a mountain of dirty laundry and a molehill of will to get it done. So, there's a two week laundry schedule I commit to in order to get that perfect amount of clothes where it's not so little I'm wasting my time and not so big that I'm hanging folding sorting balling up socks all day. There be no coffee big nor bagel scrumptious enough to will me into that task.
This week we were terrorized with urine.
On the comforter and classy duvet last week. Audible groan, off to the laundromat.
Once on the bed a few days ago. Wash the comforter and classy classy duvet that we use because of how classy we are. Go to classy classy Bed Bath and Beyond, pick up a diapery sounding mattress protector, some perfectly accenting throw pillows for the couch and an impulsively purchased LCD track light that isn't gonna do what I wanted it to do but will definitely serve as a reminder against future impulse purchases from BB&B.
Again on the bed this time with blood. Inaudible groan, off to laundry. Wash the comforter again and take Fred, the cat, to the vet.
Back from the first vet trip and once again on the bed with this time my fuzzy dumpling clearly articulating his feelings on having been dragged to medical attention by strategically pissing between the four pillows, getting piss on each pillow, each pillow case, the top and flat sheets, but also testing the quality of the mattress protector whose integrity and function withstood trial by urine with great resolve making it a fine and worthy purchase unlike the LED track lights that were $19.99 plus the cost of ten AAA batteries even though it uses only six leaving me with four batteries to float around until I can lose them moments before I need them. Back to business, throw away the four old and soiled pillows, recase two pillows from the closet (welcome back pillows) and buy the last two other nice new fluffy medium-firms at Target for about thirteen bucks apiece. Bad news first, the bed is now a comfy, reassuring, pleasantly scented place for a cat to take a piss. Good news, if you've been keeping track, four new pillows. (If you've been listening as closely as you ought you may have noticed in this narrative, written in 2015, I had two pillows just sitting in my closet waiting to be recased and put back in rotation. Historians may debate the veracity of this statement for ages because who has extra pillows in a closet? Moving on...)
Today, fall of 2015, the day of the feline mass extraction, Fred, my darling child, relieves himself on the comforter alone. A gutsy move considering he did not have the bed to himself at the time. Perhaps speaking more to discomfort than guts but objectively a gutsy move. The comforter washing routine now dangerously assimilated into daily tasks. No big deal. Barely any groaning.
So now that that's been cataloged I guess it's only been five times in a week, but five times in a week for something normally five times in two months is a lot for a guy like me. And don't forget with a comforter you gotta wash it, dry it, move it around inside the dryer and dry it some more to dry it evenly so it's an extra trip to the laundromat and half an hour of bonus laundry time. Call it the labors of love, the joys of parenthood, probably a few other applicable cliches but who has time to think of them when another load of laundry is surely on its way as soon as Fred and the bed have time to themselves.
The first trip to the vet was a little like doing laundry. Cram the cat into a thing, bring him over, wait a lil bit, bring him home. [Gesture where you clap your hands vertically, the international sign for one and done. If you can't visualize it I'll do it for you in person.] Pretty much the only thing different from doing the laundry was all the feline misery and bad news.
Bad news first- the cat was of course miserable for the entire experience, the other cat has been hissing at him since he got home because I guess he smells different and he needs surgery. He's got a big ball of something in his bladder. They couldn't tell what it is because he, like a coward, emptied his bladder inside the carrier on the way there, but it's there, and even if they could tell what it was it would still need to be ripped out. Good news- we are rich yuppies (haha) who can afford rent, duvets, pillows, worthless LED tracklights and cat surgery.
So today in between trips to the laundromat to wash and dry the comforter for the final time for at least a few days, I bring the cat to the vet for the procedure. Good news- the vet is only a few very walkable blocks away. More good news- a friend let me borrow his cat carrier so I didn't have to stuff him into that over the shoulder catpurse thing that was a little too small for my 18 lb. feline companion.
That's how much my cat weighs. We know how much he weighs now because of that magic stainless steel tablescale the vet had. Ever see Fire in the Sky? That movie about the alien abduction? Did you know that cats watch that in film school and talk about how it's all metaphors and projections related to the experience of your human love-and-food attendant taking you to the vet? The strangers, the anal probing, unintelligible language, stainless steel tablescales, trauma and alienation from friends and family. It's all in there. Very deep stuff for feline students of film.
So my fluffy 18-pounder in the big awkward plastic carrier getting lugged to the vet. Ever lugged anything? It's joyless. Overstuffed grocery bags get lugged up walkups. Dead bodies get lugged into marshes. If there's no shoulder pain you're not lugging. Moving on...
