Sleep and Tenderness

Preface: The threat of tragedy is what makes a romance significant.  Without the risk torn open by vulnerability, love would be without gravity.  You must risk something that matters.

Sleep 

I awake trembling to the scent of lily-white love.  The sun is surreptitiously streaming in through narrow glints that sneak past the heavy opaqueness of the drapes.  But it provides no warmth.  I can't stop shaking, even beneath the leaden blankets.  I cautiously, meticulously, move to my left, towards this monolith of heat on the far side of the bed.  He's so comfortingly warm; he's almost glowing.  I burrow and nestle my way in, eradicating any discernible space between, the contours of our bodies paralleling consummately.  Within minutes the heat magnifies to an unbearably beautiful pain, searing my skin at all contacts.  I endure as long as a physically can, to bathe in it; I'd just as soon stay there forever, but my body is red-hot with fire.  Fuck it, I think.  Let it engulf me in flames.  I want to feel that magnificent burst, that instantaneous powerful flash.  An event horizon.  The only stripe of white light to be seen in the piceous and necrotic universe.  I know not who breaks first, but I find myself staring at the opposite wall, huddled in a pitiful ball, soon enough.

I love the way he looks in the morning.  So genuine, so raw, so human.  Unspoiled by the rigors of the ensuing day.  His eyes, so brilliantly blue, are oceanic, with hypnotizing tidepools of aureated gold; chiaroscuroed tactilely against the freckled and sunken-in nature of his surface.  It hurts my heart to see him drip with insincerity and feigned pretension.  But the world demands it, or seemingly so.  His subjects eat it up like candy, leaving nothing but spent wrappers in its wake.  I want the goofy guy with the bullhorn, wearing my viking helmet, dancing around in his thick socks and fleece cargo pants.  That's the man of my dreams.  That's the man.  The man too busy living and loving to care what anyone thinks.  Wholly himself, genuine and selfless, innocent and understanding.  Courageous in his sincerity.  Real.  Alive.

If we are who we pretend to be then a frightening reality awaits.  So most people choose not to wake up.  They just keep pretending.  The more involved we get, the deeper I fall, the more I feel like I was sent to him for some specific purpose.   The universe continues our course, despite the obvious and more cunning diversions.  For better or for worse, I love him.  I can't help it.  Embracing the vulnerability eases the fear, somewhat.   The make-or-break point came and went and I was left in the lurches of love, with less of a choice in the matter.  But there's a thin line between devotion and chump.  But it's simpler to just fall all the way down the rabbit hole.  To live in a twisted dream where everything is sutured by love.

I'm almost in tears when recalling the strange and vivid dreams of the previous night.  I dreamt a before and after dream, but they are out of order.  I dream the after first: A little boy, maybe three or so sits at a picnic table with a few presumable friends some sunny afternoon.  His eyes are so brightly blue, with those familiar gold flecks.  Shaggy blond hair falls into his labyrinthine eyes and he smiles the most heart-melting smile, with a mouthful of adorably crooked baby teeth.  He's drinking out of a miniature glass, like a shot glass.  He's seated next to the little boy, almost uncomfortably.  The little boy I suddenly realize is mine and there are tears in my eyes.  He pours something into the little boy's glass and the little boy says, "I love you, Daddy," to which he can't help but soften.  I've never felt happiness like the happiness I felt in that dream.  Cut to a party a few years earlier, this strange woman won't stop asking him about having kids.  At which point, he gets mad at me for whatever reason.  I respond by saying I wasn't the one bringing this up, so don't take it out on me.  This sets him off on a ten-minute harangue about how he doesn't want kids because he's got so much going on career-wise.

I'm taken back to the present, to the intensity of the morning, when our bodies entangle like thorned vines in the twilight dimension between dream and reality, between consciousness and sleep, between cognition and emotion.  The only time I breathe in deep and securely.  "Sleep and tenderness, that's all I need," he says.  It sounds like a vaguely familiar song lyric.  I feel incredible.  All I need is to live right here in his arms.

Tenderness

I've never seen a human being so content before.  That look of sheer ebullience.  I'll never forget it.  I never want to.  It made me euphoric.  I was filled with pure delectation.  I'm tired of living in fear, waiting for it all to fall apart, missing out on even the lightest moments.  Constantly trying to fortress my emotions for fear of getting my heart ripped out.  I was so scared to fall again, I superficially cursed love, but never really believing it.  I wanted it more than anything.  And I was finally open to it, but when the going gets tough, old habits tend to die hard.  To my credit, certain fears were justified, but they took over.  They ran amok, Lord of the Flies style.  My pride or more aptly my survival mechanism masquerading itself of pride refused to allow me to do the things I so longed to do.  I longed to touch him, live in the sanctuary of his arms, tell him I love him a thousand times a day, which still wouldn't have been near enough.  I wanted to pine for him while away and dream he was doing the same.  I just wanted to love him, nothing else, but I don't have a balanced middle ground.  It's either all love, all the time, or I shut down.  I play the nonplussed, too-cool, don't-need-anyone, icy, sanctimonious loner.  The dictatoress, the one no one can touch.  The one that escapes into her head, instead of her heart. Where she truly belongs.  She dismisses all of mankind with a smug wave of hand.  But that negates the other half.  The undiluted lover, the self-less nurturer, born to make a man happy, even at her own expense.  She does need him.

