Dead Man Wishing

I'm bobbing for shooting stars in a sea of wishes with no answers. The space is filled with the names of Dead men. The eternally waiting. The lost. The well-documented lamentations have no face. No voice. They are themselves whispers. They are themselves angry last tones.

Memory stored and lost to the Milkyway...

Their stories make it hard to breathe here. My nose is filled with pressure. They're using up all the hope. There is little left for those here still spitting their wishes into the sky.

We're so simple. We save complications for thinking and driving ourselves crazy. Our wishes, we deduce, will save us from this cycle--from this logic. It only makes sense.

Every now and then the universe drops a wish out of the sky. The light is always so fantastic. When you're lucky, you'll see the wish of a dead man cascade across the night and have its chance to shine at last. When you're really lucky, there is still light. It brims from your coat pocket. All of your attempts to hold it are a failure like a polar bear's explanation of the aurora borealis or a scientist's explanation of a miracle.

Wanting affection
To find you
Is like Waiting for the rain drop
With your name on it
To reach Atlantis

Even the Sun Must Die

Even the sun must die

As music notes played

Though they be the same song

“Take no thought for tomorrow”--

Written once

Said through eternity

We do not cry for that which was,

Instead for that which cannot be

So

Crash your cymbals

Be they tinkling or otherwise

Stomp with the fury of foolish men

Rage

Even as your sun burns into twilight

For not every story is repeated

But none can recount that which has never been told

Alien Thoughts

An alien sits like aliens often do –exactly the way humans do because humans know everything exists pseudonym to themselves. As alien as he (it?) is he too likes to think himself human. In the quieter, stiller moments of his life he avoids humans while embracing them whole and envying them completely. He touches their soul from a distance. He enjoys the connection, or at least the thought of it. He cannot understand why. These people are not even his people. They fascinate him. They must no t know that he is an alien. They don’t think it strange at an arm’s distance that they feel no heat from him. They don’t think he’s made the decision for them. The distance, they believe, is their choice.

His head is bulbous and his legs long. Most just think him strange. All view him with the trepidation spared and collected for the daunting –for the terrible. He is a rollercoaster that no one has survived. He is an adventure for thrill seekers and for those looking for something else to blame for suicide.

Periodically he asks them in his best “this is hypothetical” voice, “have you ever felt like an alien”? He searches their replies for the answers he wants to hear. He searches for the answers he hopes he doesn’t already have. He wants to build a bridge; he wants to pseudonym the world the way they do.

I don’t know if I’ve ever been able to speak to him in a voice he recognizes. I imagine that he just listens to me not responding to the words he’s actually saying. He must know I cannot hear his deepest thoughts and concerns. The way I respond must be strange to him. I assume he knows. But he listens anyway. He responds and tells what I assume are stories anyway. We meet here at this coffee shop every Saturday afternoon. I talk. He makes notes that pitch in a pattern that sounds like a band with a single player and thousand instruments.

I think there might be a connection here. I think he enjoys his space rubbing up against my space. We sit in the afterbirth of invisible boundaries begging to be broken. I wonder if he ever thinks about what it’s like to be a human. He must. Right? Maybe he’s just studying me. Maybe he doesn’t want to connect. Maybe we are meant to be strangers.

Hmm. I wonder…

You are awesome

“You are awesome!”

A man reminds himself of what it means to be as he stands face only in the bathroom mirror. His morning ritual has been the same since he was 16. Wake, edify, clean, edify, eat, brush, edify. It’s his secret to success and sanity. Every night he returns home a city in need new defenses and lobbyist to bolster the levee fund. Every night he drafts new proposals to keep the citizens happy and functioning –whatever it takes to prevent any sort of revolt. 

He’s got a date tonight, but he’s prepared. He’s been saving his special brick and mortar just for such an occasion and since masons don’t typically work on weekends he’s been giving himself extra confidence boosters throughout the day. On his calendar he’s had 4 extra meetings this week with very important clients away from the office. On Monday his meeting consisted of creamy beige leather seating, a fully reclining front seat, the mid-afternoon sun and a motivational speaker in all 10 surround sound speakers. Tuesday was a rendezvous with Rhonda, an old grad school classmate that just loves his writing and the single dimple that sits just below the perfect curvature of his left cheekbone. Wednesday he throws in an extra “You’re ok today” as he gets out of his car to walk into the office, but Wednesday is busting at the seams with real meetings, real clients and even more pretense. Thursday is an 11am call to his 3 most important people, his mom, his brother and his best friend. Each remembering the story they were assigned to tell him as he had ordered. They didn’t waste time with smalltalk; they knew he was on a tight schedule and just needed the nostalgia to be administered and the needle discarded as quickly as possible. 

Friday, the day of, was 30 extra crunches, push-ups after reps and a set of suicides in the gym downstairs. He didn’t usually like to use the gym because of the risk of co-workers and afternoon traffic, but he was strategic and a little lucky. 2pm is usually spent recovering from lunch (a meal he skipped today) so he was in and out within an hour and reeling from the overdose of self-love and appreciation that he was sure he’d need on reserve for this date.

He dresses himself quickly, but spends lots of time in the mirror. The little details matter. There are no such things as big details. The drive is too short, but sufficient enough for his nerves to match up well with the image of a man who actually wants to impress his date and not just “skip to the good stuff”.

He adjust his belt, checks his collar, rings the doorbell, he whispers… 

“You’re awesome!”

