Evelyn,
I had found the diary by coincidence it seemed, walking one day, dirty (it was raining heavily), mud caking to my shoes along the wood-trails of Van Cortlandt Park. Brad had favored Central Park for the duration of our time in New York, as most New Yorkers do, but I had found myself taking the train to Woodlawn Heights at first weekly, and then daily the second winter we were there.
The winter was still, and so I was driven out onto the street. We were alone, also; no more wives or girlfriends for that time until they would return in the new year. It was only the three of us, liberated for the first time, yes, but beginning to feel it's eventual sting of isolation. And so I became acquainted, rather intimately, with the John Muir trail.
As I said, it had been raining. The woods dripped a morose way near the aqueduct, and it was nearby when I spotted it - a flash of red which made my heart stop. I thought at first it was a cardinal, or stray graffiti, but it was somehow smooth and reflective, and therefore artificial. It was coming up out of the ground, as if it could not stay buried where it was (a trait I would come to know is yours in singularity).
You may be curious to know exactly how rain affects the colors around us. In the dimmer lights filtered by clouds, I was told once it allows our eyes to better interpret and differentiate color. In the rain, when senses are heightened thus, my favorite things to examine are soil, and stone.
Under the fluorescent greens, I saw amid the dung brown and vivid mulch of the leaves of the foregone autumn, the plastic bag protecting a corner of the diary. I dug it loose with my hands, mucking it from it's casket. It was the color of all my thoughts, interrupted. The color of my heart stopping.
When I had pulled it loose, I took it with me to the creek and washed the grime from it and my hands before opening it, to examine the contents.
The interior of the bag had no scent but plastic. When I saw the writing within begin at the top of the first page, aching girlish in loops of uncertainty, I closed it without reading the words at all. You see, I realize I had committed a terrible sin.
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
The Red Woods of October
The Red Woods of October
Red Rocking Chair
Life has a steady forward movement, marked in even hours and predictable turns of the sun and moon. Some of this is arbitrary, and some is necessary. My first enemy was time.
I can remember, or I think I remember, moments when time elevated me and everyone around me in a fast wind, and I could feel the adults lift their feet from the ground, pull their hands inside the cab, and let the leaves swirl around us with tornado force while we plummeted off of a cliff and into the blue space of the unknown.
"What's that?" I can remember asking about the sound of the great beast accelerating - the engines of time pushing this Earth delicate as an egg into the black arms of empty space. We have no place to live... We have nothing to eat... They have come for the car... And the strings pull long and then, let go, before resuming so fast I can no longer see his fingers steady on the neck.
When the wind rises, so does my heart, to listen to a call I think most people have forgotten. When the wind comes, it means...
"Are we leaving?"
And my question is met with not only silence, but derision. Because they're trapped here, while I'm not.
Montague Road
But people, with their ribbons, will try. They unspool from the heart, green and blue and yellow, and tie with promises around waists and wrists and too tightly around the neck. The beginnings of my sexual education were dance steps to avoid these being cast by all around me.
When I was stagnated to the ground, and the wind wouldn't carry me away like a dandelion seed to be as light as I felt, I walked to places too far to be found, and I let the ribbons of my heart go, into the trees, or out to the wind, where no one could have them but birds.
While outwardly, I had learned to be a girl, I was living inside the shell of one; a kind of unknowable boy responsive to fear and agony.
There was nowhere on Earth more desolate than this place, we made sure of it. The high desert autumn was dry and bright and the ground bleached white, pocked with browning leaves blowing in a bitter wind. It was the only place I'd ever go, where it's easy to learn things like how easy it is to let love die, or roll forever into nothingness.
Forest On Fire
In isolation, there is nothing left but principle nature. Adam once asked me, did I want to know what he'd learned, being alone for so long, as if I didn't know the answer would be this. Not who he is, but what he is.
The nature of me is exactly this long - this longing feeling to disappear into the smoke of a force destructive enough to blot out the sun - to outlast it until the last ringing sound dies at the end of all things.
Impasse
A girl's power is a coiled fox, dangerous because it is indiscriminate in it's target. They're unwieldy animals who do not consider risk against reward. All pain is necessary, all costs regrettable but not enough. In my nature is an animal who doesn't mind breaking the neck of the thing I love to free it from a trap. It doesn't mind chewing off a limb to simply die elsewhere. God and I have always been at an impasse. As much as I want to be consumed by him or his crushing worlds, the movements I make inside him never fail to alienate us.
Night Terror
The only way I know how to love anything is to dedicate the tooth and claw of this animal to a boy who will never know the difference, and let every other ribbon unroll and vanish in the wind.
Aurora Gone
The girl everyone sees becomes a stand-in for the girl no one sees. The girl no one sees bunkers down to weather this thing, and then this one, suffering them like indignities in a prison, until the voice comes like a suspicion.
The voice is low and hateful, and the hand is hard and flat. My back to a wall, the wall opens, becomes a door, and the hand pulls me into the dark, the voice whispering to me secret things. Things so secret, they defy expression. All the locked closets of my childhood vanish into an unending backstage where the hand and the voice feed the fox in me.
The secrets it speaks take the shape of a salt-field, a fire in the distance, wind bone-sharp on the skin; words like blanch and scar and thresh; the tightening of the glottal muscles before crying.
These shapes become a name in the dark, and the name becomes not a person, but a promise.
Bradley.
Flatlands
I become the tallest point on the smoke-field for miles and miles, knowing I am made of copper, knowing the storm is coming.
I acquaint myself with the dirt with the timid fingers of a virgin. The tree comes out in small movements, which I am motionless to watch. When the dawn comes, it blooms fire, and ticks like a clock.
I think all my prayers are made growing something which will ultimately be used to destroy (like Brad, that was Brad). It has to be that way, so I can bleed, and bleed, and bleed, and bleed.
Red Rocking Chair
Life has a steady forward movement, marked in even hours and predictable turns of the sun and moon. Some of this is arbitrary, and some is necessary. My first enemy was time.
I can remember, or I think I remember, moments when time elevated me and everyone around me in a fast wind, and I could feel the adults lift their feet from the ground, pull their hands inside the cab, and let the leaves swirl around us with tornado force while we plummeted off of a cliff and into the blue space of the unknown.
