Standing

I would see things that made sense out of the nonsense. I knew him, and I knew what I saw.

And now I remember him much the way the Prisoner of Chillon remembered the rats.

I realize the hauntings are so much better than anything that actually occurred. Funny how funerals can make saints out of sinners. Strange, how memory does this.

I don’t get writer’s block. But I do get writer’s unwillingness-to-share. And I'm a big believer in waiting it out until it's thoroughly cooked. I don't want to contract Salmonella poisoning in addition to the toxins I seek out and save. I think too many bacteria make each other sick and confuse the symptoms.

I was standing there correcting the grammar on a film festival's scrolling advertisement when it hit me. I’m standing here, a hundred years from his nonsense and occurrence. I'm not a haunted prisoner. I've forgotten much more than I remember.

And I'm standing here,

Beta’ed and blocked.

Regret and guilt are shovels, just waiting for you to know when to start digging.

I know when it's working. I know when the rats are cooked and the only diseases are the ones I unearth on purpose. I know when I hit that emotional peek. It's a writer's secret: the real work is in the climb. In the freefall, god just takes over.

“This tells me so much more than you could ever say.”

- Cashback

I tried. I listened to the stories. One after another. I took things from the funeral. Birds, and champagne. I was standing there, someplace I didn't belong, with his rats and my rot. I'm not sure when I lost my way but damn that was the day I found it. That was the day I started seeing. And it's like what Lex said: "You're like a wind up toy that's got no more wind, but you're still standing."

Some Words are so subjective that they can't actually function as Words anymore. I just didn't know you were one of them.

.

Reconnaissance

They turned. Not me. And this was not the time.

I couldn't be as selfish.

I left through that garbage-lined alley.

I didn't look back at the liars. The cheaters. The infidels.

The martyrs and the self involved.

Trust breaks like a spine. There is no correcting this damage. There is no way my soul-screams can be heard now. This is over.

Coyotes will remove the liver from a dead animal. I only write from a distance. I think I'm afraid that if you name and label the emotions too early they never really simmer, and change, and become. I think the real truth lies in the reduction, the aged scotch, the planted seed. You have to wait it out. You have to let it Become.

And that takes time. That takes patience. If you birth the Words too early, it's like all your plants become male. And what the hell are you going to do with that? You have to know when to bring the light. You have to know when to harvest.

You have to know when to eat the liver. And you have to know when to surrender the kill to the wild.

I look at the things I did. And maybe it's still too early. But I see everything I did was wrong. I trusted too quickly, I loved too fast. I didn't realize everything was becoming male. I didn't know when everything went to shit. I went out there forgetting to look for the enemy. Forgetting to identify the fuckers. I kept the goal in focus even when nobody else did.

And I was shocked that nobody else did. I was shocked.

And that's one on me. I didn't know how bad it could be. I didn't know how bad they had gotten. I didn't know when that piss-soaked alleyway became a dead end where married people and broken promises go to get their way with the addicts and the whores. After all, that was my liver.

I look at the way this has changed me. And how I can never be unchanged again. I will forever be damaged by this. And that's another one on me.

.

Subside

Some things are just too painful to talk about.
But somehow nothing is too painful to write about.
Something about the pen makes everything free game.
Nothing is too sacred,
Nothing is too horrible.
Nothing is too beautiful.


We live certain disasters. We call them by name when we rediscover them with familiarity and infamy.
Because when you return, when you go back to the wreckage and own it,
you find a comfortableness and a stillness,
behind those locked gates in the dark.

You walked that road once. And you learned your way. And you won't make this mistake again.

You hit this point in your 40's when you realize your life isn't in front of you. It's behind you.

We were drinking Stoli and facing the sunset when I discovered just how empowering that realization is. I know what I'm doing. I know where I screwed up. I know how to own this. And I know how to write.

The greatest day was when you saw your unborn children and a thousand dreams. A hundred Christmases to come. When you didn't know what moments lie ahead.