It's a cool and breezy early fall day in the borough and the locals are out. The long term locals with plaintive faces ambling about; the middle and high school kids with their chunky headphones and obnoxious conferences at all corners; the new element with their Urban Outfits and semi-discreet white wired headphones walking with great poise and dutifully avoiding conflict by way of eye contact. A day without a riot in a neighborhood where the rents are either spiked or stabilized and the two groups mingling without incident. Easy access to alcohol, caffeine, transit, minutes from Manhattan, stainless steel appliances, minimal felonies, pet friendly.
Fred cries a few times and I give him my best cat voice to let him know I'm still there.
Me walking with my chunky caterwauler in a tupperware box with holes and a gate. The cool breeze and the Brooklyn noises.
A tiny mouse on the sidewalk so tiny and cute and I wonder if Fred can smell him or if he's busy smelling everything or even anything at all.
We make it to Eastern Parkway and I take a knee to rest my already weary shoulders and administer some more cat voice. "my boy, my boy... it's okay papa, you be okay"
Three or four more blocks and my arms are a little tired and I'm hoping someone sees what I'm doing and gives me a sympathetic nod, but no, and that's fine, and it's only a block or two to the vet, and Franklin Ave is the Franklin I have come to know and expect only there's me with my cat and his terror and his mass in his bladder and I am leaving him with strangers to be terrorized for reasons that a tiny walnut sized brain like Fred's does not understand.
He gets received like a load of laundry and I am quickly back on the street and his trials have begun and I am on my way home but first maybe a bagel or two bagels but the good bagel place is on Nostrand and I don't really feel like it so I turn around to the good coffee shop for an Americano and as the telepathic link between me and the love of my life gets stronger I am close to pouring my guts out like the dirty black shot of espresso splashed into the paper cup but I don't because I don't expect sympathy or understanding from this barista nor anyone I meet on the street plus and more importantly I am a rock I am an island and I do the things I need to do and I don't break my stride I simply do these things for they must be done and I am the man to do them and the idea of convenience or inconvenience does not cross my mind but still there is inside of me the sadness of the animal and it is clear now there is a bond we have created that a walnut sized brain is perfectly capable of creating and very quickly I am vibrating with fear and sadness and here's my coffee and let's go home and do the things we do on our day off and Brooklyn is still Brooklyn it is the Brooklyn that only the dead knew that only the dumb know now and here's me here's another dude another heartless gentrifier with a novelty t-shirt and an Americano almost crying, almost crying, feeling emotions perhaps not his own but very much his own, my own, me sad about Fred alone under extra terrestrial lights with masked aliens and oddly shaped instruments of torture, me walking south on Franklin, across Eastern Parkway even though the light was red but safe distance from traffic because he who crosses first is coolest and to be cool is to be on top of things, no emotions and if I am he who crosses first without having to Frogger my way from one curb to the other then I am cool and who cares anyway it's the kind of thing that happens a thousand times a day, people cross streets all the time no matter what color light looms overhead no matter if its a reddish hand or a white walking stick figure this is new york goddamnit and most of them make it just like most cats make surgery and live to pee wherever they want.
I'm on Franklin around the corner from my apartment and one more street to cross before the laundromat where my almost done drying comforter is in and I see the tiny mouse again and it is on its side and the eyes are closed and the funny little teeth show from the funny little slightly opened mouth and one arm twitches. It is either dying or already dead.
That is the story of the tiny mouse.
A story within a story standing shoulder to shoulder with countless other stories in a packed subway car circling the sun that thankfully is all a beautiful green brown and blue from the right distance.
The facebook status read as such: "I'm at the vet for my cat. Stop what you're doing and pray, you godless rabble." It was a little funny. Funny because you don't have to pray. You don't have to pray for the cat, you don't have to pray for the mouse, you don't have to pray for the plaintive faces, and you certainly don't have to pray for me. It was just a little scary, that's all.
He turned out fine.
We all did.
Amen.
Sunday, June 9, 2019
hot oil
one day there's a place you walked into every day for as long as you can remember and the next the locks are changed and you're out in the cold no matter the season
there wasn't a cake, there wasn't a party, nobody went out for drinks after.
the sun went down on something and rose on something else and it's a big deal to only one person and that's you
so you talk to a friend and tell them what happened and they care because something you think is bad is happening to you but in all honesty they saw it coming and had the good sense to warn you but the decency to let you make your own stupid decisions.
