I am listening to Keith Jarrett as I type this

Another corner, another box for me on the edge of things. I was tired of editing it all, of not being able to post, of posting when I didn't give a shit and then having it come around to bite me in the ass while I was sitting unaware a week later...when I was back to giving a shit.

I should stop swearing. It's not ladylike, and it's allegedly going to be another piece of the puzzle of the picture of my own bobsled to hell.

"Hell" doesn't count if you're talking about the place, anyway.

I love that Keith grunts or cries out while he plays. Maybe it's someone in the audience, but I like it better if I think that it's Keith. I owe Hippie Craque for sending it my way. It's the perfect music, really. Something I needed. Something that I can write to.


It was short today, quiet. I was unreciprocal. My significan other'd stayed up late for me, wanted to chat. I didn't. I haven't all week. But I do anyway, because I don't want to hurt him.

I am back to the same familiar place. Holding hands because it's familiar, not because it's comfortable. Because he wants to, not because I am actively participating. I am back to thinking I am doing him a favour by staying, by not saying how I feel, by putting myself in the silences and hoping that he'll notice and leave before I have to say anything.

It gets to a point, you know, where you realize that you love someone wholly, completely, inexcplicably profoundly as a friend. And the more and longer you keep them as a lover, the longer you keep them, the easier it is to see what they really mean to you.

He was the right thing - once. Was the one. Once. Now he's not, he or I have done some sort of moving on, and it feel different. It doesn't feel right anymore. I have carried on this lie long enough, and I should leave now, before I get there and have to leave after everything more.

The vagueness is intentional. I am only as clear as I can make myself understand. It has to be abstract.

Because I can't just look at the thing in my hands and say, honestly, I am bored and I do not want him anymore. I am over him and I am trying to untie and let go, without him noticing that I'm leaving, because I am tired of feeling nothing just to make him feel good. But I don't want him to feel bad.

Enough. I cannot do this today.

I am the truth of what I feel. To myself. In my dark corners.

Everywhere else, it's a fake feeling. And the faces you see aren't me. No one sees this face. No one's been here enough to peel back the layers and understand.

These words are an exorcism. I distill myself in poetry until you have me complete and enigmatic enough that I no longer need to be here. And when that is done, like Sylvia, like Emily, I will run to the quick and eager dark. Heed the call of some need to discover if I can still be, without all the masks and the voices.

I wrote that once, elsewhere. Elsewhen, even.

But I am back to a place where it fits. I am back inside, cowering. I crave this shell, the hidden places for things where I am...just am. Where I can feel and say what it feels like, can look like it feels like, and no one has names or faces or knows enough to point and judge me.

No one even knows I'm here.

About It...

My intangibility. The way I hung - just so - behind such real doors. Like some born-again god, I was his omnipresence. Everywhere without consequence - an inability to measure the real stature of his devotion. I was idea. Accommodating. I hung behind doors, so well...suited...for his purpose. I could be inanimate. I could be. You were. Who doesn't pick their dreams at night?

He spoke more. He poured himself into the cup beyond ears. I was his backdoor escape. I was host to verbal soirees sans repercussions. My rhythm, basslines, the perfect seat for the shredding amped high-voltage rock plane he feared unleashing on you. You were a groupie for his emotions. I was the band. The crack habit. The toilet bowl, stained fingers, needles in the dark, forged prescriptions, his trips, his highs, his genius. I amplified his energy. You channeled it. I hit him in the face. He liked it. He hit you in the face.

I was the one to come. I was through the looking-glass. A tawdry, elusive, seductive reflection of what he showed himself. I was an obsession merely because I was a possibility untamed. I was his hunger. He ate you.

You were a ship that passed in the night. I sunk you behind the horizon at sunset in the rushing waves of all that he'd have me believe. Blissful in the ignorant wash of opaque tides. If the long boy with the endless piebald side had been a woman, had not wanted to devour - I would have been his. I only thought he was spending all his time in Booya Moon, Lisey.

We laughed at the gimmicks any group of friends would have heckled. Never about intentions, about things inherently you. Only the farce of action, of life's bloopers. It was to commune a sense of endearment, not a ridiculing or stoning. I was, occasionally, one of the guys. Always have been.

Have you never made plans late at night to chase after the impulsive? Of course there were plans. Cloud-castles. It was always a good dream.

