Her and Him

She

i don't have the goddamned energy or time to edit so read it as is, no complaining.

Cold moonlight shivering pours through crystalline too-clear windows into the room slightly chill, with its blue tint of spilled liquid moonlight casting long shadows in the too-still room. Through the blinds of the windows, alternating panels of shadow and light fall across the pained contours of his face, light chasing dark and dark chasing light. She raises her hand to touch him, a fine tremor running through her arm to her fingertip, straining her whole body as though against a membranous, resistant cage imprisoning him—or her? Right at the moment when the delicate, sensitive tip of her finger is about to reach him, so close that her fingertip tingles with the charge of the proximity, she pauses, abruptly; no longer straining, she freezes, eyes tracing light and shadow on his lined forehead, his crow-feet lined eyes, the thin, dark skin under his eyes, his high, proud nose, the thick, slightly parted lips; dark, then light, then dark, then light; then lets her hand fall back to her side, without strength, as though she were but a mechanized doll whose batteries have failed.

She watches him like that, a little longer.

She draws the blanket up around his shoulders, tucks him properly into the blanket he’s kicked away. She smoothes his hair back, gently pushing back the softly curling waves of his faded brown hair, just beginning to be touched by gray; sighs as the waves resist slightly against her fingers, strain almost imperceptibly and then give into the push of her hand.

She almost leans over, intending to kiss him on the forehead, to smooth away the lines—only, instead, she rises, pads over to the dark mahogany dresser, part of a set of thousands of dollars worth of wedding furniture, all well-cared for and almost as good as new, clad only in her underwear; seventeen long years no longer necessitating lingerie; opens the top drawer, and without having to rummage through the pile of plain marriage underwear and socks, reaches straight for the cold, solid and familiar weight of the pistol lying restive in the drawer.

She cradles it in her hand, wondering almost at its smallness, its denseness. As she turns it over, the moonlight bounces off it, and in short, fierce, almost painful jabs the glancing moonlight brings back memories of summer rivers and lakes she’d swam in as a child.

The light changes; submerged in the dark now, she soundlessly pads back to the bed, seats herself on the edge of the bed opposite him. She sits there, looking at him, her breathing slow and calm at first, but becoming more and more rapid and pained until she can see sparks behind her eyelids and her chest constricts with bands of iron and—finally, in a short decisive stroke of her hand, touches him. Touches him, cutting through the membranous invisible cage that had kept them apart and longing for so long—his cage or hers, she could no longer say—then, grieving, only a little bit, raises the pistol and pulls the trigger.


Her funeral was on a Wednesday.



He

She was buried, not cremated, as her husband claimed she had wanted; he believed, and had always wished that she would believe, in the Glorious Afterlife and the resurrection of Our Earthly Bodies.

The fact that she was one short of a head, nobody mentioned, least of all the preacher.

Unfortunate, he said, wiping sweat from his ruddy face, a little too full-fleshed to be properly monastic, that she felt she couldn’t reach out to her community, her loving family, her loving husband. But let the Lord comfort us in our time of need—

The husband, sitting blind and deaf in the front pew, does not feel the weight of their pale little daughter sitting on his lap. He was, in fact, somewhere else entirely, off in his private theatre playing and replaying a broken reel and track that was not entirely pleasant and much less comforting, but inevitable.

The reel does not show him the day of their wedding, a little rushed and anxious, though flashes of those pictures did flit by in the midst of the main feature; nor is it the moment of the beginning of the end, when they had started drifting apart slowly but irrevocably, thought that also intercepted the main story line every once in a while.

Instead, he sees her as she had been eight years ago, on a particularly fine autumn day, with the sky impossibly high and translucent, the gold and russet leaves transparent against the clear, heatless sunlight, and a cool, light breeze bringing news of hope and change from lands faraway. She stood with her feet planted wide apart, her back turned to him, outlined in sunlit gold, swaying in the gauzy white sundress that he would later come to recognize was the precursor to the formless, drab white hospital smocks that would become her uniform after each and every downward spiral that would leave her broken and shattered in the ward full of empty-eyed and shiftless broken men and women, downward spirals that became only more frequent and darker and violent as time passed by.

