January, 2003 (Published through Monkeybicycle)

Often, I placed my head under water as a child. In the ocean I’d stay near the shore but lay against the sand and wait for the water to rush over me. This is far less beautiful than it sounds because I would jump up coughing the water from my lungs. There always felt like room in the ocean for me to sleep. That I would just be a buoy on the water. Or that I would sink underneath and find a carnival of fish trying to battle with the sea plants.

Scientists say that we have the exact same percentage of salt in our veins that is found in the sea. Maybe there’s an entire civilization inside those long tubes we break open so often. And we let out the salt and the fish and sharks. Or we drown the fisherman by letting the oxygen inside the blue veins and think nothing of it. No one worries about killing them.

If there are two frozen poles inside of us, and something to wash ashore to, what’s to say there is nothing inside every drop of that. One galaxy after another. Even dead people, until drained, have an entire ocean in their blood.

The Death of Classmates (February, 2003)

We pretend love means nothing to us. We pretend we’re a joke to everyone but ourselves and look in the mirror with a profound hatred. Oh, let’s call it a poem. We ask people questions we can answer with drugs and then feel hurt when someone answers. We’re empty capsules and we would rather fill it with violence. We take medication to save ourselves. We have religion to give us a reason that we failed. We failed.

A bruise is a biography. Your addiction to life is your way to not imagine your death. Drowning is only sleep. We teach ourselves that vodka will outweigh staying up all night with sharp pains in your abdomen and that’s the only lesson you’re going to need in your life. Hope is burned and inhaled. We’ll break what we buy.

We’ve memorized ourselves and never found the escape route. Our tongues are the best method of feeling. The best decisions we make are the ones to have sex in places other than beds. Speed is more than driving too fast.

We can detail the way in which we would kill ourselves. Some of us know we would never do it. We worry about the money we owe, the money we don’t have, the money we’ll never see.

A promise shares the sound of a collision.

March, 2003

She explains to him that excitement is to turn to your back just as you’re jumping off a building. Your body stretching for a block, grounded. To love him from half way around the room.

May, 2003

This man used to speak to an audience. My father sits in a leather chair near enough to the window to have light but not touch it. He sees the floor as a river and wont get up for fear of drowning in it. There is a mirror on the wall across from him and he inspects the glass in his hand this way; so that denial is made simple. In this mirror, he can see the dying of other people and ignores his own. In his writing there is an audience. There is me in every ‘I’ and his own father in ‘m.’ I have never heard my father speak yet I know in the things he writes he’s trying to give me more to bury than a shot man with a glass. I am a costume of my father, striking a loneliness with a belly full of vodka.

May, 2003

Where the fuck was I going with this?

He imagines that she’s left the room for only a second. There is only a pause in his life. There is little room for time. Else saw him when she was gathering her things to leave. When she was there, he came to sit, to stare, to twist his body as only a skilled contortionist can because he knows it will only hurt her. Considering his name Bent, she formed his life around the parlor. This sad story about a grotesque figure, a misshapen human function. He was the ability to be still. A lack of life.
i.

Else thinks of her life as an unsuccessful death.

ii.

From the way he would curl himself backwards to close around her body when she was drunk, Else thought of him as the inner coil of her thoughts. As the figure of a collapsed ribcage. A reaching of something outside of herself. Bent turns his eyes in to film strips; a wall in which he feels his hands to wipe the sleep from her eyes, again.

He’s a pattern that changes from present to past. A symbol for the identity we lose through age.

iii.

Bent holds still enough to forget himself. He is Else, laid up against the bed, white and purple. She’s holding steady, afraid that if she were to touch the floor, only her hipbones would feel it. She’s rubbing her hands over the places of her that rise above her skin. Bent is touching his back and his hand goes through him.

iv.

There are frames surrounding stillness. Shoes left under a table are covered by glass, reflecting, hiding the flaws that get printed on them. The indent of toes, soles, a lack of an arch in the center. Her feet are always hurting and he watches the way she tips as she walks. Clinging to her dress to make it seem as though it’s only a way to stand more straight. This is a trial and error. Sundays are always filled with mistakes. A man who thinks of himself higher than a seat of any throne, a man who is an emperor, is still getting dressed in her room. Else’s eyes turn red and puffed. Tears are no longer worth the effort.

v.