"What's that?" I can remember asking about the sound of the great beast accelerating - the engines of time pushing this Earth delicate as an egg into the black arms of empty space. We have no place to live... We have nothing to eat... They have come for the car... And the strings pull long and then, let go, before resuming so fast I can no longer see his fingers steady on the neck.
When the wind rises, so does my heart, to listen to a call I think most people have forgotten. When the wind comes, it means...
"Are we leaving?"
And my question is met with not only silence, but derision. Because they're trapped here, while I'm not.
Montague Road
But people, with their ribbons, will try. They unspool from the heart, green and blue and yellow, and tie with promises around waists and wrists and too tightly around the neck. The beginnings of my sexual education were dance steps to avoid these being cast by all around me.
When I was stagnated to the ground, and the wind wouldn't carry me away like a dandelion seed to be as light as I felt, I walked to places too far to be found, and I let the ribbons of my heart go, into the trees, or out to the wind, where no one could have them but birds.
While outwardly, I had learned to be a girl, I was living inside the shell of one; a kind of unknowable boy responsive to fear and agony.
There was nowhere on Earth more desolate than this place, we made sure of it. The high desert autumn was dry and bright and the ground bleached white, pocked with browning leaves blowing in a bitter wind. It was the only place I'd ever go, where it's easy to learn things like how easy it is to let love die, or roll forever into nothingness.
Forest On Fire
In isolation, there is nothing left but principle nature. Adam once asked me, did I want to know what he'd learned, being alone for so long, as if I didn't know the answer would be this. Not who he is, but what he is.
The nature of me is exactly this long - this longing feeling to disappear into the smoke of a force destructive enough to blot out the sun - to outlast it until the last ringing sound dies at the end of all things.
Impasse
A girl's power is a coiled fox, dangerous because it is indiscriminate in it's target. They're unwieldy animals who do not consider risk against reward. All pain is necessary, all costs regrettable but not enough. In my nature is an animal who doesn't mind breaking the neck of the thing I love to free it from a trap. It doesn't mind chewing off a limb to simply die elsewhere. God and I have always been at an impasse. As much as I want to be consumed by him or his crushing worlds, the movements I make inside him never fail to alienate us.
Night Terror
The only way I know how to love anything is to dedicate the tooth and claw of this animal to a boy who will never know the difference, and let every other ribbon unroll and vanish in the wind.
Aurora Gone
The girl everyone sees becomes a stand-in for the girl no one sees. The girl no one sees bunkers down to weather this thing, and then this one, suffering them like indignities in a prison, until the voice comes like a suspicion.
The voice is low and hateful, and the hand is hard and flat. My back to a wall, the wall opens, becomes a door, and the hand pulls me into the dark, the voice whispering to me secret things. Things so secret, they defy expression. All the locked closets of my childhood vanish into an unending backstage where the hand and the voice feed the fox in me.
The secrets it speaks take the shape of a salt-field, a fire in the distance, wind bone-sharp on the skin; words like blanch and scar and thresh; the tightening of the glottal muscles before crying.
These shapes become a name in the dark, and the name becomes not a person, but a promise.
Bradley.
Flatlands
I become the tallest point on the smoke-field for miles and miles, knowing I am made of copper, knowing the storm is coming.
I acquaint myself with the dirt with the timid fingers of a virgin. The tree comes out in small movements, which I am motionless to watch. When the dawn comes, it blooms fire, and ticks like a clock.
I think all my prayers are made growing something which will ultimately be used to destroy (like Brad, that was Brad). It has to be that way, so I can bleed, and bleed, and bleed, and bleed.
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Letters 1
Adam,
Over the amber flame of your eyes, we join hands for this seance where you will explain for the first time, and possibly the last time, this dormancy. As things born without names, inside the other, we began life nebulous and strangely-defined, like shadows. When did you know me and when did I know you? It really wouldn't ever matter, until this moment, when I'm asking you with a certain fierceness to tell me so I can let this run through me, finally.
We would do well to make this a collection of our letters, I know, and have always known. But what I want is
Evelyn,
I can remember as a child, watching the television which was running a nature program narrated by a voice I know you sometimes hear in your head, a man's voice, with infinite patience, iterating to my prepubescent self that it is both natural, and mammalian, for mothers to let the weakest offspring die. If I was aware of you then, it was as a dark force beyond my comprehension; a cabal to which only the most dubious of my acquaintances belonged.
I have a memory of which I've never spoken, of the first instance I watched my mother shield me from the fists of my father. He had been aiming no necessarily for me, but I had been in the way, heedless as any toddler, not understanding that his jibes had become malicious and whatever game we'd been playing had become an entrapment. My mother moved her slight body with a swift motion to stand between us, and if she'd had a fire-poker on hand, I know I would've grown up an only child.
In the ensuing years, I would watch him, or something only hear him, elicit from her throat the meek whimper of her submission, but on this day, she growled low and animal, and I feared - reptilian, possibly, from primordial sections of my developing mind - that if I fell behind, I would be devoured by her, as surely as he would.
Adam,
There could have only ever been the pain. Confusion, humiliation. I can't face what I've done, any more than I can face what I am. I'm methodical in this rage, and always was. Was this surviving? No, you don't understand that the mother leaves her offspring to die, yes, but most especially, when trapped, she will devour her own limbs to escape.
Evelyn,
Terrariums are an interesting concept, much like ant farms: a habitat designed to sustain itself, in an isolated microcosm. I believe the knowledge it can work in science is partially the reason I tried to enact it in life.
Art, it is wondered, can imitate life and vice versa, but I wonder if the same could be said for science. Does science (the pure experiment) somehow capture the pure experience?
Adam,
I want to be taken away, is the problem. You don't understand, or couldn't, that I want to be taken on the wave of something which matters and makes the rest of the world dim. I want there to be a diminishment of sound, to a dark place where the mechanics of things are understood in a simplistic way.
All this might be attributable to a desire I have to get back to the garden.
Eve,
I've begun to arrange my thoughts, by color. Softest is where I find you, hiding beneath a green both secret and muted. Let me find it for you.