The thin, almost human trees had swayed gracefully in the pleasant autumn breeze, dancing it seemed, and the garden was dappled with the shifting patterns of sunlight and shadow streaming through the autumn leaves.

She stood planted there, at the edge of the dappled light-and-shadow carpet, limned in gold but the rest of her backlit, plunged into darkness; and he, a cry caught in his throat, wished he could reach out, touch her, bring her back; but afraid that she might break, strained, strained against the inevitable, irrevocable chasm that had grown between them without reason nor rhyme.

Then she turned around, smiling, a slow light spreading through her weathered, ravaged face, like soft, early morning light spilling across a burnt forest, making it beautiful, if only for a moment, even in the midst of the destruction—or perhaps, because of it; but then she sees him at last, the pain in his eyes, the way he strains to meet her, and fails; and the magic within her, too, fails, bled slowly from her face, which again becomes a closed, dark, desolate entrapment.

And, for the first time, remembering, he sobs, spilling years of lost chances and troubled gladnesses against the pale, fine hair of their daughter, with its two velvet black ribbons of mourning.

His voice plays upon you like an accordion

His voice plays upon you like an accordion. This music is not ethereal; it is of the earth, of the body, of the flesh. He sings your body electric. He is no Walt Whitman but he is pure poetry, he lives the poetry that others dare not. And so you fall for him, one rainy autumn morning, like a cliché. It is lamentable. It is glorious. It is inevitable.

Dutifully you go through the motions, pulling and pushing. But inside, you knew all along that you would give in, break. And you do. It’s only three weeks before you give it all up, mind, body and soul. The heart, well, that was gone from the beginning. You give it all, and when he is gone you know that he won’t give any of it back, but—what can you do.

Names and dates swirl through you like a maelstrom as you whirl through his circle of friends, family and foes. Who is she, they whisper behind your back, she’s nobody. Why did he… But you don’t care. Implied in their whispers like stabs, is the near future in which he will leave you, desert you for a better model, more interesting, prettier, sexier, funnier, more up-to-date, but you don’t care. For now, you have him. And so you can spin through the room in a daze, whirling on tip-toes, laughing as he flings you through yet another song you don’t recognize.

But then the doubts begin. It is late, later than he said it would be, and he still hasn’t come home. His call history is filled with numbers you don’t recognize, and although none of his emails are strictly improper or suggestive—you feel guilty for looking, but what can you do—they leave you with a niggling worm of fear in your stomach. So you become a spy, snooping, shadowing, stalking your prey, this man that you once loved, still do, but have come to hate as well. You can see through him, those baby blue eyes, so guileless, so innocent, and yet so false.

The lies become more and more transparent. At first, he dissembles, he fabricates, makes excuses. But eventually that too passes, and when he is sure that you are hooked, snared, he no longer explains, he no longer spins those beautiful silvery lies for you. No more roses and profuse apologies, no more spontaneous declarations of love. There is a coldness in his eyes as he looks at you; perhaps he hopes you will take the hint and leave on your own. You are worn out. There is nothing more you can offer him, except a slavish devotion of one who knows she has been thrown away but cannot let go. You no longer understand yourself; you thought you were prouder than this; but then again, perhaps it was there all along; this need to be hurt, an aptitude for slow self-suffocation.

You are defective. You know this. You are no longer even sure of your face, you look into the mirror and find it strange. You no longer recognize this stranger, who is this, who is this weak woman who lets her name be uttered like a curse, full of anger and contempt. You are a dog. Might as well let him put a leash around your neck. But then again he probably doesn’t want to, he’s probably hoping you’ll get lost and never come back.

One day, his clothes are all thrown about, there are suitcases open, his face is grim and his motions sure and decisive. You plead, you beg, you spill tears but all in vain. He no longer even calls you names, his face is perfectly empty. Anything, anything but this, you say, I can change, anything you want I can be, I can do, anything for you. He just stares at you, then turns away and goes back to packing. You lock yourself in the bathroom and sob, throwing things, hoping he’ll come in, say he’s changed his mind, he can’t leave you when you’re like this but—the sound of the door opening and slamming shut. Just like that. He’s gone.

You look around the apartment so empty, your voice would echo if you could but speak. You’d call your friends but you can’t remember their names or their phone numbers, he’d been all you needed. So you lean against the wall and slowly slide down, bury your head in your hands.

