Bullpencatcher

Blog

  • Shoopy doo

    The cat power has always been with me, despite the fact that you think their butts are unsanitary. I have been in love with you forever it seems. A house in the country with a screen door flapping, in Prosperity, SC, two kids in the yard, football, hula hoop, limbo. I cry at my therapist about a dream that I had for years of which you were the protagonist, and me. I realize that it was my dream. I was all of the players, all protagonists, including you. I built a pillar so high that I put you on, and that being that sat atop that pillar was to be my wife, wifey, beloved… mother of my children. I was absent, intentionally from the dream. I’ve lived in bars, possibly too much. Drank a bit too much. Had, possibly, too much fun. Cried a bit too much too for a man. But, I possibly loved too much, and in too much a fucked up way. It was not the bottle that broke me and you up. It was the impossibility of us loving each other in the ways that our actions promised too early on. We could never live up to the fantasy. No one could. You would still be gone now if I were a teetotaler. Perhaps I would too. It’s not the bottle’s fault. It’s not God’s fault. He says it ain’t him. We have no free will, but we have influence on it. One decision made precludes a thousand other possible ones.
    I do know I am a beautiful man. A good man. A flawed man, yes. That will love and be loved by someone one day. You’ve admitted as such, even though I don’t need you to say it.
    “You will be loved.”
    I am working through accepting you as what you are, off that pillar. I am trying to not care if you change. I have no hope of a reunion, a reconciliation. Your place in my heart is secure even if we never speak again.
    I just want you happy, as I hope you want me too.
    I will give up the hatred I feel. Be good to the new boy. Hope he will be good to you too.
    Shoopy doo! Shoopy doo!
    I love you, I love you…
    Was playing: Two-Headed Boy, Pt. 2 by Neutral Milk Hotel

  • Lake Claire

    Chocolate cream cheese muffins on Sunday mornings
    and baked good smells all other days,
    aging hippies and younger hipsters,
    and Bobby at the market and
    that place where all the initials are carved
    in the sidewalk’s concrete
    and the House of Nine Cats and the
    AA meetings at the Methodist Church,
    and runs around the park, and walks
    past the big houses bordering the park,
    and then the lady with the longhair cat,
    walking with it around her like a mink stole,
    and the trick or treating teenagers, and
    a house filled with ghosts, friendly and other,
    and the mural that the kids did, and festivals,
    and cyclists, and flowers, and the Jamaican man
    I gave too much money too, and the one in
    makeshift robes that I ran from the porch,
    and the crazy neighbors I know, and the crazier
    ones that I don’t know, and ground zero for heartbreak,
    and ground zero for coming into my own, and
    a place where too much money was spent, and
    too much time was wasted, and where my heart felt
    at peace so much, where I thought I could spend
    the rest of my life, I must leave you soon, as well.

  • ********

    I miss you tonight.
    Was playing: It’ll All Work Out by Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers

  • Sky scream smiling

    Tonight the ukulele cannot play latin tunes,
    the flamenco band has all bedded down in the third wheel,
    Chad coddles his daughter who cannot sleep for want of her mother,
    and Robert half-sleeps hoping the men will not come again
    to steal his money, and take his cigarettes.
    The ten dollars from earlier in the day
    has been used for one Big Mac, a regular fries,
    one bottle of Wild Irish Rose, and a new pack of cigarettes.
    The rest was given to a friend who seemed
    like he could put it to better use.
    All of the beer bottles are empty and
    the refrigerator can offer no more.
    There is nothing left to say
    so you and I sit across the kitchen table
    and stare at the wall behind each other’s head.
    On the answering machine awaits messages from strange men
    trying to take what’s left of the money.
    The moon seems full in the sky,
    even as it appears a sliver.
    The knives are all washed and tucked neatly away.
    When I was a child, on nights like this one,
    we would run naked through the woods and down
    to the little tributary full of crawfish,
    and even further through the briars,
    torn flesh flapping, down to the lake shore.
    The sliver of moon then, no matter how sad,
    would prove to me the night sky smiling at us.
    We never ran out of things to say back then,
    even if I don’t remember any of the conversations now.
    The quiet of that wilderness left no room for silence.
    Now my legs hurt too much to take that walk.
    My tongue is swollen stiff with talking.
    I just stare at the wall behind your head,
    thinking of the wonders of paneling and paint,
    and wonder when you will get up to leave.