I couldn't see anything. I was blind, groping for the way he reached at me in the dark. I propped my blindness on the truth of the way he was so willing to hold me. Will you really decry, and fault me, for my faith? It was a devotion. Who doesn't love the things they repose on in the dark?

I did not imagine you. Period. I scrawled dark mental lines over you any time he presented you to me. You were selfish, desperate, friendless, pathetic, gnawing at the legs of the only thing I could stand on. I hated you for it. I pitied you and the holes you dug for yourself. The holes you crouched and whined in. I blew energy into expending you. I simply did not allow you to exist in the places I did. For 6 months. It's a hard habit to break... I will admit, it itches and irks me to have you here. This is my world. In this one, I was here first - and in my absences I still garner the sense of you supplanting me. But these are my own selfish demons. They will be burned, purged. Until them, we are opposing forces, and I have not the current means of laying claim to my territory. My days, my life, my emotions, my words, my friendships are imbedded in these halls you romp through now. Surely you can sympathize with the way this grates me. Can understand the reasons I avoid you. You are taking a whole of the only half I have.

For now, that is enough to say.

I was not naivety. It was wool-covered. It was a heedless sabotage. It was betrayal. I adamantly refuse to blame myself. All I did was love. He misused it.

Have you never asked him? Has he never told you of the way he crawled, begging? Of his grandiose promises of your immediate, impending dismissal? Of the hours he sobbed on the phone while I set my jaw, stoic, resolute, hammering the blame into him; setting the responsibility, the wrong of it squarely on his shoulders? Of how he disgusted me and how I told him he was an even bigger fool to trash two relationships?

Did he tell you I told him that if he was with you, he was never with me? That my time with him was nothing. And that I didn't him to make a mockery of my 6 months by wasting them and not allowing them to make a difference, to turn a new leaf? To tell you everything and to be a better man?

...No, he didn't. A coward, he shrank in his skin. Told you I was the compulsive liar. Urged you to dismiss me the way he did. I loathed him. I was furious. And finally, I realized I never really loved him. I loved that he loved me. I loved the way he needed me.

I did not cry. I always cry, but I did not cry. Not when I found out, and not when he was sobbing in my ear, trying to rationalize his reasons for what he did and why we could still work.

My love cut its losses. My heart withdrew. My obsession, my addiction, my habit of him did not. After the murderous end of our emotional affair, we were pared down to a drug habit. An addiction. We were users and there was no rehab. Weak, wretched, drained... cold turkey, the only option, wasn't feasible on our state of dependency. I tried to substitute other drugs. Never got the same high; I did the drug he wanted to. It didn't last. You were his coffee and cigarettes. We dealt eightballs in the back alleys of our days. Cut lines together when no one could see us. It was miserable, selfish, but it was compulsory. We cut our lines in silence. We cut our lines alone. They just happened to be the same lines.

I forgave him for being himself, not for what he did. But forgiving him for being himself was something I had been doing since it started. Forgiveness was nothing new. It was what let us work.

He never censored himself after that. He always told me what happened with him. I slid myself, intrigued, into his shoes. I said whatever I needed to, to get him to say what he wanted. I didn't trust him. I never trusted him after his initial treason. I still don't trust him. But I know him. And I stayed very good at letting him trust me. You see, I've always listened. And I've told him the answers to things he'd ask me to listen to. They weren't - aren't - always my answers. But they were answers. You learn a lot about someone when you let them talk, only pausing to hear you agree with them. I wasn't lying to him because I wanted him back, or because I was trying to perjure him. I only lied to him because I was curious about what he said when I did. He fascinated me. And I realized he didn't love me. He loved his idea of me, just as I loved the fact that he loved me. We had always been so accommodating that way.

I still didn't think of you. Not in the sense of "the other woman." You were just the half of him that didn't particularly interest me. Your story - the two of you - fascinated me, but I only studied his half. I talked to him because for some reason I felt compelled to mentally log and calculate and observe him. His personality. His state of self, if you will. Conversation ended in January when I hit a plateau in my findings. The proverbial bedrock. It had been a fascinating study, but every researcher comes to a point where they can dig no further. I was done with him. Adequately and completely detached. On bad terms, but detached. A month later, I called for a follow-up. No new developments confirmed my diagnosis. I ran a test or two. Readings were the same. Progress was as anticipated. I watched him leave once more - at least from this book, this thesis. I end it with a sense of completion. A sigh of relief that finally it is done.