Eventually, exhausted, you nod off to sleep without noticing. You dream of him—but of course. He holds out his hand, and you hesitating take it. His smile so brilliant, crinkles around his baby blue eyes: “I love you.” His voice plays upon you like an accordion. It’s the only thing you have left.

How to Survive in a Dysfunctional Family: Defense Mechanisms That Work

How to Survive in a Dysfunctional Family:
Defense Mechanisms That Work

If you are an American, you probably have at least a vague, hazy idea of what defense mechanisms are—the same way you sort of know your constitutional rights, sort of know where Cuba is, and sort of know that the economy is headed for a long slide down to hell (unless you are John McCain, that is.) If you watch Dr. Phil or Oprah—and you most probably do if you’re reading this, don’t lie—you can probably even identify all the defense mechanisms of your spouse and your parents, even if you’re totally clueless about your own!

(Hint hint: Why do you think you married your spouse? Can you say, “Lowering of Expectations So as to Avoid Disappointment”?

Also, look up “masochism” in Appendix B.)

In this book, I would like to share my story of redemption and teach you how to become a Dysfunctional Family Survivor® as well. Do as I did, and you, too, can survive a dysfunctional family! So throw away that bottle of sleeping pills (make sure to flush it down the toilet instead of throwing it out with the garbage—wouldn’t want some dumpster-diving homeless to get high off of Ambien, would you?) turn off the oven (you know the smell of burning meat and hair doesn’t go well with chocolate chip cookies. What would mother say?) and plop down on the couch with your favorite microwaved TV dinner. (You probably learned those nasty eating habits from your mother. If you read this book, though, you can avoid turning into a fat cow like her!)

(If you’re already past the point of no-return, however, I would suggest liposuction or gastric-bypass surgery: Look up the Advertisement section in Appendix C to find qualified surgeons in Tijuana. Your mother may have been a cold, frigid bitch, destructive and overly critical, but she was right on one count:

Those extra pounds really don’t look good on you.)

I mean, who would want to go out on a Friday night instead of learning how to cope with their dysfunctional family? Well, for starters, me! Unfortunately I, like you, come from a dysfunctional family, and I never learned how to interact with people properly. The last time I tried to get laid, she/he (I couldn’t decide whether it was a hermaphrodite or a she-male) called the police and I got to sit around in a cold jail and get friendly with the squabbling mice family. I tried to give them counseling but they threatened to scratch my eyeballs out if I didn’t shut up. Fortunately I got pneumonia, sued the police department and ended up with a windfall which allowed me to sit on my ass for three months and write this book. And now I get to make more money off of sad, gullible self-help junkies like you! Isn’t that grand?
Hah! Just kidding! Got you, didn’t I? As I will explain later, inappropriate, grain-of-truth, barely masked hostile humor is one of the cornerstones of the Defense Mechanisms That Work™ program.

But, as my father liked to say, “You goddamned chatterbox of a child, if you don’t get to the point right away I’m gwoin’ get my belt and whip ya bloody.”

So, without further ado, I hereby present to you the hard-earned secrets of a Dysfunctional Family Survivor™.

What is a Dysfunctional Family?
Some prime examples of a dysfunctional family in popular media are the Sopranos, of “The Sopranos,” the Simpsons, of “The Simpsons,” the Tennenbaums, of “The Royal Tennenbaums.” Further examples include “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape” in the movies, starring Johnny Depp (what a hunk with those miserable, anguished brown eyes of his!) And of course there is "Romeo and Juliet," a true classic.

Fine works of art, all of them! As a matter of fact, there would be no literature without dysfunctional families, and the entertainment industry would simply collapse! If you follow this line of thought far enough down the line, the whole economy would collapse without us. (Although it will do so pretty soon without our help, anyways.) Let me spell it out for you: First Hollywood will go bankrupt, causing plastic surgeons to go out of business. The sharp decline in silicone breast implants will rob Silicone Valley of its main source of income, (FYI, the computer chip thing is just a front) causing a chain reaction that will result in the second, real YIIK in the year of 2012. In short, without us, there would be no art, there would be no economy, and the world would end.