Sometimes, I wonder if my clothes dictate my mood or my mood dictates my dress.  When I dress provocatively, I feel powerful.  I feel like I have something to lord over the men that leer and molest me, both past and present.  I am now in control instead of them.  They relinquish control as they are occupied reeling their tongues up off the floor.  It's simple misdirection.  Sex is an easy disguise.  No one gets to the sweet nature.  No one gets to the vulnerability.  They don't get the privilege of the real me, as if that's some great prize.   But it's all I have.  It's something to me, my core.  What was it I saw in those piercing eyes that chilly winter night?  It was as if only his eyes existed in the incandescence.  Just these floating orbs of cerulean light dancing and flickering their way to me.  They made what paltry breath I had left catch in my throat.  My heart sputtered and stalled.  Trying so hard to look slick, but his eyes betrayed him.  I saw right through, so glassine, they were.  It was as though each man I met over those nine months, were another premonition or hint at him.  Because something about each one of them wasn't quite right.  "I'll give you the nickel tour," he said.  It all felt so real, so unbelievably authentic, overwhelmingly so.  I never stopped for a moment to think that he might be insincere, using canned and rehearsed lines.  It was genuine to me, everything I felt, the whirlwind I'd searched for slapping across my flushed cheek.  Slamming like a neglected shutter as the hurricane raged through.  That night, that second night, after he came over and then left so abruptly.  I didn't know what to think. All I knew is that I was choking without him.  I couldn't breathe.  I was left feeling so empty.  I decided right then, that no matter what, no matter the bruise to my pride, I had to know whether or not is was as real as I felt it to be.  I figured it could go either way, completely fifty-fifty, but at least I would have settled the matter, so I could start breathing again,  however shallow and asthmatic the breaths.  It turned out in favor of, the universe working its cosmic voodoo once more.  I chalked up all the strangeness to fear and uncertainty; letting the disingenuousness wash out to sea.  I know I saw something luminous and fragile in that first second, it was only after that the posturing came into focus. But by then, it mattered not.  He just kept staring at me with no regard for decorum.  I found it incredibly infuriating and interminably sexy.  Of course I wasn't going to just let him stare without me staring right back.  But to his credit, he didn't look away much.  We kept our eyes locked on each other.  I remember saying to myself, "Who is this guy?" In part to ask, "Who does this guy think he is?" And in part because, God damn it, I had to know.  Once I laid my eyes on him, I knew I never wanted to stop. It took all I had to look away coquettishly; a patented move.  The repartee was ridiculously wry and tense.  Dripping with deadly serious innuendo.  The air was thick for being so dream-like.  It was all happening so fast.  There was no time to think, but then again enough time had passed already.  Thinking wouldn't have done much good anyway.  Primitive and visceral emotions were in total control.  I wasn't playing any game, despite the lethal roll of the dice.  I knew I was too eager, but so was he, so what did it matter?  "Can I just kiss you now?"  My heart was as fully realized as the low-slung moon that hung in the obsidian sky that night, casting the same eerie grey shadows of arcane romance.  It was never the smoothness that turned me on, that attracted me; it was the roughness.  The missteps, the weirdness, the goofy smiles, the stumbled-over speech, the lisp of a radiant heart.  The flaws he would never let others see, that's what I fell in love with.  When all the swagger and ego and oily cons drained away, what was left was so rich in beauty, so purified in sweetness, so distilled in innocence.  The innocence of a child filled with innocuous thoughts of model airplanes and catching frogs, and being tucked in at night.

Love is the only thing that matters.  When I turn away from love, for whatever reason, be it insecurity, paranoia, fear; my life commences to crumble and erode.  What motivates us to cower in fear, despite knowing better?  You have to risk something that matters.  Anything less is a waste of time and talent.  Anything worth anything is difficult.  For if it came easy, one could never appreciate it fully. And appreciation is the medium to lasting happiness.  Materialism , corporate culture, greed, all feed the beastly Cerberus.  The Tao says by quelling desire for these frivolities, we remove all reason for crime; crime of law or crime of spirit.  Coveting leads to the world's worst ills.  Why can't we just be happy with the things we already have?  What is this motivation for more?  It is never enough, so you can never stop.  The snake that eats his tail.  Materialism leads only to human objectification.  And inanimate objects can never fill the void of love.  Dissatisfaction only begets more dissatisfaction.  We are supposed to do our work and forget about it, according to Tao.  We are not to wait around for praise or exaltation.  The lure of  success is a tempting Siren, but it is a hollow endeavor.  It only lures man astray.  If we sync into the peaceful flow of the universe, we will have peace.  To paddle upriver is an exciting, but foolish errand. Peace and excitement are at direct odds with one another.  Lasting happiness is bore from peace, not excitement.  We need only food, water, and companionship to survive, not cars or phones or computers.  But yet working towards these materialisms is not only acceptable, but lauded under the guise of "success" or "drive" or worst of all "high culture."  I often dream of living in a hunter/gatherer society where everyone has their specific and necessary role to fill for the survival of the community.  You get a sense of self-satisfaction whilst contributing to the greater good.  The world is wrought with takers and only a handful of givers, read:suckers.  It's hard to balance basic human decency (assuming such a sentiment exists) with not being a mark.  It's a basic tenet of survival.  Take advantage when you can.  But there are those recherche few that embody altruism.  One-offs from the species, I suppose.

I smile at a shuffling old man passing by my table.  His weathered, but kind face lights up with a stretched and contorted smile.  He waves and I feel good.  It's these seemingly inane interactions that fill my spirit.  "I'm so happy to come home to you," he chokes out.  Is it raw emotion that makes him sputter?  He shakes me up, flips me upside-down.  I burn for the waves of his intensity to wash over me.  He keeps me taut with these currents of electricity sparking and coursing through my synapses.  I've never had what I wanted so dangerously close at hand before.  It makes for a strange and presumably poisonous cocktail, albeit an interesting one.