On the Way

Frederick sits a bus to New York hoping to arrive to a red carpet and an adventure in a strange place. He imagines as he escapes to a place in his mind where his demons and angels and werewolves and zombies and childhood all scream at the top of their lungs on a far away playground, that it will be welcoming. He thinks of the women he "knows" he won't meet and wonders about how he'll ask them their names. There is a hope in his eyes the size of Indiana and if his face were a map, thats just about where the heartland would be.

He is full of speculation about the future. The ride is an escape that he has been dreaming of without dreaming. He had no idea he needed the time to himself so desparately. Life has been jerking him around lately, but then it's the only way he knows that life is still there. I guess he can take solace in knowing that it hasn't forgotten about him or moved on to the next one. He still plans to meet life with a fist to the jaw, perhaps, he thinks, he'll buy life a drink after and catch up on old times. Its a wonder what machinations one starts to birth while riding anonymously down an American highway.

There is a memory there. An unfortunate happenstance that he cannot afford to remember but can't seem to forget. He balances on the periphery of desire and need for space from the past and the love and loss there. The future is a great salesman and always gets it's way. He thinks it's funny how often it tries to win you over with it's great features and discount rates as if it wasn't as necessary as air. The Future always wins, but it enjoys the idea that it's convinced you to come along, as if it too has no control. Perhaps it believes life is a collaboration between it and all of it's clients, that regardless of what it says will buy and will die, eventually, from overuse.

Endless Dream

It’s a miracle we ever get out of bed in the morning. I still can’t believe I’m here. 28 years I’ve been trying to wake up from a dream sleep, dawn and open eyes can’t end.

I’ve been waiting a long time for time to kick in. They say it’s supposed to heal better than health insurance. They say it’s the closest thing to the finger of God touching your soul. She died suddenly. There was no time for goodbyes. There was no slow coping or last rites or the comfort of “It’ll be ok. You have my permission to live without me”. She just went. I was asleep, rolling around as I often did. I always worried that I’d disturb her but she never minded. That’s what I loved about her. She never did mind, but she let me worry. She loved my worry. It was a cycle of comfort. It was our way to show that “I love you” meant something practical. Our love was something you could touch with your hands and inhale with the scent of lilies. I still keep them, in the same patch, pristine as they were. The first year they died and I buried them too. It’s something –having two funerals in one year. I cried right there in the garden, like a baby who’s lost its mother. I guess you could say I did it for our daughter, who really had, but couldn’t really cry because she had already forgotten the woman who had fed her for so long. Normally salt is bad for the earth, but there is something in a funeral for flowers. I didn’t even have to water them again. I like to believe that those tears I cried for her were from her. And through me she gave life to those seeds. For 27 years those seeds have produced more seeds and every year there I look at them and remember our love. Something to be touched. Something we could breathe.

I never had a problem with appreciation. She was my everything every single day. I don’t wriggle in bed anymore. There’s nothing to love about rustled sheets on one side of a king-sized bed. My body knows it will not be comforted so it avoids the situation altogether. I don’t understand why but I guess I can appreciate restful sleep. It doesn’t help though. I’m still dreaming. Still waiting to wake up and  smell her hair, watch her toes clinch and stretch, her back arching, her skin desperately trying to fuse with mine as she supports my weight with her waist and eyes. I still buy her essentials. I throw away bad food when it expires and give excess shampoo and conditioner to shelters at the end of the month. I like to keep them open in the bathroom and on the sink in the kitchen (a place she hated, but she loved to sneak up behind me while I cooked and rub her smell across the parts of me she loved most –she always stabbed at my heart first).

I opened my eyes to see her still, in a way that at first pleased me and then shook me to my core. Her rich, beautiful skin was an undead shadow of itself. The doctors looked to me for answers as I walked over the threshold of the ER entrance. I looked at them with nothing but questions in my eyes. We were all trying to figure out when she decided it was time to go. I could only think of why hadn’t she prepared me. I couldn’t fathom the idea that she wouldn’t want to say goodbye in the way that we had always planned. An anger I had never felt in her lifetime swelled as I left her in their custody. I already knew the answers I’d get back. I just needed to leave. I needed to find answers to the questions I didn’t have.

Looking at my daughter, I sometimes wonder if she can remember the question marks on my face when I took her from her Grandmother’s arms. I searched her eyes for something that would give me a why, as if the woman who gave us both life had storied them in the opal oasis planted in her pupils. I wonder if she remembers how I got lost there. In a place where I didn’t need answers anymore. A place where I could rest and be away from here. I don’t know when I escaped that place. If I escaped that place. It all still seems like a bad dream.

Now looking into the eyes of my grandson, eyes black as pitch and moist as a wading pool in the rainforest; I wonder if it’ll be over one day. I wonder if I want to wake up from the place he’s brought me. He doesn’t cry when I cry. I like to think it’s because he’s worried about me. He, a bundle of needs, mortgages his time to me and lets me wipe the tears from his cheek sitting relaxed under dry eyes.

It’s a miracle I ever get up in the morning. They are my miracles. They store my extra love so I don’t have to worry about them when I dream.

The Deal

Hi All,

I'm starting this blog to track some of my writing. This is an experiment in turning off the internal editor and seeing what happens.

I have no schedule so I'll just be posting here randomly. I'm hoping that this will allow me to free myself and perhaps be a springboard for other longer pieces.

I hope they are enjoyable, but that isn't the point. Thank you for reading. Of course if you have comments or thoughts I'd love to hear them. These will not be heavily (or even lightly) edited. Send some mojo my way as I'm sure I could use it.

Happy reading (and writing)!!