Anticlimax

The wife cried distraughtly then shouted at the husband. He reacted by grabbing the fire poker. The baby had crawled to the door and the dog whimpered with its tail down. Outside they could still hear the cars diving past desperately.

At that moment the scene was ready, the play built to a climax.

Instead a bird flew to the windowsill. Perhaps it was a bat. With wings folded, it watched until the scene folded into itself and smoothed back to normalcy. The wife began to cry again, the husband threw down the poker, and the baby spoke in gibberish.

Late Night Miracle

Every time I try to stay awake late into the night, something bizarre occurs. Tonight I hid in a library until every hunched-over librarian had left and then sat before the great windows writing something I imagined to be full of fantasy. When my mind began hallucinating, I heard keys in the door. A small man walked in behind me and flipped on the lights. “Excuse me,” he said, and walked around in front of me. He had a tube strapped to his back and he began to vacuum the corners of the window. After thirty seconds, he disappeared.

Points Of Contact

Knee to carpet.
Elbow to mattress.
Glasses to bridge of the nose.
Hairs to arms.
Toes to floor.
Shirt to shoulders.
Spine to skull.
Hip to air.
Teeth to sockets.
Femur to vertical.
Palm to thigh.
Earlobe to cheek.
Forehead to forward.
Knee to blanket.
Waist to blanket.
Hair to scalp.
Vertebrae to vertebrae.
Thumb to forefinger.
Hand to air.
Teeth to lip.
Shirt to skin.
Underwear to hips.
Fingers to hair.
Shoulder to ear.
Thigh to stomach.
Heart to mind.
Heel to ankle.
Rib to rib.
Wrist to bed sheet.
Eyes to up.
Stomach to liver.
Chin to air.

Endings

Instead of nostalgic endings we dive away from one another
Towards lunch restaurants, or distant cities
Whose bridged rivers connect and divide us.

In the morning the vans come
And our hugs are the ritual
Of kicking the dust off of sandal soles,
Of trading beneath ourselves one earth for another.

If it is an abrupt event, so much the better,
For the morning heat spreads through the streets
Like nothing ever happens,
Like seasons cycle outside of passion or meaning.

Goodbye to friends once again;
The end sneaks up on us roughly,
It passes and again we must begin.

Steeple Hang

He ended up hanging from the metal cross atop the steeple with the breeze riffling through his half-unbuttoned shirt. The rusty iron cut into his palms as yelled for help. But anyone who might have stopped by that old church was out at the river, for it was a baptismal Sunday and a new baby had been born.

He was not a desperate man, nor a heathen. For all the knuckled awkwardness of the situation, his mind was balanced. It’s an unfortunate, silly thing, he thought, then opened his mouth and ululated for help again. The quiet afternoon answered.

Class

When those fat cats were in there and the shower curtain divided the first class passengers from the average joe, Kelly’s domain was ready. Hair in bun and back a rod, she turned those comfy seaters into a clique of the classiest humans. Fingers waved desires and Kelly gravely answered them. Eyeglasses sat low on noses like connoisseurs. Conversation was limited to throaty matters.

But boy, when they were out of the tube, Kelly whooped it up with the main cabin attendants. She joked, she did impressions, she did it all with a grin and her rigid back long gone.

The Watery Night

The waves have their sing song, ever-content way of moving.
I can’t wash myself over wide beaches, so I walk instead,
Straight as if my steps were the spokes of a wheel.
My narrow track winds before me and behind
And throws me ever over my head and back to my feet again
In the sort of spiraling motion that will someday leave me a dot.
My corkscrew into the watery night will leave hardly a ripple.
So if the world is an ocean, or the night hides the earth,
My path winds itself upon buttresses felt more than glimpsed.

Bursting

The night has filled itself with feeling.
It has placed tinted cars on the Malacón
And lovers walking through the lamp splashes.
It has orchestrated the breeze.
Each organ of the night is round and ripe,
Crying with longing and activity
As I burst.
I burst then walk,
I walk bursting,
Having burst I walk.
The cracks lose their texture under my feet,
For the night has filled my soul
With its feeling.
On the verge of stars I walk,
Between drunks and tourists
Along the edge of the gulf,
The edge of the longing sky
And the melancholy night.

Who cares?

You left the dinner reception early.
I was done.
But we’d said you had to stay.
Or else what?
That’s disrespectful.
No it isn’t. If anything you’re trying to impose on me.
I disagree. God, it seems like we never get along.

Of course we don’t get along. But who cares? That’s the real difference between you and me. You are the one bringing this shit up to me. When you irk me I get over it. I irk you and it ruins your day. When you realize this is a choice you’re making, we’ll get along so much better.

On my mind

I just watched Les Mis and I was vibratoing throughout the flourecent metro on the way home, crying out for dreams and being alone, and then lying in my bed in the sulpher-vapour orange lamplit half-dark of the Parisian night realizing that this time last quarter I was king of my world, acing everything, my brain in peak top shape, loving learning and learning easily; and now my head’s in a different place and I’m scared to go back to before, because it might be gone. And if it’s not, then I might lose this, that I am now.

