“By and by,” I say, and she understands. She asks what I am doing for the Saturday night, and I say I thought I might spend some time working things out; a little time howling at the moon. She tells me I sound like a big old bear when I do that. We stand in the front yard looking at the first few stars that have appeared on this clear evening. “By and by,” I think, and I wonder what it really means. She tells me she felt love once, but it was some two or three years back and that is all gone now. Tomorrow they are calling for rain and I know it will. The clouds can be sensed in the clarity of the stars tonight. If the earth will be destroyed by fire the next time, I don’t want any part of it. A flood would be much nicer, could wash all of the scum off the street like in “Taxi Driver.” I think I still love her, know what that is to feel it like I do in my heart, or something like that. She questions, writes me off. I can tell in her eyes it hasn’t been the same for some time now. I guess she’s been leaving since the first day she really came. What’s this love that I try to define? She thinks she knows and I do to, and one of us feels it and the other doesn’t, but I don’t know if we could even begin to wrap words around it, if words are even possible. I push down two keys on the piano, two write beside each other – a black and a white. I start the serenade that she got used to, and the one before her, and the one before her, and I play and sing about babies going away, and while I am singing I think of the flood that is coming and about the great big boat. I think of cutting my toenails, and of how many like me will be allowed on the cruise. I think of the cloven-hoofed and dream myself with wings. I could fly off and bring back the first signs of foliage. I could dream of a three month flood. I could think of what life would be without love. I can still feel the phantom in my heart. Two by two they go, and me and something, and the animals I will come to name in time. And it has just started raining and I think, “male and female, but what about the hermaphrodites like me?”
Blog
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Come in Dr. Freud
Things have been pretty tough between M and me lately. The silences and subtley harsh words have been taking their toll on my wellbeing and our friendship. M has a tendency to ask loaded questions, which makes me stumble in conversation as I search for the exact neutral phrases that I think are appropriate. You see, I am determined not to satisfy her with the answer she is looking for, but I am also desperately trying not to upset her unnecessarily. It’s tightrope walk.
Over the past two nights we’ve had late-night heart-to-heart chats about our relationship and these things always end with her being upset because I let the truth slip out: that she has acted apallingly.
Last night’s chat was about the chat we had the night before. She had said that the way she had been acting lately had been a strategy, a staged drama, if you like, to help me fall out of love with her. That all the silences and criticism, all the nastiness and personnality assassination had been a deliberate act of wall-building to help me get over her. She had done it on purpose. She had shown me her worst side. So I said that was fine, but it had backfired and she had been in danger of losing me as a friend. And that, quite frankly, I couldn’t see myself in a relationship with someone who would act in that way. I didn’t want to be with someone like that.
We slept on it and the next night she said that she didn’t like what I had said about me not wanting to be with someone who would act like that. That I made her sound like a monster. And anyway, she’d made a mistake and didn’t mean to say ‘on purpose’ and could not think of the word she wanted to use; but it didn’t matter because she didn’t do it on purpose, it was something she couldn’t help doing because she was, and still is, emotionally confused about her break-up with Jeff.
I could tell that she wanted me to apologise for those harsh-but-true words. She kept on repeating that she couldn’t understand how someone who purported to be her friend could say such a thing about her. That it was unfair, and that … But you said you did it on purpose. If you hadn’t have said that, I wouldn’t have said what I said in response. And I still stand by that sentiment: I wouldn’t want to be with someone who acts in that way.
The conversation went round and round in circles until she finally gave up seeking that elusive apology and moved on to another thing I said when she’d asked me who my best friends are. I listed three or four but had not included her, and she was hurt by that. Why wasn’t she on that list? Do I consider her a close friend? I told her that I wasn’t prepared to answer such schoolgirl questions and, that she had no right to ask it. In the consequent squirming and stammering as she furiously tried to back-pedal she called me JEFF! -
Eggs
I awoke this morning with eggs
after a dream of eggs last night
and I wonder today what
my therapist will say
about such things –
these eggs, or those,
in that dream,
or the pigeon eggs,
broken,
just shells that fell
from the rafters
beneath the train tracks
as I was on my way
to the stairs and
to this chair
to write about eggs. -
Thanksgiving
One of the biggest things that holidays are for me is a time to measure out change; to see where you have come, how much your life has changed since the last time that holiday rolled around. Thanksgiving also gives us the chance to take a look at what we are thankful for, perhaps through the lens of that time measurement.
I decided not to go to Durham for Thanksgiving this year. It was not easy to just take the offer of that safety, security and support, but I felt like I needed to stay in Atlanta to prove something to myself. New friends had invited me to Thanksgiving dinner, and I felt that being able to decide to stay here for the holiday showed a substantial amount of progress in my recovery from the break up, and the formulation of a new life that I have been attempting lately. -
Mojo
Okay,
here’s how it goes,
we are sitting at this pizza joint,
and at most it is 3 to 4 months into it all.
We are just sitting there and
talking about love and
our love for one another, and
how great the other one is, and
how we should get married
before we hate each other, and
she is saying she has never
felt this way before,
and I am saying I have never
felt this way before, and
there is a way she eats the salad,
discarding the pepperoncini,
that I could see a demise,
that she didn’t like blue cheese,
and that orange salad dressings
were distasteful, I could feel death coming.
I am sitting here trying
to convince myself that it was all over
from the start, that these pathologies
were already eating us up,
that we fulfilled some fucked up
psychological void that we each had…
but no it was love, it really was,
as sure as pepperroncinis don’t matter, nor
a distaste for blue cheese, it was love.