Post Script: If we are who we pretend to be (See Vonnegut's Mother Night), then we are just that.  Pretenders.  If we pretend to be smooth, or pretend to be cool, pretend to be callous, all that makes us are phonies.  Fakes. Prevaricators.  Nothing more. But what of those who refuse to pretend? Ah. For another time.

State of Affairs or Photosynthesis of Pain

What makes my brain run the way it does?  Strange mechanisms at work.  Beyond my conscious control most of the time.  Universally-leaning.  That metaphysical riddle for me to unscramble.  The great cosmic joke just waiting on the punchline.  Perhaps eternally.  A girl cannot live on tragic romance alone.  Not at all, really.  She needs real nourishment, actual physical affection, something vitamin-rich and soul-satiating.  Something to build a real life on.  Not just some novelistic fantasy a la Sylvia Plath.  Maudlin and bathetic are just fucking fine for a far away recollection of a past life, but it can never sustain a present.  With absolutely no hope for a future.  That's why so many writers are alcoholic suicide cases.  Tragedy is their only currency.  It's their most sacred creative catalyst. Pain is the rawest, most unfiltered emotion to drive the pen.  Everything boils down to pain.  Active avoidance or fervent seeking.  There are  too many pitfalls to morbid curiosity, the by-product of sadomasochism.  I continue to punish myself.  The ultimate sadomasochist.  I have to be the best at absolutely everything, don't I?  A perfect sadomasochist.  Karma is an interesting mistress.  People are so quick to attribute positive events to their own hard work or more likely their sense of entitlement, feeling they deserve good things, as if someone is up there doling them out to the worthy.  I suppose the exercise of free will can get things rolling in one direction or the other, but success and status is pretty much luck of the draw, deeming success and status seeking behaviors worthless endeavors.  It is an illusory and antiquated notion that one can achieve their "dreams" or "goals" or what-have-you simply by old-fashioned hard work and perseverance.  It's a business model dreamt up by the Walt Disneys of the world, a childish notion that good things come to the good and the bad guys eventually get their come-uppance.  If only the wheels of justice moved so swiftly.  And more importantly this internalization of positive events is completely socially acceptable, encouraged even.  But for as quick as people are to internalize positive life events, they are even quicker to externalize negative outcomes.  Not many want to attribute adverse events to their own nefarious actions or sinister thoughts.  And those few that do are considered mentally disturbed.  Only the neurotic, emotionally-scarred headcases, like me, internalize negative events, as part of our self-inflicted internal torture regimen.  For which we are sent to doctor upon doctor and given pill after pill.  Why can't you just self-medicate to the level of functionality like the rest of the world?  We neurotics have far too many emotions to handle; they seep out in dysfunctional gloops.  Glop-gloop.  Glop-gloop.  It oozes.  Glop-gloop.  As it starts to pool around my toes in a stinking, sewage-ridden blob.  Full of love and pain; it festers.  The flies begin to buzz about the bubbling muck.  Soon the rats want their cut.  It turns gangrenous and necrotic as it further putrefies and Stilton-like veins of mold form across the surface.  What evolutionary purpose does it serve?  Our we simply evolutionary defectives?  One-offs from the species?  Or are we the pinnacle?  Evolution run amok, taken to its breaking point.  The limb finally snapping under the psychotic weight.  The brain has evolved beyond its own good.  It's forsaken itself.  Much like man discovering nuclear power.  It's grown too big for it's britches.  There is no suitable containment.  So out pours neuroses.  Even selective breeding has done the same.  Whole industries were born out of the neuroses of domesticated animals, dog psychologists, horse whisperers.  Do we just see ourselves in these animals or is it over-evolution striking again?  Dolphins, elephants or great apes in the wild seem to suffer as well.  Anything with any higher functioning or advanced brain capacity seems to develop emotional problems.  Mo' brain, mo' pain is as a succinctly and flippantly as I can convey.  Vonnegut's big brain hypothesis seems totally credible (see Galapagos).  Horse-shoe crabs have made it millions of years because they never outgrew their reproductive purpose.  There wasn't anything to think about.  In fact, I've never seen nary a horseshoe crab on a therapist's couch.  But we'll blow them all to hell soon enough, nonetheless.

