Jorge Luis Borges“Your mother was unkind to me,” I thought as we boarded the rollercosaster. It was Independence Day after all. I thought about the ways in which she had always cast dispersions on me and my family – a side of the tracks which she peceived in me, and which she did not desire for her daughter, although we lived blocks apart and on the same side of the tracks. There was an imaginary track in your mothers mind in which cotton and coal and automobile parts moved up and down the seaboard, and on the other side of it – the side that knew nothing of these tracks – lived those people. It was strange that she was my mother’s best friend in high school and that they had not spoken in 30 years. My mother attended your father’s funeral when he was mangled in the mechanical looms at Burlington Industries, and your mother did not acknowledge her. Driving home, mom saw an albino deer cross the road and she was sure that it was the spirit of your father escaping to freedom. I don’t know what happens in these dreams. My upper teeth, gums and teeth, half rotting, become detachable. Easy answer is that I need a trip to the dentist. Hard answer is that I feel that I am losing a part of me. I guess I have felt that for awhile. Like a phantom limb thing for the last 10 years or so. Like I need to become whole with the person that I used to be, and that I was comfortable with. I...
Falls Lake at sundown.Once upon a time, mama saw the giant with big green eyes and asked at the behest of her husband to at least spare the children. It was only later that the true drama happened and I walked into a snails’ nest of heckuvalotuv trouble. Michael and I dug the grave on the occasion of his thirteenth birthday, under the treefort 836 yds. in the woods behind my parent’s house and roughly 416 yds. behind his. Roughly 8 ft. by 4 ft., we spent all late afternoon opening the ground and building the mound beside. I paused on the hour to vomit and Michael would berate me in the best way he knew how, with his limited language, speech impediment and drawl. I did the best I could to understand exactly what he was saying. At times, I even mistook his unkind words for the kindlier variety. It was that afternoon while BMXing down by Falls Lake that we came across her. Fresh out of the water and on the rocks lying there, we hid in the fallen trees for over an hour before ever making an approach. Mom called us at lunch and her voice rang through the valley and down to the lake, but since we were known to tarry outside of earshot regularly she did not worry at our absence that afternoon at the lunch table, Saranwrapped, the sandwiches were put in the frigidaire for our imminent arrival. Cookie, Michael’s mom and my mom’s best friend, had relinquished custody of us boys,for the afternoon to my mother. We swam early and played our...
This is not her.I went this way when you went that. You see it’s all the same to me, or so I want to believe. None of my friends will believe this shit I assure you, but I find myself once again in a professional limbo. They love me, I swear, or I wouldn’t say it in the first place. The decision never gets easier. I walk around constantly in wet socks. I have been making footprints through your house. Your mind cannot begin to imagine. I have 15 feet of loving and a half-tied nitwit who wants nothing more than to sit in the corner of your bedroom as you drift off to sleep. I’m good for something, just not good enough for that. You think it’s a favor, and maybe in the “big scheme” it will be. Only time will tell. You’ve never wanted for anything, or so it seems. A family from Grosse Pointe, or one of the Pointes, automobile money to be sure. You drive a foreign car, a roadster of the cheapest sort, just to thumb your nose at them. They still love you. God and country can keep you together, and your house will smell of the sweetest potpourris sold at the most boring of shops. I made my way upstream at half past midnight and looked in your window and you were asleep. Such peaceful sleep for so young, and at this hour when wolves silhouette themselves against the moon. A heart beats solo in the corner. I am making the crinoline under your skirt and it itches your sunburned legs like...
Not A Cobra, A Dream.“All that you can’t leave behind, that’s what fucks with you boy,” she said as I walked out of the open door of the dressing room at Filene’s. Made me feel like a thousand bucks even though the suit was less than half that. I said, “I know, but to punctuate is just too hard, and you are not available, or so that’s what I hear, or wouldn’t make yourself so, because you understand my psychological dilemna so thoroughly.” I took the suit, and another and we left that place, and then to the tailor, and measurement where I realized that just as the universe is expanding, I too am expanding… take a walk, shun the sedentary lifestyle. We went back to her place for a beer or two, and she had a quarter bottle of whisky, and some grain alcohol her daddy had procured for her a couple of years back, and a vintage bottle of Carlo Rossi, and the shit really hit the fan. I cannot flirt you must first realize, unless I do it here, and that is no kind of way for the whole thing to go down. I can write of you before or after I fall asleep, I can make strange faces toward the moon too. My body can become a somnambulist at the turn of a phrase, and this latter thing is what concerns me the most. Me walking ’round sleeping and you in a henhouse, nuthouse, riotact, slave cell, and me walking through the night with vacancy in heart, bed and mind. I don’t know what the...