At least there was that, and
there’s nothing wrong with it, and
it was good. -
The dream is over
I will awake
in the morning
with a yawn and smile
and the dream will be over. -
Final chapter
I always hate when I get
to the final chapter of the novel
especially the last few pages
when I have to start considering
what I will read next and
I start to wonder about how
it will end even though I already know.
I know the writer puts emphasis
on this ending, it will be the last
thing he leaves you with, and
there are novels with such beautiful
endings, even or especially the sad ones.
I am up late again and out tonight
the late autumn crickets are singing
just as they did in the beginning,
and the cars are coming up
and down the road, people are
moving, falling in love, and out,
making love, kissing, arguing,
drinking, and fighting loneliness
and their own demons.
I have been up with too much
on my mind, trying to remember
the first words of the book
so I might write the last ones.
I forgot to save the pages, or
they were washed away in the flood.
I will have to recreate them, but
for now I am attempting an ending.
John Irving doesn’t write
the first line of a book
until he has written the last.
If this one ends this way,
then that end is also a beginning.
Maybe there was death at the beginning,
or the thought of, or the fear of,
or was it love, a smile, comfort after
many long days, was a corpulent arm
throwing change to the beggars below,
or did it begin or end with him coming
home after a long day, and her waking
in a monologue, ‘yes I said yes I will Yes.’
Some things end that way, or others
with a ‘no nope never’ and some don’t tidy
up so easily.
I remember something sloppy
at the beginning of this book.
Perhaps a metaphor misplaced
or carried on too long. Something
was not right and it carried
its discomfort through all of the pages.
I hate this feeling at the end,
when you start reading so much faster,
and inevitably the phone rings
right as you are reaching the rapturous finale.
This one will end right where it began, I suppose.
The pages will loop back on themselves
and I will not have to worry
about what to read next,
and all of the unkempt ends
will smooth and fray and smooth and fray,
and we will lose sight of
the beginning or ending,
and it will just go on,
fall in love and out,
and in and out until it all ends,
or at least one of us.
Where did it end? Or begin? Or does it?
It was love,
it was love,
it was love,
no matter what the critics will say. -
After Midnight
Working on the first three pages of the great American novel, I hit my first writer’s block, and wanting air I walked onto the porch. I felt you were restless too, up and thinking when we both should be in bed (together?). I have written so many words tonight and none of them seem to answer any of the questions. My restlessness, and the Siren-call of yours, brought me to put on my wool sports coat and boots and to start walking toward that sweet music. I was blocked and it must have been 1:15 AM, and the black ant I had been studying had just stood up and walked out the door as well, said he was off to work. I walked down the street, restless and lonely and thinking that seeing the neighborhood like this, at this time of the day might help cure some of these blues. I walked down past the rotting Gingko fruit, and stepped on the concrete carving and felt magic shoot through me, straight up my spine. I became fooled by the pedestrian signs in the road and mistook them for tiny men, standing still. They cast long shadows and I tilted toward them. And in my mind the trees were swooping just like they are in that scene toward the end of To Kill a Mockingbird. I walked past the cross-eyed cat and thought about the day that JT got ornery at low blood sugar. The dog bowl was not out, nor the bucket of treats. There was no one around and for awhile I thought I found my country. This is a city? I continued to walk down and took the liberty to cross not at the designated location. I dodged bulbing oak roots. I heard the Siren call still, and wondered if rocks were there to be crashed. Would I see two silhouettes on the shade? Would my life become a cheesy song? Should I have stayed in? For what? Do I want to know why you sing so sweetly tonight? Do you not sing sweetly for me? I am looking for home because the place of my departure has no heart any more, and the cliché says home must have that. I am going and going and I come past your door and pause and think of how close you are there. And I try to travel through the air. I try to levitate. I want to float there. I want to see in your window, see you sleep, but I am afraid that you are not alone, or that you are. I refuse myself the magic. I continue to walk toward a home that is out there somewhere. Just past where the Earth curves and I can see no longer, where the sun goes to sleep after a long day, and where I will finally lay my head as well.
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Entomology
On the floor by my foot
a large black ant crawls without direction,
the same type insect I spent
much time smashing after the fall.
Then they seemed to be everywhere,
a sign for the broken hearted,
or maybe it was arid and they
simply searched for an oasis in the carpeting.
The oasis, alas, did not exist,
and, alas, the black ants stopped coming,
I was left alone for a while,
a scientist without a subject.
Tonight this one arrives
and the experiment begins again.
Should I run him out of town?
Will he take me with him?
Like last night when getting
in bed and from beneath the pillow
crawled a pale orange lady bug,
and i couldn’t remember if
that meant good luck or bad,
was this the nature of the tooth fairy,
I had always assumed Mom,
but perhaps it is this.
My studies don’t always go so well.
I wonder about the other lady bug that
flew in the truck window on Saturday,
and what it scratching my cornea meant.
Was it so I could better understand
the nature of insects?
Or when the black ant bites my foot
late on Monday, and it takes me back
to that time when you once danced
sweaty to hip hop blasting from
speakers on a hardwood floor
creating a scene that I
should be forgetting now if
I know what is good for me.
If I could be strong would I
understand why these things happen
why these things are here
and in my bed and walking
these floors and not leaving
me alone, but reminding me I am -
Medication: Day 55
I must warn you all that this one will be boring. Today has been pretty awful on a lot of fronts. This will not be a piece where I will wax poetic very much. It will simply be me purging myself of the demons of this day.
I awoke this morning with JT on the sofa. We had approximately an hour and a half left together after seeing each other regularly in two different cities for the last week. We would board the MARTA train and travel to 5 Points Station together, where I would get off and he would transfer to the southbound train, and eventually to a plane back home to Chicago. It was hard not to be sad. This past week has been a pretty good respite from the things that have been perplexing me lately. I was really scared of what coming home alone from work would bring today.