Yet negative emotions persist.  Melancholy, anger, guilt fear.  What purpose do they serve?  I find myself asking time and time again.  One purpose that guilt and fear serve is to forbid me from living like a crazy person.  That's something.  It keeps me in check; guilt and fear are life's cattle fencing.  Keeping me in the pasture, for some semblance of a life.  Some semblance of morality, some semblance of happiness.  Of a life that other people seem to lead.  My head is full of these little snapshots of what a happy life looks like: a young couple picnic-ing under the shade of a grand oak on a sunny spring afternoon, a grandfatherly figure carving a picturesque Thanksgiving turkey with a big, shiny knife with even bigger, shinier eyes, a child blowing out the birthday candles on his billowy white-frosted cake against a backdrop of cheering adults, an incandescently lit Christmas tree littered with meticulously wrapped packages, while a fireplace roars beneath a mantle dotted with handmade stockings. Fireworks exploding overhead in the July heat, illuminating the faces of delighted children sitting cross-legged on an oversized red and white checkered blanket, or an elderly couple holding hands as they meander down a rust and gold leafed path, smiling at each other after all these years, relishing each satisfying crunch underfoot.  This is my foolish, nostalgic, black-and-white movie, Rockwell-ian, Americana idea of happiness.  Anything less than that seems meaningless and trite.  Silly, I know.  I wonder if anyone else, like say under the age of 75, feels that way.  Should I even care about fulfilling such a specific and ridiculous dream?  Probably not, but yet I hold out some bantam shred of hope.  Pervasive idealism is hard to deal with on a day-to-day basis.  So few understand.  No one understands fully.  I've given up on being understood fully.  But damn, I've been close.  God, it was so beautiful and harmonious once.  I could almost taste it.  It was powerful, more powerful than either one of us was prepared to deal with.   I know it scared him.  Fuck, it sure scared me.  It all changed in an instant, without warning.  One omniscient look, the locking of eyes across a crowded room, that's all it took to seal our fate.  The universe smiled between us.  Poetically succinct.  The rest of the world needed not exist in that determining moment.  There was only us, perfectly in sync.  We had it all right there, in the lavender-scented, apricot-hued effulgence.  Just the right amount of sweat and passion.  An overwhelming amount of love.  My heart ached and lurched.  I trembled.  He trembled.  Tears welled in my eyes, but they refused to fall.  For it was too wonderful a moment for even a touch of sadness.  It was the most right I've ever felt.  The universe whole-heartedly approved.  The universe smiled between us.  His heart pounding out of his blond-grey lined chest.  My fingertips dancing lovingly among the brush.  I lived to count the freckles on his arms as they wrapped around me.  Never wanting to be freed from the prison of his love.  I'm a hopeless case, I suppose.  Anyone professional with any sense has already moved on to more receptive patients.  More often than not, instead of his arms, I'm locked in the padded cell of my macabre sadomasochism.   Never letting go of the moonlit memories.  The oxidization of brass leaving a rust-colored stain on my barely-beating heart.  Never to be cleansed of his sad, watery-blue eyes.  The way his mouth curves over his teeth to form the slightest lisp.  Jesus, that barely perceptible, sweet, inescapable lisp.  I had forgotten how strong a narcotic love can be.  God, the exquisite, immeasurable, insufferable pain I longed for.  La doleur exquise, my darling.  You have to die of something.  What better than love?  Real gut-wrenching, blood-boiling, mind-bending, vomit-inducing love.  The hardest drug of all.  The one you just can't quit.  There is no rehabilitation.  Diamond-strength, nuclear-powered, surface-of-the-sun, hotter than the hinges of hell kind of love.  That's where true addiction lies.  Addiction for the emotionally flaggellistic.  Drugs for the cerebral cutter.  I want to see those hot streaks of crimson flash onto my porcelain flesh, so tight and supple with youth, yet slashed and burned with the cynicism of experience.  I've lived a thousand lifetimes in my head.  I want to wear my wounds like badges; pin them to my uniform as commendations.  Survival commendations.  People should take more pride in what they've survived.  Those are the ones who should be rewarded by that great wheel of chance.  Look what I've been through and yet I managed to drag myself out of bed!  I have yet to jump in front of a train.  Let's celebrate!  An un-suicide party.  I didn't put a gun in my mouth today! Where's the limbo pole?  Congratulations, you made it another pain-soaked day without pulling a rifle on a random crowd of people.  Kudos, man!  You didn't go kill-crazy; here's a gift certificate to Crate & Barrel.  Treat yourself to a couple of those really fancy throw pillows to take your rage out on.  You deserve it! Positive reinforcement works.  A crooked and stretched smile is forming across B. F. Skinner's corpse somewhere in the depths.

What is happiness without pain, anyway?  How can we appreciate light without shadow?  How can one discern warmth without first experiencing frost?  If good exists, so follows evil.  Everything has its natural opposite.  Positive and negative charges.  To live in the neutral is not to live at all.  I want to experience the full range of human emotions.  Why was I given them to experience otherwise?  What is their purpose?  Surely, it's not just to keep Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline lining their pockets.  It does follow that that is one reason negative emotions are frowned upon, for as long as they are condemned, the patients will continue to pop their pills, so those yachts can stay afloat and those jets stay in the air.  Why is anesthetization so much more socially acceptable than experiencing negative emotions?  Medication, be it self, or prescribed just perpetuates and prolongs the cycle of pain.  It pettifogs the brain, so you can't intellectualize or rationalize the problem for any lasting relief.  It only temporarily treats the symptoms without attacking the cause.  If you allow yourself to feel the naturally-occurring emotion, you can confront it head-on, and work through.  That takes true courage, and it's wholly honest.  There is no need for delusion.  And self-medication only works for as long as you swallow it.  All that pain floods right back the second the drug dissipates, therefore you take another hit, and another, and another, until there is nothing but that ever-fleeting drug-induced stupor.  All you've done is kill time, at best.  At worst, you've killed yourself or any remaining facsimile of it.

People really loathe sanctimony.  Especially when it contains a grain of truth.  No one likes to be held up to the light.  They aren't the beautiful prisms they purport themselves to be. They are ugly, contorted, self-absorbed, fungus-covered, swarthy, volcanic rock.  No one ever likes what they see in that mirror.  It's hard to stomach a cold, hard look at yourself.  Where are those redeeming qualities you thought you possessed?  Just another middle-of-the-road, unremarkable, terrible asshole.  Barely a memory.  No one wants to be a dime-a-dozen kind of chap, but someone has to be.  Delusion is the opiate of the masses.  It makes the world go round.  Otherwise, I guess we all would be lying in mental hospitals getting shock treatments.  There are a few sapphires of existence, but they are rare, exceedingly so.  They twist and writhe and push themselves for the sake of others, for some greater good, but to no tangible reward.  Most often to their detriment.  These tragic, genuine, beautiful creatures are the only unsung.  Justice is propaganda.  You know why some people punish themselves?  Because the world is terrible.  It's full of terrible things; hate, murder, evil.  And some poor sap has to absorb and process those terrible things.  Emotional migrant workers.  There is no landfill for pain.  It has to go somewhere.  The photosynthesis of pain is a necessary torture.  Without it, how would the rest of us breathe?  The sun shines for thee.