(Reliable sources have confirmed that the concentric circles with dark centers sighted in Mayan end-of-the-world prophecies are not, in fact, falling comets as some have claimed, but Pamela Anderson’s breasts, the last bastion of artificial chesty-ness.)

In his unparalleled masterpiece of erotic tragicomedy, “Balls in Lederhoden,” the 19th century French playwright Philp K. Dick wrote that “All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Not so! In fact, let me go so far as to say, Bullshit!

Dysfunctional families are a dime a dozen, and in all ways that matter, they’re completely the same. You could even go so far as to say that there actually are no fully functional families—just look at the First Family, consisting of Adam, Even, Cain and Abel, and the unnamed bloody squealing critters that followed. There’s marital conflicts—“If it hadn’t been for you, your slithering belly-crawler and your apple, we’d still be in Paradise!.” “Oh yeah? Who told you to eat it, huh? Did I force feed it to you? Did I, Adam?!” There’s incest—who do you think Cain had kids with? What, immaculate conception? Ha, ha, ha! You’ve got to be kidding me! Then there’s fratricide—“Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Every which way you count it, the first created family is the picture of classic dysfunction. In short, human families weren’t meant to be functional and happy! God doesn't want you to be happy! Instead, families are meant to be endured. Just look it up in the Bible.

So, without further ado, let me give you brief examples of the Ten Steps of Defense Mechanisms That Work™, which I will go into greater detail in the later chapters:

Examples of the Ten Steps of Defense Mechanisms That Work™

1. Avoidance
“I’m so sorry, but my cat has a codependency problem and threatened suicide if I don’t bring her along for the holidays. I know how allergic to cats you are, and I thought, well, if I don’t bring Cathy, she’ll bake her head in the oven, and if I do, Jason will die a slow and painful death of asphyxiation! Which is fine, but imagine how awful you’d look with all swollen and blue inside your coffin! Have you picked one out yet, by the way? I mean, what with your diabetes—”

2. Passive Aggressiveness
“Oh! Your wife’s name is Cathy? I forgot! I thought it was Rebecca!

Oh, no, that was the secretary you had an affair with… How did that go, anyways? Fired from the company? Oh, well, you’re doing well now. Frankly, I’m surprised Cathy hasn’t divorced you. Completely unrelated, but have you seen a urologist about your erectile dysfunction yet?

Your small business is floundering? Oh, no!… Don’t worry, you always were a smart one— you always knew how to extract the last penny from your customers, from the time you were selling overpriced sugar water calling it lemonade, to when you took nude photographs of me and my boyfriend and blackmailed me… Good times, good times.

Anyways. How ironic! I named a bad-tempered, neutered and habitually codependent cat after your wife! Ha, ha, ha! Isn’t that a riot?

No?”

3. Denial
“What? No, of course I’m not trying to get on your nerves. Why would you say that?”

4. Pre-emptive Accusations
“You’re saying that because you think I have an anger problem, don’t you? I knew it. I knew it all along, I always did. What else? You think I’m fat, don’t you? Oh, yeah, I know what you’ve been saying about me behind my back. Oh? You don’t remember? Well, let me remind you.”

5. Dredging Up the Past

(If you want to read the rest, pay me. I'm poor. It's always been my dream to make money off of suckers browsing in the self-help aisles and masturbating to Dr. Phil.

Good luck spending spring break with your families! :-) )

And With Him, You Rhapsodized The Night Away—

Leaving Mr. Mackenzie.

The jester comes at night, climbing through the window. She waits for him, eyes wide open and wild, flitting and skittering over the absolute darkness of the bare-branched trees. She fights a losing battle trying to keep her hair, which is dyed purple with the moonlight, from spilling over the edges of the bed. She tries to keep her hands calm and still by her side but they are not a part of her, they wander like nervous butterflies.

The night is deep; the hours pull and drag. They leave behind crawling, slithering trails embedded with ember-like scales. She could go blind watching their burning intensity but still she cannot close her eyes. She is not good at turning away, she has never been good at turning away. This is a fault of hers, she knows, but in the end she feels no desire to change. What is, must be.