The greatest day is when you see who has never betrayed you, and you've had three or four dozen Christmases you've loved. When you get it. When you know. And everything ahead of you becomes clearer.

We all suffer. It comes down to how you wear it. Like any good disaster there's the hopelessness, and then there's the healing. There's the calling. There's the writing.

It has nothing to do with the hurt or the loss. Or the senselessness. Or the way this wreck has left you broken.

You write because your life wouldn't have it any other way.
You write when you've been gutted.
You write when life needs a rhythm and a ransom.
You write when you're sad.
When you're torn.
When you feel.

When life is not a poem.

.

When the World Worked

And sometimes, you dance.

The intricate complex music of life flows on and on. The roads you chose to ignore, the paths you needed to follow. The faces that will forever be beside you, the people that faded away. The moves and the miles, the moments and the missing.

And inside of it all, when you're ever so lucky, sometimes the harmony aligns and you find a groove. And you allow this face, this movement, this moment, and you accept this dance. You dance, because life lets you. Once in a while. It all works out for one brief instant, and you have the opportunity to dance.

And after the rain and the radio,
After the wind and the waves,
The moment passes and you move on.

Life grants you gravity and inertia. The way life pulls you, the way it's hard to break away. The way the energy around you keeps its momentum. The way you sometimes forget. But the way you'll always remember those dances.

You look, but people like me and Tony, we change our names or go off the grid. Or spend a little time in South America and then pretty much become untraceable. Unfindable.

We wind up on different planets.

Sometimes it wasn't all in your head. Sometimes they find their way back.
Sometimes not.
Sometimes, you dance.

I don't know why I danced with him or her. I don't know why life was kind and the Earth smiled, and for one minute a million years ago it all made sense. And I don't know why she died, or why he loved her, or why I found him, but not her. Or why he had to find me. I know it has to do with the inertia and the gravity. And possibly the rain.

Years from then, years from now, you'll be someplace quiet when the music is slowing, and you'll remember certain seconds, certain flashes of wonder.
When it mattered,
When you melted.
When the world worked.

You won't think about the rain.
You'll remember the dances.

"I don't know how it happens. It all took place so quick."
-Dire Straits
.

Sentience

I remember eavesdropping, lying on a beach. Lying in the sunshine, hiding in the daylight. Quietly pretending to sleep, so I could hear.

The guy was maybe 26, the girl was maybe 19. They worked in the same deli, she was new. She was pretty.

She was talkative and happy. She jabbered on about work and play. Food and customers. Schedules and roommates. Rent and pay.

He was laid-back. Quiet, relaxed. Probably high. He was not really listening to her, he was just biding his time. He was lying in the sunshine, hiding in the daylight. She was telling him what she packed for lunch. He was getting ready to have her for dinner.

She was apple cheeked and fresh. No make up, no hair junk. And no idea. He was scruffy, and smart. Lying in wait. Lying in the sunshine. Probably high. Watching the clock.

It wasn't very hot, it was September in Cape Cod. It was breezy and comfortable. Quiet and clear. I listened with eyes closed, only peeking occasionally to see how he'd stare off, and nod and uh-huh. And wait. Putting in his time.

But then, she mentioned Jason. And his attention perked. She went on and on. How strong Jason was, how helpful. How cute. She smiled, a little shy and a little giddy. She had nothing to hide. She sang Jason's song in the sunshine with an innocent breeze. How he lifted heavy stock boxes, how he helped her find her drawer shortage. Little tales in the daylight for all to see.

He sat up, agenda jerked. He sat up and he nodded. He looked sympathetic. And then made his move. He explained he's known Jason for quite a while. And how great it is that Jason's making an effort. After all he had done.

She asked what, she asked who. And he proceeded to weave.

I'd sat up to watch. I was staring and he saw. He was lying in the sunshine. He was hiding in the daylight. But he'd been seen, and he knew. And he nodded to me.