#5F956E
Adam,
Every time I feel like I'm onto something, a stray wind comes to shatter the cobwebs and I wonder if perhaps nothing is gentle enough, or soft enough, to contribute to the perfect den in which I can touch old parts of me which have retreated far below the surface. I was going to ask you to do it, but the song changed, and
Over the amber flame of your eyes, we join hands for this seance where you will explain for the first time, and possibly the last time, this dormancy. As things born without names, inside the other, we began life nebulous and strangely-defined, like shadows. When did you know me and when did I know you? It really wouldn't ever matter, until this moment, when I'm asking you with a certain fierceness to tell me so I can let this run through me, finally.
We would do well to make this a collection of our letters, I know, and have always known. But what I want is
Evelyn,
I can remember as a child, watching the television which was running a nature program narrated by a voice I know you sometimes hear in your head, a man's voice, with infinite patience, iterating to my prepubescent self that it is both natural, and mammalian, for mothers to let the weakest offspring die. If I was aware of you then, it was as a dark force beyond my comprehension; a cabal to which only the most dubious of my acquaintances belonged.
I have a memory of which I've never spoken, of the first instance I watched my mother shield me from the fists of my father. He had been aiming no necessarily for me, but I had been in the way, heedless as any toddler, not understanding that his jibes had become malicious and whatever game we'd been playing had become an entrapment. My mother moved her slight body with a swift motion to stand between us, and if she'd had a fire-poker on hand, I know I would've grown up an only child.
In the ensuing years, I would watch him, or something only hear him, elicit from her throat the meek whimper of her submission, but on this day, she growled low and animal, and I feared - reptilian, possibly, from primordial sections of my developing mind - that if I fell behind, I would be devoured by her, as surely as he would.
Adam,
There could have only ever been the pain. Confusion, humiliation. I can't face what I've done, any more than I can face what I am. I'm methodical in this rage, and always was. Was this surviving? No, you don't understand that the mother leaves her offspring to die, yes, but most especially, when trapped, she will devour her own limbs to escape.
Evelyn,
Terrariums are an interesting concept, much like ant farms: a habitat designed to sustain itself, in an isolated microcosm. I believe the knowledge it can work in science is partially the reason I tried to enact it in life.
Art, it is wondered, can imitate life and vice versa, but I wonder if the same could be said for science. Does science (the pure experiment) somehow capture the pure experience?
Adam,
I want to be taken away, is the problem. You don't understand, or couldn't, that I want to be taken on the wave of something which matters and makes the rest of the world dim. I want there to be a diminishment of sound, to a dark place where the mechanics of things are understood in a simplistic way.
All this might be attributable to a desire I have to get back to the garden.
Eve,
I've begun to arrange my thoughts, by color. Softest is where I find you, hiding beneath a green both secret and muted. Let me find it for you.
#5F956E
Adam,
Every time I feel like I'm onto something, a stray wind comes to shatter the cobwebs and I wonder if perhaps nothing is gentle enough, or soft enough, to contribute to the perfect den in which I can touch old parts of me which have retreated far below the surface. I was going to ask you to do it, but the song changed, and
Monday, August 19, 2019
There's No Earthly Way of Knowing 4
The night after Rosie and Drama blinded Grady, we decided to go for a ride.
Grady accepted the blinding with grace; something not all men can do. When he came to without his sight, he laid in bed for a period of time just listening to the house around him. We decided to go for a ride because he had planned one, regardless, and being now blind wouldn't stop him from it.
He invited Rosie because she was the one who'd taken his sight, and because he loved her, and because she wanted to go. Brad and Clyde and I invited ourselves because it was the first time anything had happened to us, our small and inconsequential biker gang, which facilitated our riding together in a way that fit the character we'd chosen for ourselves as a gang. If we ever went before, there would be insincere carousing, wheelies popped in posing jest of ourselves and none of us could stand it, really, so we just didn't go.
Grady accepted the blinding with grace; something not all men can do. When he came to without his sight, he laid in bed for a period of time just listening to the house around him. We decided to go for a ride because he had planned one, regardless, and being now blind wouldn't stop him from it.
He invited Rosie because she was the one who'd taken his sight, and because he loved her, and because she wanted to go. Brad and Clyde and I invited ourselves because it was the first time anything had happened to us, our small and inconsequential biker gang, which facilitated our riding together in a way that fit the character we'd chosen for ourselves as a gang. If we ever went before, there would be insincere carousing, wheelies popped in posing jest of ourselves and none of us could stand it, really, so we just didn't go.
Monday, August 12, 2019
Friday, August 9, 2019
There's No Earthly Way of Knowing 3
If I could choose Adam's name all over again, I would name him Blunt Force Trauma. In the middle of everything, he interrupts me. He does it repeatedly and viscerally, like he can remind me of where I came from by beating me to death with the bricks of the house we grew up in, caving into smeared tissue the places in my brain which forgot him.
"I'm not a careful man, Evelyn," he reminds me, removing his glasses and folding them into the breast pocket of his shirt with fingers so many people seem to forget are roughly calloused, even me. He plays a professor very well, it's true. He dons without effort the mantle of soft collegiate intellectual, but when it comes to any of the Gray boys, all their efforts at civilizing stop at the hands, each pair battered and scarred like teenage warlords. I've written too much about each of their hands, and the secrets they betray of how these boys have grown consequently into men who fight, who vandalize, who commit murder, break down doors, and crash cars.
And so he crashes one into me, when he interrupts me to say, "Come home, Evelyn."
I can never remember what I was doing before. So all statements of will turn into magic spells.
The lights in Adam's room are low, his door partially ajar. I close it when I enter. His curio cabinets glow with exhibition lighting cast over deformed animal bones and antique tattoo guns. I resist his interruptions like I resist anything else I think will affect me inside, and I enter his room a nonchalant boy, immune to charms and dense to nuance.
"I forgot I was going to bring you another penis cage I found," I tell him, diminishing his deep reverence to the history of human sexuality with a fast kick to his sandcastle.
"Goody," he dismisses, because he knows both the mood I'm in and the boy it engenders.