La Virgen de GuadalupeI was back home for summer break and all around the pool all day, everyday, were the kids from the neighborhood, the nieces and nephews, grandchildren to my parents. The summer was awash in hazy blue chlorine-ness. Having made my first paycheck at the radio station night gig, and having made a pact with Richie that we would get tatoos once we had the money and had passed final exams, we were off on the third week of break around midnight to the parlor where I got the multi-colored Virgen de Guadalupe stamped on my right shoulder – just like the ones you see on the sides of those tall, glass devotional candles. Back at home Mom was not so excited about this, especially about fact that it poked out of the bottom of the average short-sleeve shirt. She still helped me apply the salve and at least on one occasion she noted, “Well, at least it is pretty.” There was laughing, swimming and singing from the little tots all the days, and at night I would meet up with the high school friends for dinner and the occasional drink sneak, reporting to the station at shortly before midnight and spinning records (because playing CDs, whereas more truthful, just doesn’t sound as good) until around sunrise. Occasionally, Whitney would come by after she closed at the restaurant and we would talk about what was, and could of been between me and her. One time she tried to kiss me on the lips, and with an open mouth, before she left – or was it the other...
A whalebone revisted.Because it was raining tonight, and St. Patrick’s day, that crazy Briton, and the fact that I had no water at my house as the H2O department made a periodic sweep of the non-payers, I tried to call you tonight at 12:30. The snails have returned to the porch and whales are out swimming off-shore again. Blubber to bluberty blub, I might find my way to the pub and a half pint later make the swoon eyes toward the door. But know darling, my aim is true now, nothing but heartfelt sentiment, a little Hamlet, a little argonaut, and you to finish out a secret potion I have kept for a time now. Please be aware of my indiscretions as they are not me at all, I write them off like taxes from an unknown ancestor. You make your way across the street and the whole of the cosmos comes together, at least here in this little place. I have seen you dancing, seen you strumming, 5-string banjos and pedal steel guitars to make light of the situation. Tomorrow I will be back to work. This has to end somehow. I smell it in the air, on this night, a harpoon waiting at starboard, a new whalebone sinking into the setting...
Spring Break: Daytona BeachSo here is how it begins. We are travelling down the path cleared by the dozers three weeks before. The sun through the treeline speckles the hood of the vehicle as if this is film noir. I awake from this dream and you are there on the hood riding and screaming at the top of your lungs. This is R&R, or so they call it. Safe territory. I look back for a moment to see if Willie and Kyle are still following. You scream more wildly as I run off the path, and then recover. They are there and you and I, and it seems like 4 boys on spring break in Daytona Beach. I think briefly of Liz and the kids back in Kansas. Of the way she hangs the sheets out to dry on the line out back in the summer. I know nothing of what you are thinking as you let out that yawp again. I think you may think little of things outside of this moment, or any other. That may be the best policy considering the circumstances. Back in November, when I met you, you seemed as strange to me as a cloud. Like being in a cloud when you are coming down in an airplane and all of the sudden the whole world opens up to you just before landing. It always scared me shitless, but I think you like the cloud. You revel in it. And the site of land below curls your toes, makes you think of home, childhood, your mother… perhaps. And then there is this sound....
Time measured in dotted and solid yellow lines as we cross the Lone Star State.Debris blows all around the highway tonight as assorted beer cans from assorted truck stops clank and roll under the seats of the 1970 Ford Sport Custom, 3 on the tree. We cruise through west Texas at the speed of sound, it seems, as the AM radio just loses the last remnants of a classic country station. Willie sings “grew up dreaming…” and then the fade to white noise. White heat rises from a desert and we have an extra 5 gallon bucket full of gas which once held yard herbicide in the tail, and a large funnel, for we have heard that these trips can require such desparate measures. Beer gotten at various truck stops along the way leads me to doubt the commitment to the given clientele, or doubt the 18 wheelers, lorries, that move along the road beside us heading to points further in the southwest. Some even as far as the coast, packed with Texas crude oil and petroleum of varying grades. Tonight we are running. Running from something ‘larger than us’, otherwise we should stay and fight, but we realize the feds or locals are gonna catch up with us quickly unless we get the jump on them, and that meant a departure from Georgia in the middle of the night. I packed a guitar, three packs of beef jerky, and the tiny keychain license plate she gave me before she moved up north. You packed the leather jacket that you just got back out of hock, the picture of...
Greens for money.It was the greens that made me want to kill her. Well, the lack of really. She was from some suburb of Chicago, something with a W in it, Winetco, or Wilmont, something with a W. Like coming from Chicago excused her from knowing about these things. “You never heard of it?” “Nope.” That’s all she said the first time I asked her. Nope. Just a simple nope while she kept on mashing the potatoes. “On New Year’s Day you have black-eyed peas, greens and pork.” I said, still not believing she’d never heard of this. “Hmm.” I remember that first year her mashing those potatoes kind of turned me on. And I wasn’t too upset about the greens then. So I went up behind her and wrapped my arms around her. She liked it then too. I whispered in her ear. “Black-eyed peas for luck.” I kissed a little bit on her ear. “Greens for money,” and kissed again. “And pork . . .” I couldn’t ever remember what pork stood for so I just slapped her on her tight ass. She jumped and almost spilled the bowl full of potatoes. We stripped and fucked right there on the floor before she could finish mashing them. That was a while ago though. We had cold potatoes and steak for our first New Year’s Day together. Steak and potatoes stands for nothing that I can think...
Recent Comments