I've been in that moment before. I've been that moment, all sides. I've been in the sunshine and the daylight, in the lying, in the hiding. I've been the breeze.

He shifted his weight, he rolled onto his side. He blocked my view and lowered his voice. But I knew what he was saying. Maybe not the exact Words. Maybe not the specific evils Jason would now wear in the dark. But I knew the idea.

I could still hear her, and the sound of surprise. And I closed my eyes. Lying in the sunshine. Hiding in the daylight.

Interrogative

You remember and re-sense the connections. Some people can do that. And when it's like kissing your brother, your body makes you repel. Almost every Dan you've ever known has been sexy, except for him. Your memories had physically manifested and you weren't able to do anything but hurt him in California.

One of the reasons you forgive as much as you do is that you're hoping for the same cosmic grace. So many things are out there that you regret, that you genuinely wish you could have done differently. Things you've written out and cried about, and can't fully let go.

You apologized once, at David's wedding. You meant it, and he saw that, and he was polite enough to forgive you. But nothing changed. You didn't forgive yourself.

You don't want everyone to see your darkness, but you want someone to see something. So you give it a try and you pledge to be yourself. But that feathers and fades, doesn't it. Eventually it's fake. Eventually you stop saying what's really on your mind because the real you isn't something any of them will get. And you learned early on from an old episode of Lou Grant that the more you let everybody know that you don't belong, the more everybody will see to it that you don't.

You put on different masks for different rooms. You let only so much show. The taste of lies is worse than the smell of fear. And you can tell yourself whatever you want, it doesn't change the music. You're a story you forgot to tell, the only one you didn't write.

You were stupid once, you just didn't get it. You were lucky that part passed. You were 26 once, and I'm not just talking about years. You turned heads and fucked rockstars, but that was a lifetime ago. You don't make the same wishes anymore. You pay for your drinks. You have a plan. And you aren't going to change the world after all.

You speak in second person plural out of loneliness, out of wanting not to split infinitives or be the only damaged writer feeling this way. You did one thing right. And thank god for that everydamnday because as it turns out it was the most important thing.

You can blame your father for alot of this. You can blame your mother for the rest. You've got a little more rage than you know what to do with sometimes. But you manage enough self medication to keep all bats contained in makeshift belfries. And you sure as hell confuse remembering with imagining.

Scream

They took your dignity.

They used you and treated you like nothing. And when they were done they threw you away. You've never felt safe, you've never felt free.

You scream out over and over so loudly, because that little voice is all you have. You yell because you have nothing else. They took the rest from you - everything you had to give and more. And you scream and you scream because you're so used to no one listening. Your little voice bouncing off the bars of your caged life endlessly. You cry out when you need something, when it's wrong, when you're scared. You cried out, expecting maybe. Something. But nothing. No one heard, no one came. Nothing changed. You didn't matter.

This is how you learned life to be.

This is how you existed. And it's a hard habit to break. You've had so few things on which you could depend, like your little schedule. So you stick to it fervently. And you yell at us when we break it, when we forget. We all hang on to what little we have to sustain us through the storms, especially when they are life long.

You fight so hard upon wakening. You strike out. Because that's when the bastards get ya.

I know that you want to trust me but you don't know how. I know you need to bite. I get it. And you can do whatever it is you need to do. Bite. Strike. Scream out at the top of your lungs. Do whatever you have to. You won't scare me off.

You're with me now. You're safe forever, even if you don't know, even if you can't believe.
I give you my Word.

Not a Care

She was little, and dirty. Someone wasn't taking care of her. Someone who was supposed to wasn't caring. She was seven years old, maybe. It was 1978, maybe. She was littler than I, but not less. Never less. But at the time I couldn't hear and I didn't care.

And they'd send her off to St. Ephrem's School in her little plaid uniform with her old socks and unwashed hair.