Must Have Been a Train That Took Me Away From Here, But It's a Train That Will Take Me Home: A playlist for the dying romance of the rails.

   The once majestic and gilded splendor of these smoking monoliths, chugging people to and from their grandiose dreams in romantic scenes of uniformed men hauling steamer trunks and put-together ladies in wide-brimmed hats carrying leather train cases in their dainty lace-gloved hands waving goodbye and blowing kisses out of the half window as they train slowly pulls out of the station, have been replaced with utilitarian steel boxcars covered in scrawled neon graffiti, moving lodes of nondescript cargo and only coming to mind when stuck behind one at a dwindling railroad crossing.  I always look down the line with a faraway look and my pulse beats a little faster when I can make out that old Union Pacific logo on one of the passing cars.  In a full-throttle society, the public's patience wears thin in front of the clanging bell and flashing red light.  But a shred of grandeur remains with the train; their sheer power, the blaring cacophony. There is something unmistakably nostalgic and even utterly American about the train. The amount of train songs in existence is exhausting, even in the face of the train's fade into obscurity and relic-hood.  So here's a half-hearted attempt at throwing some of them together in a quasi-coherent manner.   Dreams die quietly without hope and adrenaline.  Here's to gaining a little momentum in our coal-fueled daydreams and because sometimes you just want to take the first thing smokin' the hell out of town.  It must have been a train that took me away from here and a train can bring me home...

Tom Waits- Train Song


Willie Nelson- City of New Orleans


William Elliot Whitmore- Lift My Jug


Woody Guthrie- Hobo's Lullaby


Jimmie Rodgers- Waiting for a Train


Arlo Guthrie- Last Train to Glory


The Flying Burrito Brothers- The Train Song





Steve Earle- Mystery Train Part 2


Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee- Rock Island Line


Bob Marley- This Train is Bound for Glory/Guava Jelly


Downbound Train- Chuck Berry


The Impressions- People Get Ready


Spike Driver's Blues- Mississippi John Hurt


Lonnie Johnson- Long Black Train


Leadbelly- Alabama Bound


Charley Pride- Atlantic Coastal Line


Johnny Cash- Orange Blossom Special


Woody Guthrie- Little Black Train


Hank Williams Sr.- Lonesome Whistle


Roy Acuff- Freight Train Blues


Boxcar Willie- Old Train Song Medley  (Some bang for your buck.)


Jerry Jeff Walker- Desperadoes Waiting for a Train


Hank Williams Sr.- The Devil's Train


Townes Van Zandt- Wabash Cannonball/Fraulein


Tom Waits- Down There By The Train

One for the Road

Another unfinished, partial-fiction, stream of consciousness written in third person to distance herself from the gut-wrenching content written some time ago.

She sat back on her haunches, huddled in the pseudo-industrial bathroom, trying not to touch anything. What the he'll was she doing? She couldn't keep her mind off of him, those few sultry  summer nights, the heat so intense they would both awake drenched in the most delicious sweat. That stupid Mohawk. Thank god for it. If he didn't have it, chances are she would have done something foolish, much sooner anyway. She could barely breathe as her fingers deftly scrolled to her intention. It was now or never, she knew, but she wondered if he did. Just pick up, you asshole, she thought as her heart raced to the ringing tone. The door to whatever semblance of a relationship or what-could-have-been was rapidly swinging to a close.  Of course it was his voicemail. Why did she even bother with this nonsense? Everything was always on his terms, she always acquiesced with him. He made her weak. Weak with desire, longing, weak with love. His azure eyes swirling and churning as the saline sea, that damn glint, as if the sun had a direct line. The slight lisp on his speech, like an adolescent wearing a much-maligned retainer. The ways his clothes hung ever so slightly large on his substantial frame. God, the way he looked in v-necks. That patch of blonde-grey hair, the way it sprung and wound around her fingers when she tugged at it. She couldn't get the slight-watery image of his eyes out of her mind. Why did he have to have such comedic timing? It's like he knows every time she is happy, and he swoops his tomahawk self in to throw a beautiful, romantic wrench into everything. To cast doubts and make her second guess. She shouldn't entertain such thoughts, but as the nights came on, she couldn't escape them. They crept in. He crept in. "you've got ten minutes to call me back fucker, it's now or never kid. This ain't a joke anymore." she didn't know whether she wanted him to call or not, as some of the fervor was draining out of her system.  She just needed a little fix, something to tide her over for a while. Just the inflection in his voicemail would do for now. This stupid lunch idea. Why was he obsessed with lunch? If only lunch could last forever, she knew which one she would pick. she was so close to saying "meet me, noon tomorrow, at our place," but something stopped her. Common decency, perhaps? Doubtful. What was it that stopped her? Was it love?  Devotion? Half a brain?  A taste of his own medicine?  There was something comforting about the red  battery light flashing in the corner of her device. It made her choice a little easier, she wouldn't have to employ her typical cognitive dissonance. What the hell made her even do it?  Seeing his mother didn't help. Rereading the frantic and obsessive messages certainly didn't either. She wanted to feel something harsh though. Something to contrast the marshmallow dream she had landed in. She wasn't used to such harmony. She thrived on chaos and pain because that's all she knew. Her defense mechanisms had no time card to punch any longer, she felt she was losing her edge, thankfully, but she had grown so accustomed, it felt foreign and naked. Maybe she was just looking for an excuse, something to order her world back to it's upside-down state. Because thinking back on when she first read that message, she didn't feel much. It grew more rose-tinted as the days and nights floated by. Was it just simple anxiety? Plain old fear, brought on by having this perfect picture,  perched so deliberately upon the mantle, smashed to the ground by past demons. Was that dream and that day the beginning of this?  It stands to reason. But the epiphany that night morning, what of that?  She cried and thought of Mabel. She felt her, she felt she was in the right place,

Bukowski Loved to Bet the Horses

An unfinished stream of consciousness from a while back.  A few notes: full moon, freak magnetism at cartoonish level, interrupted by some drunk and tragic asshole.  Come to think of it, when am I not...