Under her dress, she’s written the names of all the men that were there. The emperor is written in gold yet smudged from the way she walks. It is a sign, she tells herself, that he means as much as she does. Tissues remove his crowned name.

vi.

Dry eyes lose their vision. Else stops looking.

vii.

Outside, Bent builds himself over again. There are roses embedded in his skull and leaves to give him hair. He replaces his arms with tree branches. Else walks the halls inside wondering where her eyes have gone. She places a chair against the wall, climbs to stand on it, and feels the ceiling for eyes. She finds bulbs that turn on when placed inside her.

viii.

A flood passes through the cracks of the doors. Else and Bent lay on the floor, playing dead to pass time, waiting for anything to come. The rising water covers the top of their hands, laid flat. They’re on opposite ends of the room; Bent has one eye under the surface of the water, his head tilted just enough to see Else, whose damp shirt becomes invisible. An hour later, all that touches the floor are their fingers.

ix.

The carpet had turned to mold the months before. Bent slept in the ventilation all through the mornings. Else looked for him under cushions, in drains, between the shafts of light.

x.

A murder of crows just outside of everything.

xi.

Leaves bury children and Else remain leaning against her lies. Bent watches the fall building a slow sea for winter. Being alone is the human condition he keeps in secret. Else forgets the existance of time.

Bent hears the noise of an airplane but knows that Else can’t hear past the cold air.

November, 2003

How odd it is to go through old things.

During the night he’d woken with sweat collecting together, forcing ripples against his eyebrows. They fell back and dripped slowly along his scalp, through the forest of hair. He pulled his hand through and cleared himself of the feeling that his body was being ditched in the Atlantic. His eyes remained glazed over and heavy. He imagined seeing them purple and blue, or it was the light cast in the room from somewhere outside that made them appear to be.

The frost had set on the window over hours and trying to look through he knew it was no match for how milky his eyes still were from sleep. Outside was still night, the car headlights had been left on and in any other moment he’d rush to turn them off. Tonight he told himself that the battery could die before he’d find a desire to get up. Inside the cold gave him excuses for a lack of company, of involvement in the work he once wished to complete over the winter and of the endlessness of existence to which he had written about in letters to his sister. He’d been restless, carrying aching pains in his limbs, thinking the house lights were too bright and had turned off the power last week. Assured by the lack of color in his room at this time of night, he often drifted out of sleep to write things in his head but never put them down. He looked forward to the mornings when he wouldn’t remember ever waking hours before. His temples throbbed with the hour, begging for his return to sleep. He pushed the ball of his hands against his eyes and forced them upward, pausing to hold them open until air could dry away the glaze and let him see rough edges as opposed to the dream-like ones you see when you’re still half-asleep.

Looking out at the room he thought, “If a human mind is truly a wasteland, sleep isn’t justifiable.” He tilted his head to the window and through the frost could trace the outline of trees that were gathered around his house, far from the civilized town in the North. In the trees he imagines spaces to hide, grizzly bears, deformed faces sheltering from the eyes of those laughing from their cranberry-colored homes in the distant. Touching his own dried and wrinkled skin, he talks to himself about befriending their gaps, eyes with hooks and one-legged bodies that have been dragged from birth to now. This was the thought he loved most. The shadows of trees, the space between snowflakes, the pure drops of water on a leaf that blows from this forest as far out as the sea. Returning to his dreams, he is on a ship with Edgar – the man who lives in the first tree to the left of the porch, who has no arms and cannot speak – and he rows them both to the bottom of the ocean, where there is no light or sound.

Lancaster, California

Pear juice dripping down my hands while standing around a grouping of Joshua trees, my hair blown in to my eyes, and I can realize how long it is and that this alone makes me feel different. And I’m looking around and nothing is familiar and nothing is the way it was. The only thing that manages never to change is this section of empty desert and how I feel when I stand in it.

Beginnings

“You’re obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you find absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That’s the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.”

Octave Mirbeau