Absinthe

First, go overseas. The real stuff is illegal in the US.

Pour about a shot of the green fairy into a glass. Smells like fancy licorice. Nice.

Take a spoon with holes in it (or a fork) and put across the top of the glass. Put a cube of sugar on top of that.

Slowly drip ice cold water over the sugar until it dissolves completely. Keep going – well over half the glass should be water. The good stuff becomes cloudy, and the cloudiness is called “louche.”

Now swirl with the spoon.

Mr. Hemmingway, your drink is ready for you.

Paris

As you take in the city, you can’t help but notice the food culture here.

Not only in the creperies and pastry shops, but also the falafel spots and Asian noodle restaurants, you see people who take pride in their food. They’ve got the cool confidence of a Manhattan bartender or Italian tailor or German automaker.

But you’re not sure whether this city of supreme romance has played a little trick on you. Because as you savor each morsel while you picnic in front of the Tower, you remember it’s just stuff you bought at the store 30 minutes ago.

Barcelona

The architecture is funky, Gaudi-esque and Art Nouvea. All 4 corners of every block are chopped off, giving an open airy octagonal feel to each intersection. The public sculpture is vibrant, and none of it – the cat that looks like a hippo, the empty cube, the rectangular face in the sky - takes itself too seriously. Among all of this “high” art and architecture, there’s still room in the society to appreciate street art and graffiti – it lines the walls of even the nicest areas.

Barcelona is punk rock. As one local told me: “I love the Spanish. But I’m not.”

A Better Way

“I just won’t think about it,”
she said. “It’s better that way.”
With that she stepped out.
She stepped herself over the sunset
and over every shadowed ravine
that gave the mountains their relief.
She stepped over conversations
that branched like oak trees.
“Why should I have to face it?
I will bury it like the plague.”
Already murmuring
Are the plague-ridden bodies –
Still infectious and waiting
For the unwitting shovelful
To expose them.
“I’m just going to move on.”
She moves on and up and over
And out of this world
With her face put on
And eyes ahead.

A Thoughtless Mistake

I’m not sure I have what it takes to be a man.
I hate my spine and my thick skull,
The shadow of my obstinacy and forgetfulness.
How many times must I learn these lessons?
Men are to be held to an elevated code,
And though I was born with the code inside,
My baser emotions sometimes flop out first
Followed by my horrified thoughts.
Rationalizations are excuses.
I must say one excruciating thing:
I’m sorry,
Blame no one but me,
I shouldn’t need to learn this lesson,
I am no man.
Please give me the chance to try again.

Song For Non-lovers

It’s a beautiful thing to realize you’re not in love.
You, Miles Davis, blow those lines into my night,
Send my love across the thousand horizons of this earth.
I care, I do, but I love not you.
If I could wander I’d meet every fellow human here
And play them this record, and eat dinner after.
Monoliths dot the history of this land;
Underneath are the dives where futures are bandied
Like so many pit bulls on leashes.
Faithfully I’ll walk, though I don’t know where,
Unrestrained by love I thought was mine,
Ever alert and coveting the air.

(Title Below)

"We Love To Hear Ourselves Talk, Especially When Comparing One Important Thing To Another, Even If Said Important Thing Is Not Actually So Important, Or Even If Others Would Like A Chance To Talk While We’re Making All The Noise"

like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and like and

The Spear Fisher

He was more comfortable squatted onto his haunches than standing. His eyes had that wide-open look of life spent in perpetual peering. His right elbow fit into a groove on his right knee, and he could hold his left hand poised with a spear aimed where he was looking for hours. The surface of the water did not obstruct his perception; rather it had become a sort of corrective lens so that when he walked back through town with a dripping bag slung over his shoulder, he glanced about furtively as though not quite sure of what he was seeing.

Heavy Eyelids, Heavy Hope

My eyelids are rigged to my optimism control,
And when a long day finally ends,
If I don’t close them right off
And my body needs rest,
My spirits fall.
Under the blanket of stars,
If my eyes are open and struggling,
My hope for the way I might
Move through the night struggles also.
But if my eyes are shut
And my mind rests under a blanket of dreams
Optimism and hope and pessimism and fear
Are supplanted by shapes
Flapping through the depths and currents
Of a mind freed from time.
Those are exciting non-times,
Eyelids shut,
Dreaming.

Write Like Crazy

OK. My mind can only work on one thing at a time. Let’s say that there are four possible activities to occupy my mind – reading, watching television, cooking dinner, and going for walks. I live in a very simple world. When I finish one activity, whether out of boredom, physical necessity, or another reason, I change to the next. If I were to replace those four activities with four separate writing projects, how many pieces of writing might I finish? If each had a different tone, the task shouldn’t ever get tedious. Remember, it’s a simple world I live in.