and you're there stranded with all your excuses wondering where the tragedy went. you're begging for pity on your knees at the gates of a kingdom you swore would welcome you and they're about to pour hot oil out on you and your starving troops
and it pours
and it's not hot oil
it's cold water
and you screamed because it's not what you expected
and if you're lucky it keeps coming
and that gargoyle grimace you've been sporting for some time now beings to slacken
you're being washed
your clothes melt away
the sand hits the floor
then some hair
then a bit of skin and blood
then your bones turn to smoke and you're still exactly where you are
without a body
first a body then a cloud of dust then smoke then nothing
ages pass
and then like nothing
like this was all nothing
you're given another chance
you open your eyes and turn around expecting
an army of undead hellbent on your destruction
but it's gone
it's a field of flowers under a yellow sun
and now everywhere you go is a paradise.
a raisin floods your jaw with electricity
and you're finally allowed to be happy
you breathe through your nose and almost laugh out loud
there's motion behind the doors
the gates part and you're welcomed
and somehow there's hope
and you feel deeply
that as bad as it was
is as good as it's going to be
there wasn't a cake, there wasn't a party, nobody went out for drinks after.
the sun went down on something and rose on something else and it's a big deal to only one person and that's you
so you talk to a friend and tell them what happened and they care because something you think is bad is happening to you but in all honesty they saw it coming and had the good sense to warn you but the decency to let you make your own stupid decisions.
and you're there stranded with all your excuses wondering where the tragedy went. you're begging for pity on your knees at the gates of a kingdom you swore would welcome you and they're about to pour hot oil out on you and your starving troops
and it pours
and it's not hot oil
it's cold water
and you screamed because it's not what you expected
and if you're lucky it keeps coming
and that gargoyle grimace you've been sporting for some time now beings to slacken
you're being washed
your clothes melt away
the sand hits the floor
then some hair
then a bit of skin and blood
then your bones turn to smoke and you're still exactly where you are
without a body
first a body then a cloud of dust then smoke then nothing
ages pass
and then like nothing
like this was all nothing
you're given another chance
you open your eyes and turn around expecting
an army of undead hellbent on your destruction
but it's gone
it's a field of flowers under a yellow sun
and now everywhere you go is a paradise.
a raisin floods your jaw with electricity
and you're finally allowed to be happy
you breathe through your nose and almost laugh out loud
there's motion behind the doors
the gates part and you're welcomed
and somehow there's hope
and you feel deeply
that as bad as it was
is as good as it's going to be
Saturday, June 8, 2019
icebreaker
a ship as big as you've seen lunges into the arctic leaving a trail of whipped water frothing and fighting like demons bathed in hot oil. there is no crew no captain no hand on the tiller. forging on ungoverned and undeterred with nothing to stop it but itself.
at night there are lights on board and from a certain distance this monster seems alive and there may even be a sleeping bunch of men below deck huddling for warmth or casting lots and smoking cigarettes but instead this machine from hell is hurtling toward an unknown location.
the cold is stark. on nights without a moon there is nothing but the screaming engines and the white noise of churning chop. the scene is terrible.
i can see the ship.
i am cheering for it.
behold the champion of the cold
the marathon runner to which all my hopes are pinned to
cracking the thick frozen earth
i believe in you
you are immense
your power is infinite
and your will is subject
to neither whim nor worry
go
you steed
you metal hero
i am watching
and screaming for your success
i feel, like a fool
that it is my heart bearing you forward
and you
indefatigable you
will win
and victory will be bland
because there was no doubt
no doubt at all
Thursday, April 18, 2019
a poem as big as the world
a person can write a poem as big as the world
it can say something other things can't
there's a poem somewhere
waiting like an active mine in an abandoned battleground
that's now an impromptu soccer field
maybe you're there
watching but not playing
watching but not playing
and the other children are ideas you had
that you never understood
calling to each other in a language you don't understand
they're playing a game
you think they're making fun of you
for not knowing what they're saying
and they are
but maybe one day the ball gets kicked over to you
and it’s more awkward to not play than it is to play
so you jog onto the field short of breath but not fatigued
and get blown to bits in a good way
and it’s more awkward to not play than it is to play
so you jog onto the field short of breath but not fatigued
and get blown to bits in a good way
there's a poem somewhere
written lifetimes ago
printed on a page as delicate as communion wafer
that you could lay on your tongue
printed on a page as delicate as communion wafer
that you could lay on your tongue
and eat
just one
but it's the ceremony here that matters
not the tiny snack
it's small but it's as big as the world
you eat it and something grows in you and tries to bloom
or better yet
some wretched monster dies and leaves you to rebuild your city
a poem hiding in a book
for some reason
last place you'd ever look
something to lift you up
to fill your heart
to warm you
and you wouldn't dare feel nothing
and all that numbness that you thought was maturity
may be exactly that
but you still feel something
anything
everything
and you remember why it was you got into this business in the first place
and the next several decisions you make
are very helpful
very drastic
very easy
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