Adam has been clean-shaven and crew-cut since Brad has abandoned the notion of grooming over a year ago. While Brad wilted, Adam starched. Because if he can't give me what I want, he can provide for me it's contrast, and does so with adept innuendo and crisp accuracy.
"Your new deodorant has an almost mildew scent," he adds, "which I enjoy quite a bit."
"That's disgusting," I snap as I cross to the wardrobe where he's relegated my clothes.
"No, it's very pleasant. Like all the leaves of you, have fallen for the year."
Inside the wardrobe, there are t-shirts and jeans on one side, dresses on the other, sweaters in the middle. Adam's arranged my clothes by gender and preference, with items of safety in between. The gesture dissolves my resentment toward him in an instant - the manner in which he understands.
The first night we had sex, I wore my favorite white dress to see him, which ended the night discarded on the floor. Since then, I've seen it haunting the corners of his closets; a secret I've been determined to let him keep. It was a year ago or so when I found it in the lab, a 6-inch square excised from it near the hem. The straps of it peer out from the back of the wardrobe, shrugging their wooden hanger.
I put on a shirt I found on the boy side, faded black and waving the flag of torn pocket over the breast, and we went to bed together. He was gone when I woke up, but I resolved to repay him with the trespass of rearranging his closet similarly, in a way he'd like but never consider himself: by the texture of the clothing.
"I'm not a careful man, Evelyn," he reminds me, removing his glasses and folding them into the breast pocket of his shirt with fingers so many people seem to forget are roughly calloused, even me. He plays a professor very well, it's true. He dons without effort the mantle of soft collegiate intellectual, but when it comes to any of the Gray boys, all their efforts at civilizing stop at the hands, each pair battered and scarred like teenage warlords. I've written too much about each of their hands, and the secrets they betray of how these boys have grown consequently into men who fight, who vandalize, who commit murder, break down doors, and crash cars.
And so he crashes one into me, when he interrupts me to say, "Come home, Evelyn."
I can never remember what I was doing before. So all statements of will turn into magic spells.
The lights in Adam's room are low, his door partially ajar. I close it when I enter. His curio cabinets glow with exhibition lighting cast over deformed animal bones and antique tattoo guns. I resist his interruptions like I resist anything else I think will affect me inside, and I enter his room a nonchalant boy, immune to charms and dense to nuance.
"I forgot I was going to bring you another penis cage I found," I tell him, diminishing his deep reverence to the history of human sexuality with a fast kick to his sandcastle.
"Goody," he dismisses, because he knows both the mood I'm in and the boy it engenders.
Adam has been clean-shaven and crew-cut since Brad has abandoned the notion of grooming over a year ago. While Brad wilted, Adam starched. Because if he can't give me what I want, he can provide for me it's contrast, and does so with adept innuendo and crisp accuracy.
"Your new deodorant has an almost mildew scent," he adds, "which I enjoy quite a bit."
"That's disgusting," I snap as I cross to the wardrobe where he's relegated my clothes.
"No, it's very pleasant. Like all the leaves of you, have fallen for the year."
Inside the wardrobe, there are t-shirts and jeans on one side, dresses on the other, sweaters in the middle. Adam's arranged my clothes by gender and preference, with items of safety in between. The gesture dissolves my resentment toward him in an instant - the manner in which he understands.
The first night we had sex, I wore my favorite white dress to see him, which ended the night discarded on the floor. Since then, I've seen it haunting the corners of his closets; a secret I've been determined to let him keep. It was a year ago or so when I found it in the lab, a 6-inch square excised from it near the hem. The straps of it peer out from the back of the wardrobe, shrugging their wooden hanger.
I put on a shirt I found on the boy side, faded black and waving the flag of torn pocket over the breast, and we went to bed together. He was gone when I woke up, but I resolved to repay him with the trespass of rearranging his closet similarly, in a way he'd like but never consider himself: by the texture of the clothing.
Thursday, August 8, 2019
For Tigerlily
Tigerlily,
Across the bathroom tiles, I've spread this memory, liquefied. You told me once you were taught to shave, and even if you never were, you were. We were. We were taught how to give voice to this color-secret, the liquid truth, in long equations of additions and subtractions.
I cut. My hair.
And it was a tragedy.
The scissors were my mother's, engraved with her name, and so it was in her name that I did it. I parceled it into long offerings which poured bleak onto the tiled floor. Subtraction, in these many hateful inches.
I wished I could have remained a Lost Boy, but Peter promised. He promised to love us all through the hardships of first living as a hatchet-limbed boy of little speech, then changing in these grotesque inches into the wicked banishment of girlhood.
I cried, I remember. I hyperventilated in the bathroom while he picked over his collection of Hustler and Playboy and drew the ubiquitous florals sufficiently labian. I took the scissors, and cut my hair, squealing I don't want to die I don't want to die, and Peter was calm. He was so calm, like he knew. He let the inches fall, and we watched the pile for a long time without saying anything, like it was a pit of living snakes.
"It'll only hurt a little, Tig," he said to me, and his shadow nodded.
Peter always keeps his promises, through the broken ankle-straps and haphazard nail polish. He loved us through each blunt scissor-stroke and rage of lace and ribbon. We learned to shave, and then we stopped because he took us to the hotel together, and left us there without anything we could use to hurt ourselves. The blossom expands, and then curls into itself. Like detox.
He left us there, he said, until we could figure how to fly again.
-Tigerlily
Across the bathroom tiles, I've spread this memory, liquefied. You told me once you were taught to shave, and even if you never were, you were. We were. We were taught how to give voice to this color-secret, the liquid truth, in long equations of additions and subtractions.
I cut. My hair.
And it was a tragedy.
The scissors were my mother's, engraved with her name, and so it was in her name that I did it. I parceled it into long offerings which poured bleak onto the tiled floor. Subtraction, in these many hateful inches.
I wished I could have remained a Lost Boy, but Peter promised. He promised to love us all through the hardships of first living as a hatchet-limbed boy of little speech, then changing in these grotesque inches into the wicked banishment of girlhood.