He comes like a shadow, he comes like a thief. Once, the far away tinkle of silver bells would have warned her of his coming, Now that he is sure of her captivity, however, he has taken to leaving his hat and scepter behind. She cannot quite decide if she misses them or not.

His pale, slim torso catches the blue shadows and the opalescent moonlight. She thinks of silver-finned fish flying through the boundless night. Silent lips press against hers, dry and hot, a contained fire, a spreading conflagration. She shivers as his eyes slide ever so delicately over her body, lingering, caressing. Her flesh comes undone, loosening; myriads of invisible yearning hands unfold and strain to reach out to him.

But, he knows nothing of this. And so, he sighs distant promises he does not mean to keep, whispering, murmuring against her strumming neck, which is taut to the point of breaking.

She might break; she might shatter. She could burn, she could fall, she could die. All these things are possible (and one day, inevitably, she will,) but when she is held in his arms, she forgets. No, not quite forgets—she remembers, she knows, but knowing and remembering are not the same as understanding. She knows that if he weren’t careful—if she weren’t careful—he could pierce her through and through, impale her upon his desire for perfect oblivion, for eternal and everlasting damnation. But she also understands that this is the closest she could ever come to paradise.

And yet.

“This isn’t enough,” his eyes sighing tell her. “This will never be enough.”

And she agrees.

VD: Love in the Time of VD—a True Comitragedy

Love in the Time of VD—a True Comitragedy (or is it tragicomedy? Hell, who the fuck cares? Just read the fucking thing.)

STAGE:
Man and woman stand facing each other in a darkened room, which looks suspiciously like someone’s parents’ basement. A large window made of celluloid and cardboard is barely visible at the back of the stage. Why there is such a large window in somebody’s parents’ basement, nobody knows. (Poetic license wasn’t invented for nuthin’, folks.)

Posters of comic book heroes adorn the wall, with a prevalence of pokey cone-bra’d Wonder Woman in various titillating poses. There are also action figures in pristine unwrapped boxes, and anime figurines with huge starry eyes, non-existent noses and mouths, and double-D breasts. They are covered in some sort of suspiciously sticky dried liquid, a half-opaque white.

Man wears an oversized black hard rock t-shirt and baggy jeans; he is pale and covered in mousy brown hair, except for his head, which is starting to look rather sparse. The woman wears black thick-rimmed coke bottle glasses, has a horrible asymmetrical hair cut with a terrible at-home jet black dye job with pale roots showing like she’s balding, and an outfit comprised of black fishnet, an “artsy” print t-shirt and white and red striped opaque tights.

They would both rate somewhere below five on the Hot-or-Not’ness.

Man: (*Woodenly.)

((*He should speak woodenly throughout the whole play, even when the stage directions read "incensed" or "stunned" or *warning: foreshadowing "bleeding to death."))

You’re so cold and withholding. How can you just say “That’s interesting” when I tell you that I love you?

(pained) Not even a “Thank you”?

Woman: (drolly, or attempting to be droll but coming off like a gorilla with a speech impediment; takes out a cigarette from her bra, inhales, chokes, then retches the smoke out)

Then (choke) why are you (choke) with me?

Man: I have mommy issues.

Woman: Well, I have daddy issues.

He died when I was fifteen and I haven’t been the same since. I have commitment and intimacy issues because I’m afraid of being left by the important male figure in my life again.

Also, I’ve kind of been itching down there. Are you sure you got tested after your last partner?

Man: (incensed) Of course! And I use condoms every time.

Woman: (eyes narrowing) Then why didn’t you know your own condom size when I first had sex with you?

Man: Uhm… I think I grew since then.

Woman: Really? (muttering) ‘Cause that’s kind of sad for your ex.

Man: (fake excited) Look, something’s flying outside the window! Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, its—

Woman: (cutting him off) You know, I might be cold and withholding but I hate how every time an uncomfortable subject comes up you avoid the issue and start talking about your stupid juvenile fantasies. What next, Wonder Woman in her cone bras? Oh, don’t think I don’t know about your little geeky masturbation fantasies—I saw everything in that folder—

Man: (tearing out his hair. For real. Chunks of it.) How could you?! I told you it was private! I can’t believe it—

Woman: What the hell did you expect? You labeled it "wet dreams, " after all—

A woman in cone bras, looking very much like Wonder Woman, slams into the celluloid window at the back of the stage. She slowly slides down the window with an audible wet gloppy sound.

