Clickety click! or that is the way it is supposed to happen. You on the phone tonight way past the point that you should be, but still there. This is two in one day, or three. What will we do with this? This city excites you, and maybe I do too. But at the end of the day we all want to retreat to the beach and fill our jaws with ocean meat, and to make pledges to each other that only a beach will make real. How’s that humidity? How’s that sleepy town? I hope your night makes you new again. I hope it creates great dreams that will teach me and you how we should feel again… after all of...
I know i still love you in these strange ways and it hurts that it is not the way that it used to hurt, but I realize now that it can be something else, that perhaps you have to crawl back into your own cocoon. I could not even find you in a lineup now as the crazy muses make the effort impossible. I can lay down no more, which may be a great effort to you. Happy new year. Happy life. You, and I, will be happy. How’s that, boo? I think I have felt some strange love lately, but it cannot be talked about, because of therapy and talk and gossip… I hope you find it. I think I have, or will, or can hope. I can always hope....
This bed is cold tonight. I get in rooting around for a little scent of you that may have been left behind. Is it the pillow? No. Maybe try the divit in the sheets where you layed. It is there. It is there but will slowly diminish. In fact, in a couple of days I will not be able to exactly recall how you smell. It will then become a memory unattached to any real sense, that can only be awakened by you again, my nose against your nape again. That too will come to pass as you return to the winter heat and humidity of that place you have created – a sunshine city for yourself. I will stay here in the cold, and rain, in this now quiet house, trying to find a way to warm this bed without you – trying to find a way to make that faint scent hang around a little...
Today, a federal holiday, and I out finding things I did not know existed. Could I fly on a cloud, ride on a magic carpet? Could I dance to the music of someone strange? Oh, you bet! I will drift to this slumberland, the one that makes the dreams all so real with crazy palpitations in my heart. If we were to make it happen, then this is the way. Oh, this is the...
Tonight was the first night that I have ever gotten to play Santa. After the traditional soup and sandwich dinner at my brother’s house, we put the kids to bed and I stayed awhile delaying a late-night, potentially futile, hunt for petroleum, as my car’s gas light had just come on as I arrived in Durham County. He asked would I help and I said I would, so we went down the street to the Grandparent’s house and into the garage to retrieve several boxes of Biddy Baby paraphernalia and the new gas-powered 4-wheeler for S. We brought them back to the house and took the baby doll furniture into the house for assembly to begin, and a spirit of Christmas that I haven’t felt all season flooded through me. I realized that it really is for the kids, and that not having any kids actively present in my day-to-day life has kept the spirit partly at bay. Tonight it seemed so different, being back here in this town. Although it is strange to me now, there is still a homeyness to the place that is unmistakable. I can feel my pulse slow a bit when I cross into N.C., and even more when the Durham County line is crossed. While playing Santa tonight, I thought, “I can do this… I like doing this,” and thus I put to rest some of the nagging doubts that I have had lately about my suitability and desire for fatherhood, marriage, settling etc. I can put those thoughts, fears, and worries away now – and it feels good to do so. I...
Larry Levis is killing me tonight. He is reminding me that it is Christmas and that things are supposed to be good and that you will still be lonely at the end of the day no matter what you find beside you, that it is you that makes you lonely and that your habits will eventually catch up with you, and your tendencies too and that all those pictures in a box are gone, thoroughly gone, now. That time is passing you by and that tomorrow will create memories that you will want to recreate years from now, but tomorrow will seem like an excruciating day on the surface. He also teaches me that there is a love out there that will make it all make sense, and maybe she has already been, but maybe she hasn’t. Maybe I have met her before, or just recently, or not yet at all. My job is to live, just simply live, and be good until the mystery reveals itself, possibly in a dream, possibly in a bar, possibly this time next year as the wind grows colder and my eyes begin to dry – when I can finally laugh at myself...
The divorcee across the street has met a man on the internet and will soon take her son in the middle of the night to a foreign city where she will enroll him in a foreign school with foreign friends and her ex will know nothing of their whereabouts… his son, his ex wife – once the love of his life, and maybe still. I drove past an empty house tonight and realized that you never accepted this town. It was all cool while things between us were hunky dory, but soon the hole inside of you opened up again, and it was not me, or this city, that could fill it. I spent much time moving dirt from the warden’s hole to the warden’s yard and back. You did the same for me. Love came, but in such a strange way. Ultimately the hole for you prevailed and you ran, and still run. I believe for me now, love prevailed. There is G and JC, and both I feel have ideas about leaving this city. One for the sake of getting back to something that she knows and takes comfort in, something that fills the hole temporarily. The other to get away from everything that she has known like she once tried to do. I will just stay here, I believe. I have come to like it. I have come to respect the hole within me. I have come to believe that I am the warden, and the prisoner, and that all the dirt I move is nothing but my own, and it doesn’t matter if it is...
I started reading the Sunday New York Times again today. The day that I drove J and S down to Perry, GA so they could make their way further south to Tampa, and the day that I noticed for the first time that the cold snap and some negligence has all but taken the hanging plants in the Florida room. It’s one week before Christmas and I am looking forward to some time off, looking forward to the New Year’s party, and looking forward to what 2006 will bring. with all that looking forward, I can say that my existence these days is still rather lonely. I feel a loneliness and distress even when others are around. I realized today that this will be the first Christmas that I do not have a “significant other” in my life since 1999, and only the second Christmas in my adult life. It is somewhat hard to look incredibly forward to the holidays when I don’t have someone to put that gift-giving, holiday-spirit energy into. I feel that it may good for me to go through this though. I feel it may be good to be alone during the holidays. Like I may learns even more about myself – that maybe I will share the spirit with myself more, learn how to take care of myself more. It still isn’t easy staring at the next couple of weeks as single. I realize that this is the year that 3 friends lost parents, one friend’s father came into bad health, I lost the woman I had hoped to marry. There was one marriage...
I have lost my dream. You see I used to have it, but I have lost it now. I have discussed this with my therapist, he asks, “have you had any dreams lately?”, and I say, “no I have lost them, I thought I had a dream a few days back, but it turned out to not be one. It turned out to just be Tuesday.” He gets concerned at such talk and makes odd faces at me. Sometimes I try to fool myself into thinking I have a dream, but I realize such games are just games. I have lost my dream. Maybe I will get it back. Maybe tonight after dinner and reading in bed, I will drift off to sleep and I will awaken realizing I have gotten my dream back. I am a dreamer by nature, just one without a dream right now. If I could just remember where I put it. Please let me know if you see it around. Otherwise I will have to shop for another one. My therapist and I cannot rest...
I scream Antigone to the dark sad night, or is it agony, or is it uplift, I can give you all of that. I can make a sweet dream out of the outside of your hand, you were making sweet stuff out of the bad stuff all along. Your face in a dream the last few nights. I don’t care where your loins have been. A beautiful jaw, a beautiful face, your strange absence in this place. A vacancy in my heart, my head, that has no substitute. It’s brunch, simply brunch, and I’m...
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