I cried, I remember. I hyperventilated in the bathroom while he picked over his collection of Hustler and Playboy and drew the ubiquitous florals sufficiently labian. I took the scissors, and cut my hair, squealing I don't want to die I don't want to die, and Peter was calm. He was so calm, like he knew. He let the inches fall, and we watched the pile for a long time without saying anything, like it was a pit of living snakes.
"It'll only hurt a little, Tig," he said to me, and his shadow nodded.
Peter always keeps his promises, through the broken ankle-straps and haphazard nail polish. He loved us through each blunt scissor-stroke and rage of lace and ribbon. We learned to shave, and then we stopped because he took us to the hotel together, and left us there without anything we could use to hurt ourselves. The blossom expands, and then curls into itself. Like detox.
He left us there, he said, until we could figure how to fly again.
-Tigerlily
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
There's No Earthly Way of Knowing 2
Matthew unfolded, tricks up his sleeves which he emptied as he walked over the water-soaked floors. He unfolded like a creature of many legs, his green eyes blank and sane as cicadas. This torment, the torment of the flood and our subsequent apathy toward all it's related chaos, was the circumstance which called him to action; the way we all struggled in his invisible web.
Matthew crept, spreading over doorknobs and into cracks in the tile in the bathroom the paranoia of purpose. We are dark creatures when provoked to dark places, and in idleness Matthew itches us to look inward, find patterns in nothingness, blame each other, and form alliances with forces we'd never bother with on normal nights. Where he walked after the flood, he spread a thick and dangerous magic that we all needed, as much as we all hated it.
Maybe he saved us all, who really knows? Maybe it was only me.
I pride myself on being some kind of hero, though after the last 5 years, I'd struggle to come up with anything I've done which was heroic at the time and not totally in my own self-interest (if the two are even mutually exclusive, which I can't say anymore). My old belief is that I'm the hero, and Matthew is the villain, for all the ways he walks around moral absolutes and maintains his innocence of heart. Wouldn't it be strange if he'd done something to save us all? Would it have been an accident, or would he have had the intention to do it?
It was simple, or it began simply. He wrote me a letter, and so peeling off one of his thousand tattoos and laying it flat and loving onto paper, he was coy and apologetic for that which had come before. It was a clever and incisive "good morning," but villains are like that. They have the ability to make idle chit-chat into weaponry and drive it straight into the heart of all things.
Matthew crept, spreading over doorknobs and into cracks in the tile in the bathroom the paranoia of purpose. We are dark creatures when provoked to dark places, and in idleness Matthew itches us to look inward, find patterns in nothingness, blame each other, and form alliances with forces we'd never bother with on normal nights. Where he walked after the flood, he spread a thick and dangerous magic that we all needed, as much as we all hated it.
Maybe he saved us all, who really knows? Maybe it was only me.
I pride myself on being some kind of hero, though after the last 5 years, I'd struggle to come up with anything I've done which was heroic at the time and not totally in my own self-interest (if the two are even mutually exclusive, which I can't say anymore). My old belief is that I'm the hero, and Matthew is the villain, for all the ways he walks around moral absolutes and maintains his innocence of heart. Wouldn't it be strange if he'd done something to save us all? Would it have been an accident, or would he have had the intention to do it?
It was simple, or it began simply. He wrote me a letter, and so peeling off one of his thousand tattoos and laying it flat and loving onto paper, he was coy and apologetic for that which had come before. It was a clever and incisive "good morning," but villains are like that. They have the ability to make idle chit-chat into weaponry and drive it straight into the heart of all things.
Eve,
The fountain is a kiddie pool. You had already known that. Everyone had known though no one had returned any rubber duckies to it. Well, I dove in. The water we said we would never touch. I found Jamaica.
There's no more half-assed evil spirits in here, only prefabricated ones and the last bit of patience you could stuff into your pockets. I said I wanted your eyes. This, this, this, over again, but never round like the button holes you had me put my tongue through to kiss you.
Meager though we are, meager though we can't. Her palms blister, and then I accuse her of becoming you. Daughters are like water.
This was the rain, dripping down the boots of some who had not known rain before. There were bells in the river. An ocean could not rise to match the fire or be brave enough to put it out. Though it was like something out of one of those darker teen movies such as that which all the actors were former models anyways. I hate when it has gotten dark when leaving the theater when it had been day when we went inside.
Turn when you can hear me speaking to you, will you? I hate when you cannot look into my eyes. Circle, circle follow circle, circle. I never got to show you my hand, and you never believed it was a winner.
Though you were confused by me and hurt by me, you let me make you laugh, and you made me laugh. Why do you let yourself do that? How can you let yourself? I want you to teach me how to do it, but also I want to kill you for knowing how to do that as well. Fuck that.
I got a new job, I am going to be a crash test dummy. I had thought of asking you not to laugh at me for this. Is there a point? You have a new job as a gas giant which admits noxious, destructive chemicals which kill. I am going to dry off. I am going to paint with all colors which are edging to pink though they aren't pink. It is the colors of Venus, appearing pink though they are altogether not. If I had not rushed off to become a fighter as early in my life, I would have become better with colors and made my own paint to sell and called them Pink Planette. But now I am to resort to test dummying. Goodbye forever.
I love you, Eve.
MBK
Sunday, July 28, 2019
Dream 7/24/19
Brad,
We tiptoed around dusty crates at the attraction, perhaps a carnival or hidden market, the light indicative of a secret withheld. Brown bottle glass, antique mirrors. I would have forgotten your name, if it was one you'd ever told me.
There was so much life that happened to me before I realized I could distill this down to the single sentence: we fucked on the couch and it my first time. I, as usual, wish I had saved some of that life so there could be more understanding of the process, but maybe the process doesn't matter, and didn't matter even then.
I knew it was a memory, but at the time I knew that ironically, like growing a new memory over the old ones I was handed by circumstance is a terribly passe thing these days and can be ignored as easily as refusing to acknowledge anymore remixes. Maybe the process is just as easily summed up by saying it's the same song, but different.
This could've been a poem if I was a different part of myself - the part maybe that sees poetry as a weapon instead of the pattering mortar of words which feels like an arsenal but ultimately moves little. If you push me around, I'll move. Justified down to the last pawn on the board; if you push me around, I'll move.