Man and woman both stare at the window silently for a moment.

Man: You know, I actually wasn’t expecting that… I was just trying to change the subject.

Woman: Yeah, I know. Oh well. I wonder what the hell’s going on, though?

OUTSIDE: a man flies down and lands outside the window, screaming in a high-pitched tone suggestive of a eunuch.

Man Outside the Window: I knew it! I knew you were sleeping with Batman! What does he have on me that I don’t, huh? He can’t even fly, for God's sake! I thought your favorite sex position was Aerial Spinning Bumblebees! Can’t do that with him, can you?! He'd last five seconds in the sky!

Woman Who Looks Suspiciously Like Wonder Woman, and Also Resembles Madonna: (mumbling) Oh and like you last longer on ground. (to Man Outside the Window, loudly) It's not all about positions, shithead. He's got some dope techniques. You wouldn't know because you've only slept with your Smallville ex-girlfriend.

Man, etc etc: (pained) What, does his penis vibrate?

(jealous) I heard he got some hydraulic shit installed in it to make it bigger and last longer.

(raging) Was that it, you slut?!?

He stands confrontationally with his fists balled up at his side. Wonder Woman is still lying prone at the floor. Man starts sobbing uncontrollably, at which point Wonder Woman does a back flip and lands cross-legged on Superman’s shoulders, locking his head in a death grip between her very well-muscled thighs.

Presumable Wonder Woman: (also pained) So what, Clark? You don’t even notice me anymore even when I’m wearing my lacy push-up cone bras! Is it because I tore off one of your nuts?

Man etc etc: STOP TALKING ABOUT MY NUTS!!! Who told you to go and get thunder thighs, anyways? You don’t even look like a woman anymore! I'm starting to feel all my latent small-town homophobic issues coming back! Your cone bras are filled with tissue, and don’t you think I don’t know it!

I told the Council of Superheroes that you’re doping, you steroid-fiend! I gave them your urine sample and they’re going to suspend your license!

No more licensing deals with Wonderbra, WHORE!

Wonder Woman lets out a deep and guttural scream. Her thighs tighten around his neck and he makes an unfortunate gurgling sound.

Man etc etc: (choking) At least get breast enlargements, for God’s sake! Dick from Marvel came over and he said that it’s straining the comic artist’s sanity to draw you like some juvenile geek’s wet dream when all the photographs of you look like a man in drag! Hell, you’re not even a good drag queen—

She tightens her grip some more. His eyes start bulging from their sockets.

Presumable Wonder Woman: Like you're enough of a man for me! "OMG it's Kryptonite please hide me in your wonderful cone bras!" is what you said to me last time!

I bet you were off rolling in the hay with that slut from Smallville, too! I'm surprised you haven't got some weird farm disease from all the animal feces in the barn in which you copulate! Oh, don’t think I don’t know about her! You and your little small-town bitch—

Man etc etc: (roaring as well as he can through constricted vocal chords) Don’t. Call. Her. A. Bitch!!! (choke)

Just because she’s got huge knockers and you’re jealous—

Woman: Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? Well, it’s not like YOU’RE big! You know what? You know what?! You might always be saying that "It’s not about size, it’s about how you use it,” but well, Batman’s bigger and yes, he can vibrate and twirl and expand in there!

So fuck you!!!

Wonder Woman smacks him up the head and does another back flip, taking them out of the frame of the window. Something crashes to the ground. Superman screams in pain.

Wonder Woman: Take that, you sonuvabitch!

Kryptonite!

Man etc etc: Aaaaaaargh—

INSIDE:

Man: (stunned; sounding like Keanu Reeves) Wow.

Woman: Yeah, wow. (dazed)

Man: Well, at least we’re not that bad, right? (weak smile)

Woman: I know. Well, it’s a good thing neither of us can punch a hole through walls of steel, right? I mean, you have the muscles of a jelly fish. You can't even stay on top of me long enough to come! (weak laugh)

Man: Yeah, and your breasts aren’t too bad, either. Although I do wish they’d droop a little less. You know, a cone push-up bra might not be a bad idea.