Bukowski loved to bet the horses.  Who is this man I put my money on?  All in. No safety net this time. You have to risk something that matters, but I risked it all on this absolute stranger. This stoic half dork, half stone cold fox. Dual natures the both of us. Living in a dream can quickly turn nightmarish. On a dime. I'm not looking for problems keeps echoing in my head. Maybe I am manufacturing them instead. Passive-aggressive is my nature. It satisfies my two halves, simultaneously. Ive always been a gambler at heart, for it is my legacy, but I let it all ride this time. Seventeen red. My whole stack. Everything I have.  I do mean everything both tangible and in. Maybe, I'm the one clawing at the freshly dug Earth. Maybe it's just fear's time to set in. To confuse and upset my happiness. Last week was too trying for the beginning. It threw a monkey wrench in the whole machine. I want to scream or cry or kill or smother myself with a fluffed pillow of my own design. I feel kill-crazy. My hands around a throat. Hands around my throat. Clutching, choking, squeezing the last ounces of life out of me. Do I feel it or am I dead already?  Is this dream really just a novacaine induced coma? Or is this what life tastes like?  What happens to the boy who gets everything he ever wanted? Does he really live happily ever after? Or does he live some illusion, some hologram of happiness? never to see his true reflection again. A delusion. Bukowski was onto something with this red wine drinking, I'll tell you that. I feel more open and ungated than I've ever felt. There are no inhibitions to work around. There are literally no cares to hinder the process. Fuck it. Fuck them if they can't take a joke. Fuck them if they don't understand me or my writing. Or if they can't separate my writer's persona from the real person, if there is a discernment to be had. It remains unclear. It's just a facet of me. The chameleon, the super-empathizer. Highly suggestible to the intense emotional lives of the living. Never quite knowing where the empathy ends and my soul begins. What is the percentage of evil. Is it constant or does it change? Which side will eventually win out?  I fear the nefarious always does. I wrote about past demons of others today, but what of my present demons?  They are not as far away as I would like. But they also keep me sharp like a knife steel. Like pull my emotions taut so they can be plucked and manipulated onto the page and smeared into my waking life. Like dripping, pungent and intense oil pigments on a freshly-stretched piece of gesso-ed linen. The gobs of color cling to the canvas with a tenacious fervor unmatched by any other paint. There is no running. Just streaks of madness across the mind, pressed so hard it leaves indentations on the other side. Can life be the dizzying and frenetic abstract that my mind dictates and the Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post drawing of my heart?  More like an oddly colored and slanted post-impressionistic landscape of my soul. I knew the lightning rod of freakishness was at full strength this afternoon, much to my relief, but perhaps to others chagrin. It fuels my writing, my honest, real, but seedy writing, but at what cost? Can the honest writer ever be happy? It doesn't appear to be if past precedent is to be believed. Hemingway, Tennessee, Bukowski, they all suffered, suffered not because of their art, but suffered because their neuroticism allowed them to create art. It is a by-product of madness. A worthwhile symptom of the disease. The only solace. The only solace afforded to the neurotic, hysterical, emotionally blessed/cursed writer. What a fucking night. I'm b

We Bury Our Dead 'Round Here

The old grey farm cat finally died that last frozen winter's night.  The temperature dropped too low to sustain another beleaguered breath.  They found the frozen, calcified mass under the porch steps the next morning.  Just a hint of a once-vital tail stuck out to barely signal its petrified presence.  It was rigid, as if bronzed, and curled into the smallest ball it could manage for any paltry amount of warmth.  The ground was too solid to bury it, so they figured they might as well take it down to the creek and let the icy current do what it willed.

The big farmer bagged up the gelid feline he once held a moody affection for and with his ominous black rubber Hunter boots and fur-lined parka, he marched the mile down to the creek at his wife's insistence.  The farmer's wife never did care much for cats, even if they did catch the pester-some mice that scurried about the farm.  The way they slunk and crept along so stealthily; she didn't trust them.  They seemed wicked and maniacal, always plotting something nefarious behind those shifty, marbled eyes.  She especially hated that old grey cat.  It never seemed quite right.  It lurked and stared at her, as if it knew a deep, dark secret.  It gave her an uneasy feeling whenever it slithered by. She was glad to be rid of it, once and finally.  She smoothed her apron in relieved satisfaction and went back to frying up the fresh-cut bacon for breakfast.

The big farmer finally reached the creek on that bitterly cold, overcast morning.  It was frozen over, of course, but he figured if he trudged down the bank a bit, covered it with a thick mound of snow, it would be, but a hazy memory by the spring thaw.  He found a suitable enough plot for his once-beloved pet, but he only felt the cold of the day and a maybe a touch of pity.  He packed the snow around the corpse tightly enough to pay reverence, said a quick prayer and began his trek back up to the bustling farmhouse.  There was plenty of work to be done.