How humiliating for her. How silently she'd stand there at the sink, doing what she was told to do. Surely she heard. Surely she hurt, and knew that she was different, and that someone didn't care. And now, someone else didn't care.

Long broomstick handles with hooks on the ends were used to open and shut tall heavy old windows next to the cloak room. We'd open the windows a crack in the winter, and leave the hooks in the back of the room, leaning them up against everything that wasn't heard.
We left them.
I left them.

Some stories unfold. Some are hidden in the prose making gestures toward the pathway. Some you have to blurt out like a confession. And some you just can't bring yourself to tell.

There are the things that you hold, things you carry, that you can't let go because that would be too much like forgiveness and sometimes you shouldn't be. There are the things you regret because you didn't know then what you know now. But you know now.

Morning after morning we'd walk down to the second grade classroom, with windows and cloaks and hooks and little ears. We'd go every day to aid. And morning after morning we escorted that dirty little girl to the basement bathroom.

I have never forgotten your big dark eyes or the quiet in which you stood obediently alone.
You barely spoke, and why would you.

You were the only one listening.

You and the World

The only true difference between the dawn and the dusk
is the going and the coming.

The world reveals itself to you in layers.
The when and the where depends on all your firsts.
The first time you saw lightning.
The first time you caught a glimpse of forever.
The first time you realized you're out there all alone.

Much of my life has been spent in bars: drinking, writing, talking to people that were drinking who should have been writing.
When they didn't, I wrote the Words down for them.
I wrote the Words down for us all.
It was one of my firsts.
The first time I realized narration and correspondence were part of the story.
The first time I believed the story is mine to tell.
The first time I knew the call of my whales.
The first time I followed.

I lost a lot of bets, I lost a lot of foolishness.
A lot of theories disproved themselves.
Sometimes a thing will end in the same place it began.
In theory, that's a circle.
In life, that's a rut. Wheel spinning. Obstinancy.

We finger through the layers,
We squint to find the fairies.
The smart kids will tell you that it's just dust -
The dots and sprinkles in the air that you can see when you blink or rub your eyes.
It's up to you to believe. If you don't, then it's dust after all.
But it's still my story to tell.

The first time you saw the ocean. The first time you took a bow or signed an autograph. The first time you realized how little you are. The first time you realized how big you could be.

The world seems to cling to sunlight, fighting the coming of night. And in the morning, sheds the darkness with eagerness. Sometimes the world doesn't know what it's doing.
Like how much time and thought goes into setting a table, which is later cleared hastily and anxiously, in only seconds.
I think it happened during a sound check, or a dress rehearsal, or a pre-release book signing cocktail party. It was the dawn of the big and the breach of the little. When I was right there on the edge.
I think that's when it happened.
I think that's when I saw the dust.

And I went on to blame you for it.
I blamed you for making the fairies into dust.
When the truth is, all that happened was I grew up. Dusk and dawn. And the book I'd been writing all along turned out to be finite.
There was a beginning, a middle, and an ending.

I just wanted to be in the middle.

The first time you felt your heart beating and breaking. The first time your ride was gone and you walked the 5 miles home in the dark alone. The first time you realized where you get your material. The first time you looked into his eyes and saw nothing but emotional research.

The book is what made him. The book is what killed him.
And I'd tell you this: it would have been worth the price if it had ever been read.
But I'll promise you this: there was no way out.

I lost the bullseye on my back. I found my way through your cities. I lost my fairies, I found your dust. All my firsts, all my intoxications.
And I kept my Word.

“He got out of Belvue on a clerical error and that night opened for Firehouse at CBGB’s.”
The Devil and Daniel Johnston

Dusk

Mike worked in a Dexter’s Shoe Store. And then one day the shoe store wasn’t there anymore. It was a Dexter’s House of Sound.

And sometime after everything had happened, I was in the passenger seat of my grandfather’s car during one of our late summer early evening drives. I was wearing my black jeans. We were going up 86th Street toward 5th Avenue, and I looked in the shoe store as we passed. And there he was again, in that building, again, working. Like he was stuck in the space no matter what company was leasing it. No matter what they were selling.