Woman: (strained laugh) Yeah, I know, and although I think the Batman hydraulic system could work wonders for our sex life, it’s not like you can afford it, right?

Man: (smile slowly draining from his face) Yeah, and it’s a good thing I don’t have X-ray vision either. Then you couldn’t hide those rolls of fat under your “Bodyshaper ™,” huh?

Woman: Ooooh. (vein bulges from her forehead) Well, you know what? X-ray vision might help you find my clit, for once. How hard can it be? The only thing you’re worse at finding is a job!

Man: Hey, hey, hey! Just because the capitalistic corporate world doesn’t recognize my talents—

Woman: What? Your talent in remaining a regressive coddled Mama’s boy, living in your parent’s basement and whining on and on about how people just don’t understand you? You’re thirty-fucking-five years old! And yeah, I understand you completely and I don’t like what I see! You’re not as interesting as you think! In fact, you’re as interesting as a gorilla with a speech impediment in sign language—

Man: Oh yeah? Oh yeah?

Woman: Oh, yeah.

The two keep squabbling. Not only would it be too tiring for the audience to hear their incessant string of complaints and whines, the author does not feel like writing anymore. She has an appointment with her imaginary, perfect lover, who looks a little like Christian Bale and has the above mentioned hydraulics system installed.

Boy, does that man know how to move.

THE GRAND FINALE, a SUMMARY- because telling, not showing, is easier and all work and no play makes TS a crazed *tampon-penis-shrine building psychopath.

*Can be yours for 12 installments of 19.99 dollars each month. Red, viscous dye with musky metallic scent optional ($2.99 additional charge per installment.)

In the end, a Kryptonite-crazed Superman pairs off with the woman and flies off with her to the stratosphere, where she promptly dies due to asphyxiation. The man looks pleadingly at Wonder Woman but Christian Bale arrives in a flurry of bats and accidentally impales him on his arm guard spikes and knocks him over as he grabs Wonder Woman and takes off to the ceiling.

Man: (bleeding to death) Yeah, this is a great Friday evening.

Bonus:

Check this out:

Christian Bale Rips Superman a New Asshole

Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice

A Girl’s Best Friend:
Pearls, Lipstick, Silk, and Diamonds;
&—
Most Definitely,
Most Certainly,
Most Absolutely—
SUGAR AND SPICE.

Real Women ™, a most delicious and exquisite concoction of sugar and spice;
Available at your nearest dealer in fine (hopefully) organic meats!

Price negotiable,
Barter encouraged.
Suggested Real Women ™ currency includes Tiffany, Cartier, Burberry, Coach, Gucci and Dior.

No refunds allowed;
New models available for discounted exchange price.

Caveat emptor:
No warranties included.

Cindy surveys the room, decked out all fancy and nice in Melissa’s good taste; what worldly sophistication, what effortless elegance. She feels a twinge inside—This is exactly what I’d want Mom’s room to look like. Of course, at the time she had been too young and inexperienced to know what exact form this sanctuary of mysterious femininity should take, and it had never become more than a vague, hazy, shifting but pleasant mirage in her mental landscape of desire. But this, this is perfect.

The room has captured the exact timbre and resonance of her callow imagination, more so than she could have ever hoped for. Melissa’s palette of choice—rich browns, pale understated gold, a deep reddish brown—are autumnal and earthy, soothing and calming to Cindy’s frazzled nerves. The pale ghosts of her past are arisen, drawn to the scent of stale dreams, spreading like a miasma and capturing her imagination with their immutable hungry fingers. A wordless séance is taking place; Cindy closes her eyes at the trembling of her heart.

Her eyes catch and linger over the wallpaper, which has the sort of intricate but understated patterning that she associates with the British aristocracy. Up until she’d left town, she often dreamed of English manors, curling up with a much loved and thumbed through Bronte or Austen after a long day spent at the shop. Oh, those stormy, windswept manors! Shrouded in fog, enchantingly doomed—ever so romantic, ever so mysterious.

Of course, living in such a place would entail the sudden arrival of a dark, tall, and handsome man, the epitome of rugged, dangerous masculinity. He, who would swoop in, ravish her, whisk her away from her cold, tight-lipped (if only her real family had been gracious enough to be close their mouths for once, with or without tight lips,) disapproving family, for a lifetime of passionate romance and utterances of undying love. Somewhere in between all of that there would be plenty of wild, heavy-breathing, moan and gasp inducing sex.