I'm mad because the dream happened, and like anything else, it makes sense only after the fact and maybe 20 years before, but no time in between. And I loved you.
No, that isn't what I was going to say. I was going to say I kept the love I felt for you a secret from everyone, and that's why we were never going to be together. I can never tell when I'm talking about you or thinking about you, if anything I think or feel is real. I don't know how this part of me works, and being close to you at all means I have a whole other half I might use to undermine it in the first place. I think this whole thing could be really funny if I wanted it to be, but I don't.
I don't know what to do with this slice of time anymore, not after I beat it to death to analyze where everything turned from good to bad. Not after I discovered I could never be a princess for you, accepted that forever, donned pair after pair of thigh-high fishnets to spite you, tried to grow up without you, felt like such a fucking disappointment to you, refused to ever trust you, cursed you loudly and often, only to wake up, Brad, to fucking wake up in the ash after the blast because you kissed me and a thousand years had gone by in the blink of your slick red time machine.
I wanted to be angry with you for this distinctly adamic maneuver, tying something up in me with a bow to present it back to myself like what's been in your pocket for the last 20 years was this puzzle piece. I wanted to be angry but at the same time, I was too relieved. Relieved that you had it, and relieved that you had it.
I can't remember really how we got here, except we fell in love the other night, and it felt like something unrelenting colliding with something unwarranted. So I find myself under you again, tangling into your hair, begging you not to stop again and forgetting what the both of us have always known.
I loved fucking you the first time because I could feel how my body belonged to you and no one else. It feels like that every time since.
I can't remember how we got here, but the slide passes from one side of the carousel to the other with a metallic sound, pushing one photograph over in favor of the next. Once, we were at summer camp, once we were orphaned killers, once we were newlyweds absconded from the law, once you took me to see how the world began, and now this. Now this, we lay on the grass in borrowed clothes and wonder what just happened to us.
But we couldn't know all the attendees of the wedding would be vaporized the next day in the power of the blast of the house exiting this atmosphere. We couldn't know it was their graves you picked through to propose. We couldn't know what it would take to marry my heart to yours, being unflaggingly the same.
I have to tell you, I lied to you so much when we were young because I was afraid of meaning the things I said. I promise I'll never lie to you again.
Love always,
Janet
We tiptoed around dusty crates at the attraction, perhaps a carnival or hidden market, the light indicative of a secret withheld. Brown bottle glass, antique mirrors. I would have forgotten your name, if it was one you'd ever told me.
There was so much life that happened to me before I realized I could distill this down to the single sentence: we fucked on the couch and it my first time. I, as usual, wish I had saved some of that life so there could be more understanding of the process, but maybe the process doesn't matter, and didn't matter even then.
I knew it was a memory, but at the time I knew that ironically, like growing a new memory over the old ones I was handed by circumstance is a terribly passe thing these days and can be ignored as easily as refusing to acknowledge anymore remixes. Maybe the process is just as easily summed up by saying it's the same song, but different.
This could've been a poem if I was a different part of myself - the part maybe that sees poetry as a weapon instead of the pattering mortar of words which feels like an arsenal but ultimately moves little. If you push me around, I'll move. Justified down to the last pawn on the board; if you push me around, I'll move.
I'm mad because the dream happened, and like anything else, it makes sense only after the fact and maybe 20 years before, but no time in between. And I loved you.
No, that isn't what I was going to say. I was going to say I kept the love I felt for you a secret from everyone, and that's why we were never going to be together. I can never tell when I'm talking about you or thinking about you, if anything I think or feel is real. I don't know how this part of me works, and being close to you at all means I have a whole other half I might use to undermine it in the first place. I think this whole thing could be really funny if I wanted it to be, but I don't.
I don't know what to do with this slice of time anymore, not after I beat it to death to analyze where everything turned from good to bad. Not after I discovered I could never be a princess for you, accepted that forever, donned pair after pair of thigh-high fishnets to spite you, tried to grow up without you, felt like such a fucking disappointment to you, refused to ever trust you, cursed you loudly and often, only to wake up, Brad, to fucking wake up in the ash after the blast because you kissed me and a thousand years had gone by in the blink of your slick red time machine.
I wanted to be angry with you for this distinctly adamic maneuver, tying something up in me with a bow to present it back to myself like what's been in your pocket for the last 20 years was this puzzle piece. I wanted to be angry but at the same time, I was too relieved. Relieved that you had it, and relieved that you had it.
I can't remember really how we got here, except we fell in love the other night, and it felt like something unrelenting colliding with something unwarranted. So I find myself under you again, tangling into your hair, begging you not to stop again and forgetting what the both of us have always known.
I loved fucking you the first time because I could feel how my body belonged to you and no one else. It feels like that every time since.
I can't remember how we got here, but the slide passes from one side of the carousel to the other with a metallic sound, pushing one photograph over in favor of the next. Once, we were at summer camp, once we were orphaned killers, once we were newlyweds absconded from the law, once you took me to see how the world began, and now this. Now this, we lay on the grass in borrowed clothes and wonder what just happened to us.
But we couldn't know all the attendees of the wedding would be vaporized the next day in the power of the blast of the house exiting this atmosphere. We couldn't know it was their graves you picked through to propose. We couldn't know what it would take to marry my heart to yours, being unflaggingly the same.
I have to tell you, I lied to you so much when we were young because I was afraid of meaning the things I said. I promise I'll never lie to you again.
Love always,
Janet
There's No Earthly Way of Knowing 1
In a way I imagine to be similar to the unwinding of a galaxy from a center point of creation, the house unwinds into things which could never contain it as we drive it onward with the elastic recompenses of our imaginations. The front lawn, the battlefield, the site of the Wilkes' barbecue, the Radley's front porch, Dracula's drawbridge, and I don't give a damn. I passed a hundred bodies on my way up the front drive and into my home tonight, all casualties of these close quarters I share with this pack of bloodthirsty animals, and I didn't see them at all because I choose not to see.
The swamp has absorbed all our bloodshed and lost hopes and dreams, and when it became saturated, it spat them back at us as the water overflowed the first floor and the hurricane raged outside. Maybe every storm has been a result of our unnumbered transgressions against god, order, and creation.