Or maybe it was an electronics store first and a shoe store second. The more I remember the more I realize I don’t. But I’m sure about the space. And I’m sure about the jeans.

Mike was very short and wore coke bottle bottom glasses over extremely poor vision and crooked eyes. He had good hair though, and an incredible Shore Road apartment overlooking the water. I don’t think it was actually his, but he lived there like it was. He wore bell bottoms and listened to Zeppelin. Nothing about him screamed pedophile, but if you looked hard enough, you saw what you needed to.

Some things I just can’t handle. And I really can’t handle them twice.

Especially when they never change. When they’re the same forever. Like a great pair of black jeans in 1979, and like one of those old railroad room apartments on 3rd Avenue in Bay Ridge. I remember sitting in the bathtub filled with cool water drinking Schlitz beer out of the can that very hot August. I remember being alone, and so much older than I was, and realizing it in the stillness of that bathtub. I remember my grandfather didn't know all the details, didn't want to know all the details. He just wanted me to be ok. He treated me like an adult. He said, you can't go back. And he let me stay there with him in that apartment when nobody else wanted me.

It was a bad summer for best friends and blondes. I still haven't forgiven her or her family for what they did to me. I still haven't forgiven.

I found refuge in that sixth floor high ceiling’ed apartment on 3rd Avenue, with the big heavy solid dark wood doors, and the sound of the heavy clank of old elevators. I'd lay in that bathtub looking out the window, through the fire escape, through the heat and the laundry hanging on clothes lines, toward the water past Shore Road.

God it was hot. But by late afternoon it would begin to cool off. Twilight seemed to linger longer than it should. And I’d wear my black jeans, and my grandfather and I would take long drives around the neighborhood with the windows down. Sometimes we'd stop at different Irish bars where he'd drink and sneak me sips of beer, and give me quarters to play the juke box. But mostly we'd just drive around, stopping at the red lights and quietly observing Brooklyn at dusk.

It was so long ago, I can't remember which came first, the shoe store or the electronics store. But some of it is clear. My grandfather gave me a white poor-boy cap and a thin purple tie, and I bought Queen Live Killers on vinyl. It was the soundtrack of the summer. And I remember those black jeans, from The Gap.

I wore those jeans with everything.

My grandfather died the following winter. It had been our first and final summer. He was my only friend.

Annihilate

We buried it on a cold day.
We dug the grave we moved the earth.
We replaced the dirt and we went on our way.
We took solace in being able to use the words We and Our.
It meant none of us were alone.

We buried it in daylight.
But we were alone.
All alone, all of us.
The instant that bell rang we were all off in different directions, no one stopping to look over their shoulder for the others.
I can’t believe I said that.
Why did I have to say that.

I’m still that girl in high school,
Hoping they’ll like me, hoping they’ll accept me.
Hoping to be We and Our,
Unburied.

I can feel it underneath my skin like long ago splinters and expired mascara.

It was unnerving enough that whatever I wore was wrong, whatever I did was wrong.
But the fact that whatever I said was wrong...
That's the part that’s gonna kill me.

She looked at me as if to say, see how you can never fit in?
I see. I see.
And I said.

We buried it in the ground, in the daylight, in the silence and the stillness. We buried it in a moment when We were.
In illusion and paradox. We pretended.

It's 25 years later.
And I'm still the outcast. The one that doesn't fit in. The one that they don't like can't accept will always remove.

In the darkness,
It turns out nothing was ever buried at all.

5 or 6

I was an onion in the health pageant. I was five I guess. Maybe six.

I remember long walks home with my mother, looking down at my shoes taking steps. Navigating those steps over cracked concrete. I remember when the big bag of Ruffles Potato Chips had two long skinny wax paper bags of chips inside.