  • ‘t me, babe

    Oh rock and roll can’t answer me and you. I suppose we both get tired with the circumstances we find ourselves in and we think briefly of each other. We stand in a friend’s backyard and look across the yard at the person that we have it all figured out with and we question ourselves. There’s no way that he loves Clary like I do. There’s just no way. She had become my niece present in this town. I have lost her too. You get her and he does too. Tell her about me one day, please.
    We will live our lives now so separate. You will convince yourself of happiness because you do not truly know what it is. I will learn to imagine a happiness that does not include you.
    I will turn this space off in the coming weeks as I need to let you go from my life. There will be no letters for your teenage daughter to read. There will be nothing of me in your life but your memories. Yours!
    And those will fade too.
    I think we could have had something true. Maybe we did, but you and I both decided to crap on it. At least I feel that I kept you a little longer than most did after the fantasy ran its course.
    It’s too bad you don’t like baseball. It’s too bad you could not be more consistent and stable and loving and not plunging toward every helpless diving lure that was thrown your way.
    I fucked up so much, but it was not just me baby.
    Fix yourself for me or him, but mostly, for you please. Be happy, be happy, be happy. Figure that out and you have the secret of life.
    Happy Easter.

  • Drive-by

    You and him in the 4-Runner by my house while I read on the porch and awaited Braves home opener. Austin doesn’t have baseball, not even minor league, but I need to leave this neighborhood, this city. It can no longer hold me and you, and now, him too. Not running away, just starting over.

  • Insomnia

    Trying to fight off the sleep that seems to only come when not wanted and then never again. The stomach tonight will begin to eat everything including the actor, starting from the inside. What movie will it be now, now that the whole library is in the piece of credit-card-sized hardware. You could not make this, up, the lineup looks like The Man from Laramie, Say Anything, Bright Future, Husbands and Wives, Ulysses, Moby Dick, White Noise (book not movie), a self-portrait of John Irving done in cursive, the most recent issue of Reader’s Digest. And there is the man painting pictures of Jesus, and Mary, and the disciples, and Calvary and the Cross, and the dream finds me in the church, then in the hotel and then running from the man with gun that wants to steal my stories, but they can’t be stolen. “They are my stories, you fucker!” I give him all of the paper, but there is encryption and invisible ink, and he talks like Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, “G’head! G’head!” and Jon Voight is dreamy but not so much as Jimmy Stewart, and I play all of the parts, especially Hoffman and the Hunchback of Notre Dame, in this dream of this movie of these movies in my dreams, I play all of the parts except Jimmy Stewart, I could never hope to be that good.

  • Mis amigos

    Know my friends that you are valued above all, that so many of you have come to me out of these bad circumstances, and where I once stood and viewed this all as sheer horror and detriment, I now see as a whole new opportunity, another step in growing up and growing closer. I value you all in your kind words, and sympathetic sulking, understanding bitching, and well-deserved, mutual, bitter humor. I felt for so long that I was alone in the feelings I was harboring over my stupid fucking situation, but I realize that we have all been drug through the horse shit before, your testimonies have shown me as such. Thank you so much for the wisdom you have imparted, and for the constant reassurance that saying “fuck it” is not bad, in fact it is preferred, and for being there to show that there is so much life to be had after moving on – that waking up from the nightmare can bring such joy, hope and promise just from realizing you are finally awake again.
    Was playing: How Fucking Romantic by The Magnetic Fields

  • Planet Earth

    “In Israel, nubian ibex prepare to duel over a mate… These are actually young males, but their fights are dead serious. The loser may never get the chance to breed.”
    – Discovery Channel’s Planet Earth: Deserts episode

  • Oh this scarlet letter

    CRW_3148.jpg

    We were never truly happy
    Do you know how to pronounce it? It is Or-y-gun not Or-uh-gun. Does that side of the country seem like a dream to you? If he had arrived after a letter of arrival you would not have had the charge as much as you have had. If you had not protested as much, I would not have known the extent to which you love him. I have made myself available for random babysitting rendezvous. The occasional frozen pizza and mix-up of heartache. Did you ever think we were practicing, or at least auditioning for some role that we wanted, but no longer believed we would fulfill? I could feel so many things, and fill so many things, including yours, if you would allow. But those places where my body has been exist in a world more adult than childhood dreamers, fairy tale fantasies. I wanted that too, foolishly. I will roll around on this chipped wood carpet, and wait, and wait, and wait. YOU ARE NO LONGER EVERYTHING. You may indeed be nothing at all. A blip on the screen that never landed. I can feel the movements. The dance numbers have begun. The world has shifted. I have been asked into matrimony, and I do believe my response may be yes I will yes, I say, yes, I say yes, yes!