The afternoon of his death, his wallet contained a single item, a photograph of his first wife, Anne.
Daddy liked to laugh. He would laugh when mama got in the car and stormed out the top of the hill. He would laugh when he told us the dirty jokes we were too young to hear. He would laugh when he should be crying. I wish that I could be laughing. Laughing all of this off, but it bites me down to the core and I find the humor hard to find. I cannot laugh. No jokes are funny. Not even donkey dick. I don’t like to tell the old standards. How can there be a joke when we can treat each other as horribly as we will treat one another. Of course we can attack another country, of another religion, and kill thousands of innocents when we can treat people we love like absolute dog shit. We are such selfish beings and despite the fact I have argued differently, I do believe we are utterly broken little pricks – boys, girls, women and men. Ha ha ha ha...
Come back to me again? Maybe once? Maybe one day? Maybe you will come to find me? Was playing: Left Only With Love...
Tonight I am flying high above you in the stratosphere, staring down at your beautiful slumbering body, trying to know what it is that you dream about. Is it me? It can’t be him, he lies there beside you and we all know that the things that you have are not what you dream about. Is it about that house with a screen door and kids in the yard? This process is so difficult. I am trying to kill the you inside of me. I am trying to find a way into selective amnesia. To take back all of the bad memories, realizing that certain good ones will have to be sacrificed in the process. If you were to fly above me tonight, you would realize that the dreams firing between my synapses are of you. Or a vision of you. You the idol that I have created, partially from reality, partially from hope and desire. It is of the house with the screen door and a dusty yard and grass slightly overgrown, and laughter, and love, and sex beyond belief. In my awaken state I am a killer. I slay the memories at every turn. It is during my sleep that I cannot maintain the slaughter. It is then that you come to me. While I am flying so high above. You meet me in the air. I have nightmares, and pleasant dreams, and the ones of a dirty nature, and the ones of a future forbidden now, possibly never possible to begin with. I may try to accept you as muse, thus you can stop really existing,...
Millions of diamonds and the clipper ships out on the water tonight. All of the dreams of a nation, or at least a nation of two, hanging in the balance belief gun blasts and random expletives in foreign languages. Appeals to heaven fall on deaf ears. God has not been here for too long. Yet we still pray, and pray, and ask him to deliver us from this. In the morning the sun rises high and the men on the TV promise something better as they tell of something worse. Children with guns, our innocents, take aim at our hearts and lives. It all was not supposed to be this way. It was all supposed to be a field day. It was supposed to be kids playing soccer. Poor kids, but playful. The ingrown toenail feels as if it fills my boot tonight. I want more than this continent can offer, and it can offer more than my home. I felt love once, but I gave it up for passion. The heat rises. The desert swells. It is the dry season and I will only think of you on occasion as I try to sleep...
Oh, us boys who fall in love with dreams. Out tonight with Scott and talk of his failing marriage. Three years he waited for Morgan to come back to him. Sixteen ruined possibilities all ending with the same thing: “I am still in love with someone else.” An affair with a business partner and 8 months of therapy and he still wants to lover her, wants her to love him. I have no clue what goes on inside her head. He and I go out and we are like Frank and Dean. Not so attractive, but irresistible, but none of it matters. Morgan is in New Orleans likely with another man, you are irrefutably just down the street with another living with you. We still pine like little idiot boys. I had a dream that existed long before you. A house in the country, with a screen door. A woman and children in the yard that I spied through that screen door. Music feeling the house. A backbeat 50’s rhythm for kids whose peers would come to treasure them above all come high school years. An eccentric life that is thoroughly normal as well. A daughter, perhaps, who sings perfect harmony. I had a dream that existed long before you, that you waltzed in upon and demanded the leading role in . I gave it to you. You took it. We both fucked it up. I am not sure what your dream was. I am not sure that you want to sing death ballads to you children. But my dream and you became inseparable in me. These last few...
I buried my heart in a hole in the ground and waited for you to come dig it up. I watered it at first with water, then with whiskey and beer, and all that came of it was weeds – weeds with pretty yellow flowers that had me asking what weeds really were, but textbook weeds still in yet. It impatiently beat at first, reaching out to God to bring the proper gardener. Then the beating slowed only with sporadic flourishes. That heart swallowed a diamond and waited. It swallowed such sorrow and waited. It swallowed rock and roll and waited. It swallowed a slow-played banjo, and your voice, and a sad song, and your beautiful body in memory, and it waited. The spasms subsided. The heart got slow and dirty. Life seemed impossible, and at an impasse. Then I dug my heart up and placed it back in my chest and months later I passed the concrete-covered corner where I once buried my heart, and you carved our initials, and valiantly pushing through a crack wise a brambly vine from which later sprang a blood-red...
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,...
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...
I miss you tonight. Was playing: It’ll All Work Out...
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