I was five I guess. Maybe six. I remember dark green coffee mugs and mismatched dishes – green rims with a rose in the center. Light blue and white with gold swirls. And those great big Tupperware salt and pepper shakers that trapped moisture and made mush.

I was a tiger for Halloween. I was five I guess. Maybe six. The costume was big on me. I was so little. One neighbor gave me very long whips of licorice that she had special for me in a paper bag on top of her refrigerator. All the other kids got candy out of her big bowl at the front door. But she took me by the hand into the kitchen for my special treat. Even though she resembled the jointed die cut cardboard witch that hung on our door she was really nice to me. She had a shrill voice that was always screaming at one of her kids or a neighbor or her husband. She made me a little nervous. But I was little. Five, maybe six. Looking back I realize she was a nice old lady that went out of her way to give me potato chips and candy.

I don’t miss my late father. I don’t miss the celery kid or the kid that played the doctor in the health pageant. I don’t miss the neighbor that gave me potato chips or the family that ate off of mismatched green or blue dishes. I don’t miss being five. Or six.

I miss my stuffed animals.

A gray mouse, a pink dog. A couple of bunnies. I miss the stuffed animals I talked to and slept with. I miss how much love was in me, how much love I could give them, never expecting anything in return. I miss that pure giving for the sake of giving, because you can’t help it, because you have something inside of you to give.

I was Raggedy Ann in a costume contest. I was five, I guess. Maybe six. My friend was a King. His mother put the bathroom rug on his shoulders and made him a scepter and crown. I wanted to believe Michael really was king. Just like I wanted to believe the little girl across the street that was making her First Communion really was getting married because her dress looked like a little wedding dress to me. Just like I wanted to believe Molly was really a witch, and that all my stuffed animals could feel my love.

I was five, I guess. Maybe six. I could love without expecting anything back. I could wish and believe. I was an onion and an animal and a ragdoll. I was little. I was starting.

Avenue A

He held a potato chip in his fingers. It looked like Africa and he wanted me to see. He wanted me to see the sign. But it wasn't a sign. It was a potato chip that looked like Africa.

He never fit in. Much of his life was an exercise in proving just that. And in the evening he would retreat to his basement apartment that smelled like bleach and regret. He spent alot of time in that cellar, scrubbing, trying to wash away mistakes and moods, and the things the mice left behind.

Stay

He liked it to be new.
He liked to start over so it would be new again and he'd have a fresh start.
In the beginning anything is possible.
He liked to begin. He liked to be possible.

I don't remember what he did for a living but I remember he hated his jobs. I remember jokes about cubicles and mindless meetings where nothing was new and nothing was possible. He'd leave one company for another, doing whatever it is that he did. He was always looking. Interviewing. Resigning.

He was always looking for a new apartment. One closer to the city. One cheaper. On a quieter block. A new place. A fresh start.

He was always trading in his cars. Bigger. Better. A convertible. A classic.

He'd break up with her so they could begin again. But eventually it couldn't be new. Eventually, it was her again. And that wasn't anything's possible. Eventually she wasn't a beginning.
Inevitably, she was part of a pattern.

I kept in touch with her until she moved away, before email and texts and blogs and twitter, back in 1992 when it was like we were all Amish. He didn't like patterns. And then she was gone.

I think for a while some of us thought he was brave. Some of us thought it was brave to begin again.

But the eventual and inevitable made too many agains. He never gave things a chance to work. He never knew how a story could end.
He never got to the place where you know all the Words by heart,
And you're sitting shoulder to shoulder on the hood of somebody's car,
Sharing a bag of chips and watching the setting sun or a ball game.
In a breeze, in a whisper,
In the things that don't matter.
In the things that just are.
Like your oldest Levi's - faded, worn, and broken-in.

The real work is in the middle. The real work is in getting there.
The real work wasn't in buying the damn jeans. It was in keeping them all this time.
The time - that allowed those dungarees to become your favorites.