He is as he is as he is.

Finally, I have solid proof of that. He is done. He is nothing to me. He is a finished piece, another novel. A thing to be shelved. Dusted off occasionally, but put in a place to be forgotten.

Just because I learned from my experience with him, it doesn't mean he taught me anything.

I have a new profession, a new life, anyhow.

another character sketch

Raed had recently lost his only son. Crushed by the unweight of such a tremendous release, Raed was not him. Unlike him, Raed expanded in emptiness, was made of it. Like a sponge, he was completely holed. And Raed's hole seemed boundless; it surrounded him in a hollow presence that was nearly tangible.

In contrast to him, initially you are disheveled by the enormity of Raed; your instinct saying to give him a wide berth. When people pass him on the sidewalk, though the sidewalk is wide and few are traversing it (and though Raed likes to stay close to the buildings, the walls, finding comfort on the edges of things,) they will step into the gutter, or the street. Already Raed had stopped noticing this. Perhaps he never noticed it.

Have you ever noticed how the emptiness of people is often the only thing that keeps them from falling apart? Raed wore buttons: dark shirts with buttons, and a large navy blue coat with more buttons. The smallest of points can still hold things together. The reprimanding 10 am glare off the cement and the buildings rendered his coat unnecessary, but Raed was used to wearing it; had once been used to walking to work in the dark and the damp of the day. That had changed. His long navy coat, that looked like wool but probably wasn't, had not changed. How could you not cling to familiarity in the places where it doesn't burn you?

A big man, Raed still was not as big as the berth–unscrupulously gifted from the rest of us beyond him–would lead you to believe. Big is the wrong word. Raed was broad; his chest and shoulders, his hands, his feet. In high school (in his other life) they called him The Wall. It fit him. Raed was a vast and stubborn bastion of impassibility. What he was, he was. What he felt, he was. What he thought, he was. And he was unchangeable; always convinced of the right, the truth in his ways of thinking.

pen stretches

It was meant to be a tragic story, one of love lost and the desperate way people interact. And I intended to write it backwards, because that’s how we see them; blue veins of emotion that bleed though the shrug and meh of other days. It’s not until they are once again empty that you look back and realize it was in them, in the grief and the hope and the lust and the echoes that you pulsed, electric, red, alive.

I am used to this. I am used to the pyrite luster of epic intentions. The way they’ll glitter until the time for them is past, and in the aftermath you hold them in your hand. Tacky, they look, ugly and brown. It’s the reflection of yourself that you catch on a smooth side that honestly disgusts you. The Wal-Mart feel of yourself, and not the actual rock. Rocks… intentions are rocks. Intention is a rock and you, the literal you – stripped bare of intention, dreams - are a hard place. And what is between them? What is between them?

Casserole. She had settled for casserole because the cupboard was stripped down to the leavings; the last-picked-in-gym equivalents of the canned food world. All those twenty-five cent, cream of MSG, this might not be real meat…or even food… foods that seem so harmless and even necessary, until you step up to the plate and have to face them as they are. And there she goes, projecting herself once again, onto everything that she touches. Or perhaps, she absorbs it all… takes it in, with some yet unrealized corneal tractor beam of the subconscious and it becomes her. The cream of mushroom soup and her are not two things, they are not similar, they are the same thing. This could be important later. Or it may not. Who are we to say? How does anyone decide the things that are really important?

Frozen chicken breasts. She had those. Rice. The aforementioned soup. Parsley and assorted whatnots of the seasoning variety. Water. Ugh…the sink was overflowing, dishes with remnants now indiscriminate. It was a statement she was making, making herself sick. She was not their mother. She will never be their mother. Does she remember to say thank you when they clean up her dishes? What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?

It would have been a reasonable thing two hours ago, casserole; at this rate she wouldn’t have dinner until 11 and nearly chickened out and tried to convince herself that maybe she was just thirsty, or that she could smuggle a roomie’s popsicle and count that as the only needed caloric intake for the day. Her stomach rallied and internal democracy took over. Very well, she’d cook the dang thing.

