Monday, February 29, 2016

I saw my baby. and she took back all she said...


Waking

Something she said again. Lousy text message leaving you to interpret. Did she mean this or that? Work through the weekend with this question rattling in your head.

One interpretation means she's with you, the other means it's just too much trouble. Elation or deflation.

 I get up for work again. Debt slave. Always waiting for something.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Elusive

She is asleep beside me, warm against me, her hand over mine. I am drifitng off, entering a perfect state, the holy place. The phone rings and wakes us both. I have to leave this in order to assess three heroin addicts in the hospital's emergency department. They're trying to find a way to stay in that holy place too.

Monday, February 15, 2016

San Diego

Everyone likes it for its weather, and that in itself made me suspect something was wrong with me. She's there now, vacationing, thinking about moving back, logistics. It hurts to know that I do not figure into her calculus.

I have memories there walking the streets all night, sometimes sleeping in the bus station, doorways, Balboa Park. I was looking for something more real than what the others did with their weekends, walking my feet raw, drinking street wine, hurting myself. I found a girl, and maybe that saved me from what I was heading for. San Diego seemed like an on going party I didn't really want to be at - Life's a Beach, Corona and lime, gnarly dude, crystal, older men approached me on Broadway offering money, beautiful girls seemingly without brains or soul or substance. I had New England gloom and tension inside me and I couldn't make it fit there.

The desert had it's appeal though. And Mexico's brown eyes. Getting lost in a place of danger and not knowing, or caring, if I'd make it back out.

She's in San Diego now, smiling in the sunshine. I feel her.

My friends turned to demons there. The girl whose car I paid off working two jobs - hardly sleeping, rarely eating - left me for another man because I did not want to marry while so young, poor and uncertain. Crystal Meth turned Ian into a prisoner, then a homeless man, then lost for good. My mentor and best friend threw me a party the day I left for Back East. He told me he loved me and slipped a .38 snub-nose into my hand. "For the road",  he said. I saw a flash of evil in his eyes and my ultimate undoing. Something has always been there trying to push me off.

I left the gun there to menance someone else and drove the old bus into the desert feeling as low as I ever had. In those next weeks, any moment could have been punctuated with a bullet, and it would have made sense. Something has always been there to steer me away.

She's in San Diego, without me, unknowingly mingling with my ghosts in the warm, dry air. Maybe she's also mingling with new aquaintances. Maybe one of them will be the kind of meeting that changes the direction of a life. Meanwhile, her ambivalent ghost flits in and out of this room. It's snowing here, very cold, and the birds are suffering through.

Stop Suffering...


Thursday, February 11, 2016

Part of The Story

Adversity reveals where you stand with others, who the other really is, and who you really are. I can tell you that I am alone. I don't want to tell you the rest.

Count your blessings. It won't take long. Better to know than to continue to live in delusion. Truth is always better, right? Better to find out now than later. Before you invest too much. Before you come to feel her as essential. Good thing it happened now. Good thing.

I've always been a better person starving anyway.

Monday, February 8, 2016

I Thought The World Of You...


What Made It Bearable

The snowfall's increasing with swirling clouds on the gusts. This is about the time of the bluebird miracle last year, isn't it? You came to me then, and we stayed together, snowed in comfortably. I've been waiting for your call today, it hasn't come, and now the snow is coming heavier. You won't be coming here. You've got other things to think about now. I couldn't sleep thinking about it last night, like some sticky cancer. Not everything has to be sad though, right?

Sunday, February 7, 2016

I don't ever want to be alone with all my darkest dreaming...


Stage of Grief

Not expecting to go so far back and remember the feelings there so viscerally. Not expecting to see the trajectory from there to here, from this perspective, so clearly. Shot from a gun then, and somehow now I can look over my shoulder and see through the hole in everything all the way back to the smoke curling up and out of the muzzle. Hearing again the words that formed you. Remembering separation, starvation, suffocation, bleeding all that feeling, never making it. Never making it.

A history of cold wind through empty rooms, distant laughter, elsewhere parties, intermittent sounds of love not quite muted by the walls. Sitting here, bottomless. 

Friday, February 5, 2016

I couldn't read it...


An Event During A Snowstorm

Closed now, the eyes of constant disapproval
Will it also silence your voice in me?
Doubter and Negater
Corrosive to all confidence, satisfaction, trust, comfort
Any possible victory
Worth.

We never did make our peace
I couldn't find a picture of how that should look
Could you? Did you look for one?
We just got on with it, held the tension
Mostly avoiding further collision

Now you are no more
And there is no victory or relief
Just a lot of time spent clenched
Gone

I'm gasping in a foot of snow
Shoveling and cursing
Remembering when the hot tears
The sweat and the hate were
All for you. Now, I don't know
Who they're for.

Thursday, February 4, 2016

Care

She brought soup after working a twelve hour shift while you were flat on your back in your bed with a taste for nothing. The soup tasted good. She said you looked unwell and listened to your lungs, but you knew already wellness was closer at hand. No pneumonia. She stayed the night and left early for work half-pissed because you coughed all night and kept her awake, but she stayed, risking infection. The gesture did not go unappreciated. Now you are somewhat better and imbuing things with significance again.