He never built any equity.
He was never vested.
And eventually, neither were we.


"Ridin' high, when I was king.
Played it hard and fast, 'cause I had everything."
-Beggin', by Madcon
.

Exit

Maybe it was nothing you said.
Maybe it was just something I heard.

Maybe it was something you didn't say that lingered in the darkness,
And that could be why I still sleep with a light on,
Looking for things that aren't there
Like little lawn donkeys that wander off and disappear somewhere deep into Staten Island.

Or maybe it was something you said
On the Turnpike, on time, in daylight.
But I don't want these to be the things I remember.
I know I don't want to be remembered that way.
I don't want to remember every dripping detail of your center or your scent.
So don't ask me if I knew it was your song.
Maybe that's something else you never said.

I'm stopped at the end of the exit ramp tonight,
Trying to get the right song and the write Words.
And I still don't know if you went left or right.
And I don't remember when we met.
I still don't wear a watch.
Was it something you said
way back when. When, back there,
as I listened to all the things I couldn't hear.
But I still get lost on the Turnpike
no matter what time it is.

Here in between the rain and the radio
I realize there was nothing you could have said.
There was nothing you could have made me remember.
I knew there was only one ending to my story.
There was only one thing to Be.
But the rent was late and the watch was broken.
It was nothing you said.
It was everything you didn't.
You slept through the best parts
and I don't set alarms.

Close your eyes when you're hiding in the dark
or the headlights will find you and give you away.
With out the drummer driving this song -
It's just something else
you never said
that I don't want to remember.

Intrepidly

It was during a drive to Mexico,
a long nighttime drive down Route 1
with the ocean beside us,
someplace in between San Diego and Rosarita
when he told me.

We had the world to ourselves
deep into the horizon
as far as the eye could see.
I suppose he felt safe. I suppose he felt resigned.
He smiled as he said it, a brave smile. A clear voice.
He said that everyone would pass one day.
All of us.
The only difference was
he knew when.

And instead of placing fear or anger in that,
he let it comfort him,
like Bactine on your scraped knee when you're 9.

The sun was never brighter.
And that drive back up the coast wasn't nearly long enough.

We were at that age where it seemed unthinkable and far away and not possible. I don't know where he became brave, I don't know if the smile was forced for my swallowing. It was as if he'd made a simple decision some time on the Grapevine to find the power in a situation to which he was powerless.

I'm at the age now where it happens sometimes.
And I don't know many people who kept the ocean beside them.
I don't know many who found their center in the passing.
He knew so much more than when.

He was Bactine and sunshine.

Worded You

I came to care about the shudder of winter
and the little portraits I’d compose
of faces past and turmoils evened.
I came to understand the differences between the agings.
There is the immediate.
There is the momentary.
And in the end there is the knowing.

I never painted your portrait.
I never knew your moments
and I never understood what failed to shudder in your winter.

If this were fiction, right here is where I’d say: He’d look back on that storm for decades to follow with a sense of connection to the woman who cared.

But this isn’t fiction. And I didn't.

This is the reverence. And now I do.

It’s the shudder in the winter in the portrait of the window where I came to care.
I came to care.
But when I left,
When I stopped coming,
You stopped looking through that window.

I came to care about the shudder of your windows and the portrait of your winter.
But I never Worded you.

And for that,
I will always be sorry.

Bay Parkway

The truth is subjective and tainted.
She said things she can never take back. Thoughtless things, that won the battles over the years and cost her the war in the end.

She was always an angry liar. Perhaps she was so busy maintaining the lies that she forgot to remember the handful of good things I used to embrace. When you're alone in the remembering you tend to question, and let go.

The truth is I knew her in a way and a place, in a glimpse and a rarity, on a day that will never dawn again. I saw her with eyes that were innocent and trusting.
And never again. And not.