Gray House has a garage. I say that limply, to explain why all our cars are sitting on the lawn, or convince myself of some last vestige of humanity we've delayed in shedding out of sentimentality. We have a garage, and there are tools in it, and old boxes of things we've been meaning to throw out or tried to keep for too long.
The garage is large and unfinished with any drywall. The wood beams are home to spiders and the corpses of insects. Grady has three or four motorcycles in various stages of rebuilding housed there, and it looks, no matter how long it takes him to get back to it, like he's only just left the room. I think when he dies, this will be where we go to mourn him.
Adam, having completed the restoration of his own car 4 years ago, has begun work on the repair of John's rust-colored truck, which has refused to turn over since the day he came home. Adam and Grady have eyed the thing with suspicious glares, like it's alive and purposely defying them. The cement floor is generally grimy, generally cool, and growing moss in the corner closest the door.
But if I go to it now - if I cross the threshold of the place from the laundry room off the library on the first floor - and open the heavy steel door and expect to see this dim workshop before me, I know I won't. What will meet me is something a hundred times less expected and a thousand times more heartbreaking. Gray House will betray me, and become Joshua's garage if I look there.
I know from the moment I open the door, the smell of the air which greets me is no longer bayou damp and summer stale. It's winter in the Midwest. The smell of American misery, like piles of wet chaff left to freeze. It's the winter of 1973, and somehow, that is also on the edges of the air, as part of the misery; that which we despise and cannot yet change about our world and ourselves, and perhaps wouldn't, even given the chance.
Joshua's smell slaps me just beyond that - first of his hair and the soap he uses to shampoo it's twelve or so inches, and then the sweat he drips in working on the Plymouth he has on the lift. In this place, Joshua is the biggest creature in existence to me, and my world is comprised of this garage, flavored with his beer and smoke breaks with the garage boys, and blanketed in his vast checkered shirts. From this doorway, it's a hundred miles up to his shoulders where he carries me, to see the secret world above our ceiling fans in our apartment upstairs.
"Bug?" his voice calls, from this somewhere else. "You find it?"
I don't know what he wants me to find, there, or even if I'm allowed in the garage now that's it's night and we've closed. Maybe the sink is leaking and I just can't remember. Maybe I'm about to get in trouble for sneaking around for the first time. Here in the doorway, I can see with some kind of diamond clarity this one thought which dooms me always in that world: It would take a man even bigger than Joshua to...
I close the door.
The swamp has absorbed all our bloodshed and lost hopes and dreams, and when it became saturated, it spat them back at us as the water overflowed the first floor and the hurricane raged outside. Maybe every storm has been a result of our unnumbered transgressions against god, order, and creation.
Gray House has a garage. I say that limply, to explain why all our cars are sitting on the lawn, or convince myself of some last vestige of humanity we've delayed in shedding out of sentimentality. We have a garage, and there are tools in it, and old boxes of things we've been meaning to throw out or tried to keep for too long.
The garage is large and unfinished with any drywall. The wood beams are home to spiders and the corpses of insects. Grady has three or four motorcycles in various stages of rebuilding housed there, and it looks, no matter how long it takes him to get back to it, like he's only just left the room. I think when he dies, this will be where we go to mourn him.
Adam, having completed the restoration of his own car 4 years ago, has begun work on the repair of John's rust-colored truck, which has refused to turn over since the day he came home. Adam and Grady have eyed the thing with suspicious glares, like it's alive and purposely defying them. The cement floor is generally grimy, generally cool, and growing moss in the corner closest the door.
But if I go to it now - if I cross the threshold of the place from the laundry room off the library on the first floor - and open the heavy steel door and expect to see this dim workshop before me, I know I won't. What will meet me is something a hundred times less expected and a thousand times more heartbreaking. Gray House will betray me, and become Joshua's garage if I look there.
I know from the moment I open the door, the smell of the air which greets me is no longer bayou damp and summer stale. It's winter in the Midwest. The smell of American misery, like piles of wet chaff left to freeze. It's the winter of 1973, and somehow, that is also on the edges of the air, as part of the misery; that which we despise and cannot yet change about our world and ourselves, and perhaps wouldn't, even given the chance.
Joshua's smell slaps me just beyond that - first of his hair and the soap he uses to shampoo it's twelve or so inches, and then the sweat he drips in working on the Plymouth he has on the lift. In this place, Joshua is the biggest creature in existence to me, and my world is comprised of this garage, flavored with his beer and smoke breaks with the garage boys, and blanketed in his vast checkered shirts. From this doorway, it's a hundred miles up to his shoulders where he carries me, to see the secret world above our ceiling fans in our apartment upstairs.
"Bug?" his voice calls, from this somewhere else. "You find it?"
I don't know what he wants me to find, there, or even if I'm allowed in the garage now that's it's night and we've closed. Maybe the sink is leaking and I just can't remember. Maybe I'm about to get in trouble for sneaking around for the first time. Here in the doorway, I can see with some kind of diamond clarity this one thought which dooms me always in that world: It would take a man even bigger than Joshua to...
I close the door.
Wednesday, July 24, 2019
Welcome Home
Rosie,
There is no sound quite like the sound of the two of us crashing our house into the side of a world we don't understand. It makes a ripple in a flat pond, breaking hot the glass of our globe, smashing the fruit stall to wooden pulp, pushing little mountains up where the tension became to great.
Clyde split his lip, and threw Punkinbucket into reverse hard enough to ruin the gearbox and decimate the transmission because he likes to be part of the choir. That must've been why he peeled out of the parking lot of our apartment the other day - so we'd know the smell of him ejecting from a reality. Burning, summery, black, dragon.
He does all these stupid things for love.
I don't know how many times we've made this sound, and I don't know how many times Clyde's ruined that fucking car. I don't know, and have never known, where the beginning of our lives ought to be, or when to stop, or the point enough becomes enough. I don't know those things, and I've had occasion over the last year to turn that distinctly dragon trait into an angelic one.