The next morning, the farmer's wife stepped out on the aged, grand porch, with its weathered and paint-stripped planks creaking beneath her boots as it did every morning as she went out to feed the steadfast hound dogs.  As she turned to go back inside, out of the corner of her mahogany eye, she swore she saw a hint of that grey tail.  She skeptically, but cautiously peered over the flaking white of the railing.  Sure enough, there was a grey tail peaking out beneath the well-worn steps.  Son of a bitch.  Another dead cat, she thought.  She called for her husband.  His imposing frame begrudgingly lumbered toward the door, mumbling some low, agitated grumble.  The concern written all over her face stopped his knee-jerk crankiness mid-sentence.  He swung open the screen, still in his long johns and looked in the direction of his wife's disquieted eyes.  He swallowed hard and audibly.  What the bloody hell?  He stomped over to confirm his fears.  That wasn't just another dead farm cat.  That was the same dead farm cat.  He thought it best not to tell his wife of this revelation.  "Yep, honey, it's another dead farm cat.  I'll take it down down to the creek with the other one.  One hell of a harsh winter.  You get back inside and finish up breakfast."
She wondered if he knew it was the same dead cat. Her hands trembled as she cracked the eggs into the bowl.

The big farmer pulled on his old black boots and parka, once again, to make his way down to the creek with his old friend.  His mind reeled that mile down.  How in the hell did that damned cat make it back up to the house?  Did one of the dogs dig it up and drag it back?  It was possible.  That must have been it.  He convinced himself.  Or maybe it wasn't quite dead?  He pushed that thought out of his mind as strode to the burial site.  The snow was built up a bit across from the ash-white birch where he had placed it.  He dug down further and piled even more snow atop, mounded close to three feet high.  This time, he didn't feel quite so numb, he felt edgy, almost frightened, but not quite.  He recalled the day the old cat ran away.  Shot off down the road one spring afternoon, after some imaginary rodent, no doubt.  He wondered then if it ever would come wandering back, but he wasn't quite sure he wanted it to.  The cat seemed more trouble than it was worth. Sure it would catch a few mice now and then, and snuggle in his lap come evening, but it would howl and cry all night long, scratch and claw at the antique doors, leaving long and irreversible mars upon the wood.  And every once in a while, it would go into a hysterical fit for no apparent reason, only to end up in some precarious predicament, like up the old willow tree or or top of the barn.  And he was left to figure out how the hell to get her down.  The cat was gone for a season or two, but turned up shortly after he wed, scrawny and battered.  His new bride wasn't much a fan of cats, relegating them to out of doors, and he was starting to understand why.  He made his familiar, but addled way back to the looming farmhouse.

Neither one of them slept much that night.  They tossed and turned in their tarnished brass four-poster, but refused to acknowledge the others restlessness.  Before long, the old rooster was crowing from the coop.  It was time to start another morning on the farm.  They both moved a little slower this morning, cautiously, prepensely.

The farmer's wife made her way suspendedly down the groaning staircase to the kitchen.  Her heart rate quickening almost imperceptibly with each descending step.  She didn't want her husband to glimpse her ill-hid trepidation, so she tried to act as naturally as she could muster.  She unlatched the back door as her hands began to bead with sweat against the cold, tarnished knob.  Please don't be there, she thought futilely.  Oh God, don't be there.  She swung open the screen as it lurched and squinked.  She peered out over the railing once more, as her breath caught in her throat.  She called out to her husband.  His stomach dropped through the floor with an accompanying thud.  Fuck.  He knew. But he certainly didn't want to.  He pulled on his boots and parka for what was becoming his daily pilgrammage down to the God-forsaken creek.

This same eerie scene played out for close to a month.  Every morning the same story.  The farmer's wife would espy the frozen grey tail and the big farmer would hike down to the creek with the cat in a bag to mound it under an ever-mountaining pile of snow.  The precipice of frozen precipitation only growing more monolithic and mocking with each passing day.  Anger began to slowly replace the fear and pity once felt.  Each day, the big farmer's face reddening with a touch more rage as he planted each weighty stomp down to the creek.  Spring was almost here and the permafrost would soon melt, the creek would flow again, and then finally, maybe, they would be rid of this.

It was so perfunctory at this point, they hardly acknowledged it anymore.  It was just another part of the morning routine on the farm.  Get up, feed the dogs, find the cat, walk down to the creek, make the breakfast.  The farmer's wife's fear was replaced with exasperation, then quiet acceptance.  She was starting to understand.  Her husband's anger was always quelled by the last bite of breakfast.  They settled back in to their quotidian lives.

It was finally spring, the snow had melted and the ground was softening as winter lifted its thick veil.  There was a lightness about this fresh spring morning.  The sun beamed its uncut, first rays through the filmy windows with a powerful warmth.  The farmer's wife almost half-wondered if that old grey cat would even be under the porch this heavenly morning. Yet there it was, just like every morning.  But the breeze blew warm across the seasoned porch and the fledgling scent of lilac buds filled the crisp morning air.  Something had changed, more than the weather.  The big farmer pulled on his black rubber Hunter boots, but didn't need his parka today.  His lambswool sweater would do on this sun-drenched spring aurora. Swallows perched leisurely on the branches of the antediluvian and elephantine oak to the right of the porch.  They filled the pastoral landscape with their saccharine and untroubled song.  He bagged up the old dead cat, almost jauntily and turned to make his way toward the creek.  But then an odd thought struck him.  He turned to the left and headed toward the barn.  He slid open the hefty wood door.  The hay crunched delightfully under his largish boots.  He got a devilish grin across his normally stoic face.  He spotted the rusty axe leaning against the brown-grey planks of the barn wall, almost immediately, as the streaks of morning light shining through the opposing slats pointed their phosphorescent finger.  He strode casually to it, as if to savor the thought, and grasped the smoothed and sanded handle with deliberate zest.  He grabbed the equally worn spade on his way out of the chiaroscuro-ed barn.  He made his way to the all-too-familiar creek, but walked his way further down to the makeshift bridge; an old board he used to cross the creek at its low point, axe, shovel, and bagged cat in substantial hand.  The creek was free-flowing now, but he had a better idea.  He untied the bag, and dumped the cat into the supposed regenerating field.  He began to dig in the just-yielding earth.  Further and further down he went. Dirt from his spade flew over his shoulder, wildly, fervently.  Just when he thought it deep enough, he dug a few inches further still, clawing at the cool loam and clay with his bare hands now.  He crawled out of the fresh grave and clutched the axe.  He raised it above his dirt-stained, sweat soaked head, the anger built up furiously from all the laborious digging and wasted time.  He was going to actually enjoy this.  A ghoulish and deserved smile formed across his face.  He brought the axe down hard on the rigid feline, severing its head clean off the body.  There wasn't any blood, so it wasn't as satisfyingly gruesome as he had hoped.  He took another swing, not much minding the idea.  He severed the torso in half.  It really was cutting up like a dream.  He was picking up some momentum now; each chop/thud sound so gratifying, propelling the next reinforced swing.  Pretty soon the old grey cat was in a thousand unrecognizable bits of fur and bone.  He looked about the scattered pinkish guts and discolored yellow end-trails with a smug and quenched calmness.  He readily scooped the indistinguishable old grey pulp and carcass morsels up with the spade and tossed them flippantly into the cavernous hole.  After every last scrap was in its plot, he, with seemingly boundless energy, replaced the moist dirt, happily, back from whence it came.  He packed and tamped it down tight and vigorous.  Once finished, he pulled a Marlboro out of his drenched, flannel shirt pocket and smoked it down to a nub. He flicked the butt onto the fresh earth, gathered his tools and muddying lambswool sweater from the dry, cool grass and knew that he would never think about that stupid decaying cat again.