The truth is dark and difficult which is why we left it in Brooklyn a million years ago.
The Christmas cards, the convertible, and the old black and white TV in the bedroom. It was an episode of The Wonder Years that never aired.

The truth is that I've been moving away for a very long time. And it's too late to reverse that.
I ran faster in the hating. I forgot which way points east.


"We're just a million little gods causing rainstorms
Turning every good thing to rust."
- Arcade Fire
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Straw

We were a table of 15 or so, after hours. After working. We were a large group around nine at night ordering dinner and drinks.

He was tall and handsome with sweetness in his eyes and I remember watching while we all ordered. He wrote nothing down. He just listened. And I remember watching, because back then I was a photographer, and time revealed that he had gotten every order right.

The parking situation in Fort Lee was rough but I drove a Hyundai at the time and I could squeeze into those tight spots. Everyone at the salon would go to that restaurant after work, after hours, on Fridays. And I would squeeze into those tight spots, and I could see, and he would take me out for weird diner dinners and get mad if the waiter asked for my number. In a way, the diners could see too. I think everyone could tell, if they looked. I think it was there.

We'd walk to CVS from his studio apartment because once you had a parking spot you didn't want to move. He loved my shoes. He had beautiful thick dark curly hair and a pretty face, and he told me that story about pack animals that everyone who attended West Point tells. And when I made my "I'm not a pack animal" speech he was as impressed as I had been when he remembered 15 dinner orders. He was impressed and I believe he knew what I saw in his beautiful eyes but he would not speak it. Not even in a tight spot. And I kept his secrets, even the ones he didn't give me.

He surrendered the seeing because he had people that expected things from him. It was as if you could feel how torn he was. It was hard to be used but I figured it out. He was being counselled by the busy bodies at the most fabulous trendy 3 hour wait for a table restaurant and I was being offered dating advice from the very fucked up beautiful people of the design team at the most happening salon. All he could do was memorize. And there wasn't anything I could do except be the photographer and warn the reactionaries to chill.

And that's the thing about being the photographer: you have to see. I was so busy seeing that I couldn't hear the trains or the anorexics and I didn't tell anyone my boyfriend was gay. I just drank a lot of free cappuccinos and shopped at Udelco in Nyack.

I bumped into him years later and he took me for lunch. I was no longer working at the most fabulous salon and he was no longer waiting happening tables without paper and pen. The poor thing actually introduced his boyfriend to me as his roommate. I'm not sure which one of us was more annoyed. But his eyes were still so beautiful. And I could feel him struggling. I could feel the pressure and the expectations, and the years of his parents not being photographers.

I wish he had let me be his friend. I wish he had let me know him. The most he let me do was to accept his apology. He apologized with his mouth and his eyes. He offered no explanation or excuse. He just was what he was. And for that one brief moment in the sun that nobody memorized or photographed, he was straw.

Acquiescence

I am through with the ghost of you.
I am through with the things that came in daylight
and the things you never said.
I am through with the part of me that never forgave you.

"My throat is trying to be sore. I'm thinking about what I'm not saying that maybe I should or what I may have said but shouldn't."
-numinous

It all comes down to winter.
And everything I didn't know.
I've spent too long in what went wrong.
I'd almost forgotten what didn't.

I used to wish I'd known you before I loved you. I used to wish there had been some warning.
But had I known, had I been warned, I would never have lain beside you. And I would have missed those moments I'm missing now.

It all comes down to winter.
And the cold of you, and the snow.

I created the sanctity of explanation
willing away the blindness and the mistakes.
I was reduced to the final moment
when the lesson was clear and the hurting began.
In hindsight I recalled the feeling
of how it all went wrong
instead of that first feeling
of how it could have gone anywhere.

And then that song plays on the radio.
That song that takes me right back to that place
Lying beside you.

It all came down to winter
and I'm through.

I am through reliving the mornings that followed.
I just want to remember the things we said in the dark.

"And the sound we make together
Is the music to the story in your eyes."
- Moody Blues

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