It will start out with details like this, and you, you will get used to this. As it continues, less and less of it will feel real and now; it will haze, ripen… it will become ripe, almost too-ripe, the sugar will ferment, and just as you expect it to reach some apex of sweetness the bitter alcohol bite will leave you feeling detached, unsure. You’ll see it through the watercolor washing of time, of dissolving recollections.

I am being too abstract. I should perhaps abandon this line of narrative, and just tell the story…


Frances was coarse. It was not a word to describe her, it was her essence. Her voice: Louis Armstrong, only an octave higher. No one could remember if she’d smoked, but she sounded like it. Her breathing was ragged, even when it was supposed to be quiet, through the nose. She was older than everyone who knew her, but the way no one will admit to their age meant we really didn’t know. Keith Richards, she looked like. Keith Richards all over, only with an extra 30 lbs. of what may, centuries ago, have been some lusciously aerodynamic curves; now flightless, gimp, Frances’s curves had succumbed to gravity at the same time they unyieldingly clung to her frame. It was baggage, she had; Keith Richard, with baggage which had nothing to do with emotional or mental stability. When she moved, her body would have to vote if it was coming with her or not… of course it would always vote yes, but counting the ballots is what held it up, I think.

She and Frances are not the same, at least in the sense that it is not Frances who was making the aforementioned casserole. She was. But you need to know Frances. Frances needs to be a part of this story as much, if not more, than she does. And in that sense, she and Frances are the same. The way she and the soup are the same. And Frances and the soup are the same. It is these similarities that will make the difference, you see.

He was different. Tiny. When you see him, it’s the first thing you notice, how small, how childlike and fledgling he is. Sitting, in brown wool slacks that are (somehow) too short for him, on a grey pine bench, he folds into himself, drowns in the blue-lined button down shirt that at first glance looks new, so starched and white. You close in; its seams are worn, the shirt is off-white, the blue was brighter some other day. He’s had it since Nixon, he just knows how to use things. You forget to notice that he is missing a finger. You forget to notice the American flag pin near the brass of his suspenders. His tree-root hands rest on a dark varnished cane, the rubber cap on the end of it worn off on one side, at an angle, slowly grated off by cement, asphalt, dirt, the empty tennis court he walks through on his way back to a place we’d assume is home – he walks through them to clean up the trash, the papers, the empty ball cans and Gatorade bottles that everyone else has left during the day.

Laboriously, he sweeps (well, shuffles) his way over the courts in the ochre dusk, collecting, tidying. He cannot hold it all, pieces fall and he fumbles after them. Sometimes he’ll make three or five trips to the giant orange plastic garbage bins. The ones with the disheveled black plastic generic Hefty-equivalent bags; the bins they chain and padlock to the pavilion columns so the delinquents who frequent the park after hours can’t roll them into the street, overturn them.

He breathes, but it’s not breathing, he is talking. You will not understand what he is saying. He is not talking to himself. His panama falls when he reaches for the lemon-lime bottle that has stumbled. A heron, he is precariously balancing, the hat he replaces becomes the same. Like a bonsai, he is tiny, but he is huge in his minutiae; he occupies his space. He is a steward; he is more than the lie of his appearance. You see the very world as it sits on the backs of his shoulder blades. It is this that folds him. You reel in your own tininess. It swallows you.

Better – he is – than she, than Frances, than you. Better, and the same. He is the same. The watery cream of mushroom fills him, is him. He likes it with saltines. The stove and pot he cooks with even older than his shirt. You know this. Like Bubble-yum in your hair, he sticks to you. Like Bubble-yum in your hair, he will make you cry.

Unlike Bubble-yum, he will make you wonder how to fill your spaces. When you remember him, he is tall. When you remember him, he fills you. Like cream of mushroom soup, afloat with soggy saltine ships. He marks you, changes who you are physically, a bit like that compulsory gum-in-the-hair haircut you had to get when you were seven, when you were playing with your Bubble-yum.

Blue Sky

Can any of you understand the glorious feeling of having a sad, disappointing chapter of your life finally, finally close and a whole new bright and shining one open up before you like life is new, and wonderful, and full of potential and hope and wonder again?

If you can, then you can sympathize with me.

If you can't, I feel sorry for you. It's an inexplicable feeling.

Like how clean the world can feel after a completely violent, huge, loud, overwhelming thunderstorm.

My thunderstorm is over. The world is clean.

I can see the sun again. Better, even, than before.