He walked back to the farmhouse, with a lightness to his step instead of his usual leaden plod.  He was filthy and almost laughing.  The farmer's wife saw him striding his way back home from the expansive kitchen window vista.  A cold tingle of relief washed down her clenched spine.  He finally did it, she thought.  She knew he would eventually.  And she was seldom wrong about these things.  Another farmhouse breakfast awaited him.  Back to work, she murmured.  This breakfast wasn't going to make itself.

Garden of Eden or Come Here, Kiddo: A Scattered Continuation

I let the citrus crescent hang just a little too long above my half-cocked lips before I reach for it, camelopardalis-like, with my outstretched tongue.  It slides deliberately down the slickness.  I bite down on it slowly, consciously, only after scraping the white striations against my hard palette as I thrust it with my tongue.  I savor the fleshiness of the fruit as it mashes in between my dentition, allowing the barely-sweet juice to flood the cavern, mixing with my burgeoning saliva.  Within seconds, the luscious flesh and nectar have all but dissolved to hardly a memory.  And all I am left with is the tough, stringy skin to ruminate; my jaw tiring under the tension and torque.  But I refuse another segment until the previous has been swallowed to completion.  Once the fibrous vegetation has been sufficiently ground, I force it down my throat with the tenuous remaining spit.  The catch twenty-two of the mandarin.  It makes me thirst for more.  It lures me in with its succulent aroma and brilliant hue.  The color of the coruscating sun as seen through squinted slits, on the most relucent and cloudless August afternoon.  It hooks me with that first juicy squish of honeyed and toothsome flesh, but it is a decadent trick, an ambrosial ruse, for I am right back in that taunting, cotton-mouthed plight before I realize.  Oh you cursed, lovely, dastardly, beautiful fruit.  Your nefarious seduction is not lost on me.  The real sanctimonious genius of this citrus manipulation lies in the power of its allure. For even knowing this, I still open my mouth and beg for more.
"Come here, kiddo."


When the morose side takes control, there is no stopping its freight train of melancholy and reticence, except to choke and claw my way out.  When I'm in that lachrymose underworld, I forget entirely how happy I can actually be. There is a disconnect.  The demons take over and hold back the lightness with their maces and battle axes.  They don't allow those gossamer emotions through. I am forced to do battle.  But I've gotten good at fighting, expert, even. As what happens with years of practice.  For the pendulum always swings the other way.  But sometimes it needs a push.
I think knowing the things I know and having experienced the things I have, could work out in my favor more than I even had realized.  There lies the loftiest challenge of my life.  Not buying into a feigned positivity fantasy necessary for a shred of happiness the Xanxed set tries to shove down my throat, but machete-ing my way through the dense abhorrence with humor and philosophy; the only quasi-healthy coping mechanisms I can muster, to find a way to be happy in the face of undeniable gloom.  Laying to waste the torture, rape, and evil, of my mind and the world, leaving it slain on either side of the freshly cut verdant path.  Streaks of crimson smudged with ebony and snuff suffusing with the malachites and mosses of the once-fertile, now-impotent, beheaded flora; putrid and rotting in the Equatorial heat. It makes for arduous and sweat-drenched labor; wrestling and warring with these ideas in my mind.  But it feels good to not understand something right away. Finally.  It's like reading Camus.  It makes me feel human, instead of superhuman or more often, subhuman.  Happiness exists somewhere.  I've felt it; I feel it.  It's the only thing that makes me hungry, ravenous. It fans the fire in my belly.  Not darkness, not sullenness, not evil.  Love is the only currency my soul deals in.  Lovey-dovey is the only way I can survive. And unconditional love is all I have to give. I am wholly open to the flaws and eccentricities of the human race, and they sense it; those seedy, smokey, creatures of the night.  Therein lies the essence of my bewitching charm; that is the crux of my freak magnetism. Flaws are far more virtuous than perfections.  They are far more human.  Platonic ideals should never be realized.  Happiness lives in the endeavor.  For if all happiness is fleeting, we must be in constant pursuit.  It keeps stagnation at bay.  Spring is steadfastly approaching.  I let the wildflowers grow all around me.