See, I used to be afraid of the ash that falls in place of a belief in magic when you've given excuse after excuse after excuse (and by you in this example, I obviously mean me). Where things run out. Where hearts give out. Where my hypocrisy bends over backward to your isolation. Scars run the length of the Wasteland we built, moved into, celebrated, inhabited, and ultimately mapped by finding the edges which border it lined with living fur and the sound of Adam's laugh.
You know, the things which are the same as pigs flying.
I can feel you right now, even though this is hours or possibly days before you'll set your eyes on this letter, wondering who I am talking to you, and writing these expressions that you find boyish and possibly even a fumbling attempt to be charming or anticipate your reaction.
We got good at doing those things, while we were at war in the Wasteland. Reading our facets of self that prism rapid and unstoppable, as good as we got at freezing them to non-existence. Traversing places of lost time and meaning, fast as a Rolodex and just as obsolete, we flipped past that which we didn't want to see as if we were skipping whole sections of a book we've already read or a movie we've already seen to find out if we could push the tape just a little bit further this time, and let the pages fill in themselves again.
I used to be afraid of those scars, coated light with the falling snow of a detonated bomb that was Brad's handiwork; his final and cynical contribution when his eyes cloud the same as Matthew's. I'm not now because I can see there is no difference in this place or any other. We're together, where the magic is collecting like rocks in water, and our perseverance in beliefs doesn't matter.
It's easy n
Hey.
It's easy now, Mercy. I can move my shoulder upward in an idle stretch and stare down the giddy prom-night couple across from us on the M. It's easy and it's fast and I can shed this shit I don't care about and we can understand one another again. It would've scared me once, but it doesn't now.
We can touch a hundred ways, and it's easy now, as much as it was easy for you to turn to waterfall into Tinkerbell and wait with your arms crossed for my fucking applause.
When I give it to you, it's with the sole intention of wiping out all which came before this moment, in an attempt to give you everything I have within me. You, and just you. I have a war name for you. I have a cold rag for you. I have an idea to make this better. I have a stick of gum in my pocket. I have a way out. I have a way in. I have nothing. I have something.
Somewhere, an old war is being waged between right and wrong. Dylan and Brenda are breaking up again. Angels dance on pinheads, and little girls get ripped from nightmares with vicious claws.
Adam descends the basement stairs, Brad resumes his work on a song, Clyde examines the metal contraption he's built in the backyard, Dean executes a pirouette in the dance studio, Drama hits his teeth with the butt of a ballpoint pen, Grady dips his hands into black water near the swamp, John rolls over and covers his ears, Joshua responds to a text, Matthew pours his coffee onto the tracks, Nick throws his shoes into the corner.
Nothing preceded this moment. Nothing.
Hello, I love you, welcome home.
There is no sound quite like the sound of the two of us crashing our house into the side of a world we don't understand. It makes a ripple in a flat pond, breaking hot the glass of our globe, smashing the fruit stall to wooden pulp, pushing little mountains up where the tension became to great.
Clyde split his lip, and threw Punkinbucket into reverse hard enough to ruin the gearbox and decimate the transmission because he likes to be part of the choir. That must've been why he peeled out of the parking lot of our apartment the other day - so we'd know the smell of him ejecting from a reality. Burning, summery, black, dragon.
He does all these stupid things for love.
I don't know how many times we've made this sound, and I don't know how many times Clyde's ruined that fucking car. I don't know, and have never known, where the beginning of our lives ought to be, or when to stop, or the point enough becomes enough. I don't know those things, and I've had occasion over the last year to turn that distinctly dragon trait into an angelic one.
See, I used to be afraid of the ash that falls in place of a belief in magic when you've given excuse after excuse after excuse (and by you in this example, I obviously mean me). Where things run out. Where hearts give out. Where my hypocrisy bends over backward to your isolation. Scars run the length of the Wasteland we built, moved into, celebrated, inhabited, and ultimately mapped by finding the edges which border it lined with living fur and the sound of Adam's laugh.
You know, the things which are the same as pigs flying.
I can feel you right now, even though this is hours or possibly days before you'll set your eyes on this letter, wondering who I am talking to you, and writing these expressions that you find boyish and possibly even a fumbling attempt to be charming or anticipate your reaction.
We got good at doing those things, while we were at war in the Wasteland. Reading our facets of self that prism rapid and unstoppable, as good as we got at freezing them to non-existence. Traversing places of lost time and meaning, fast as a Rolodex and just as obsolete, we flipped past that which we didn't want to see as if we were skipping whole sections of a book we've already read or a movie we've already seen to find out if we could push the tape just a little bit further this time, and let the pages fill in themselves again.
I used to be afraid of those scars, coated light with the falling snow of a detonated bomb that was Brad's handiwork; his final and cynical contribution when his eyes cloud the same as Matthew's. I'm not now because I can see there is no difference in this place or any other. We're together, where the magic is collecting like rocks in water, and our perseverance in beliefs doesn't matter.
It's easy n
Hey.
It's easy now, Mercy. I can move my shoulder upward in an idle stretch and stare down the giddy prom-night couple across from us on the M. It's easy and it's fast and I can shed this shit I don't care about and we can understand one another again. It would've scared me once, but it doesn't now.
We can touch a hundred ways, and it's easy now, as much as it was easy for you to turn to waterfall into Tinkerbell and wait with your arms crossed for my fucking applause.
When I give it to you, it's with the sole intention of wiping out all which came before this moment, in an attempt to give you everything I have within me. You, and just you. I have a war name for you. I have a cold rag for you. I have an idea to make this better. I have a stick of gum in my pocket. I have a way out. I have a way in. I have nothing. I have something.
Somewhere, an old war is being waged between right and wrong. Dylan and Brenda are breaking up again. Angels dance on pinheads, and little girls get ripped from nightmares with vicious claws.
Adam descends the basement stairs, Brad resumes his work on a song, Clyde examines the metal contraption he's built in the backyard, Dean executes a pirouette in the dance studio, Drama hits his teeth with the butt of a ballpoint pen, Grady dips his hands into black water near the swamp, John rolls over and covers his ears, Joshua responds to a text, Matthew pours his coffee onto the tracks, Nick throws his shoes into the corner.
Nothing preceded this moment. Nothing.
Hello, I love you, welcome home.
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