(Although, Cindy wasn’t sure how much she’d like having her bodice ripped—after all, if she were wearing it, it would be something quite fashionable, up-to-date and expensive.) Even if they were to be poor, she would be pampered and cared for all her life by this gentle-savage of hers. And, of course, even if they were to be poor it wouldn’t matter, for of course a full period wardrobe for every occasion would be at her beck and call. It was only natural.

(She is long past that stage, now: She would much prefer a well-connected gentleman in an expensive tailored Italian suit and a Lamborghini.)

So, in short, the room is perfect. But at the same time, it is not quite so; for all its beauty, the room is a little unsettling; a shade too feminine, a few degrees too warm. Visiting Melissa’s house for the first time had been quite a shock. Cindy had always imagined Melissa a cooler, colder room, with a décor of off-whites, mint greens and pale golds. Well, at least the pale gold I got right. The large queen size bed in the middle of the room has perfectly smooth silk sheets—or at least she assumes it to be silk, she wouldn’t really know. It is the colour of good aged wine (here, too, she is approximating,) a ripe burgundy with a sheen of rich gold where the light catches it just right. Like late afternoon sunshine caught in old wine, she thinks, remembering the bottles she saw while she gave herself a self-guided tour of the house. The wine cellar in the basement had been impressive and confirmed Cindy’s long held suspicions that Melissa was secretly an alcoholic.

She takes this all in wide-eyed and eager, feeling the patter in her hearts, a leftover from the old days when she would covertly peer at the lady in church who sat just a pew away. The woman always wore expertly tailored neutral colored two-piece suits, veiled cloches and felt brimmed hats, even in church. A triple strand choker of glossy creamy pearls completed the effect, of good-breeding, genteelness, and old money. Her red stained lips were the only sign of defiance against largely homogenous Southern Baptist crowd that disapproved of any such displays of independence or vanity—even in its richest and most generous tithe-givers.

Every Sunday somehow the pastor’s sermon would return again and again to the subject of the Seven Sins. He spoke of each and every one with relish, face contorting into an approximation of all the sins (except for Lust, perhaps considered too unseemly even as an example. Well, even without that one those expressions gave Cindy quite a nightmare anyways.) Out of the seven, he liked to linger particularly over Lust, and Vanity.

As he spoke of the perils of vanity, a perfidy that corrupted the soul, he exhorted women to turn from their evil ways and towards humility, purity and chastity. A vain woman could only lead men astray; if her virtue and reputation were compromised, well, she deserved that, didn't she? Though all have sinned and share guilt in the Original Sin, it was but a fact that God meant for women to bear the brunt of the guilt and penance, wasn't it? For they are by nature temptresses, seducers, profaners of God’s Holy Writ, a trial to themselves and to others. It was their duty and test in life to go against those natural evil inclinations and strive ever towards the light. It was only a true Jezebel that dared lure yet another pure man away from the love of Jesus Christ, the fountain and tree of all life. And we all knew what God had in store for Jezebels—didn’t we?

As he flourished the microphone like the archangel’s flaming sword, face purpling from exertion, he pointedly refrained from looking in the lady’s direction. Then the lady would hold her head even higher, her delicate chin tilting backward, her aquiline nose disdaining him. The tendons in her thin neck showed up straining against her paper thin porcelain skin, her spine straighter than ever, and her blue-eyed burning gaze fixated on the portly, paunchy gray-haired pastor. He never returned her gaze.

Those red lips, those devilish red lips, had won Cindy’s lifelong respect and envy—in spite of the faint, incipient beginning of wrinkles at the edges of those perfect red lips.

Cindy scans the room again, afraid that she might have left signs of an over-indulgent guest. Stay as long as you like and make yourself at home, Melissa had said, but as always what Melissa said and what she actually meant were two distinctly different things. She suddenly feels ashamed of her own room, with its cheerful and insipid pinks, whites and mauves. It is all stripes and polka-dots—distinct and fetching in its own way, Melissa would say. Of course, meaning anything but. Although at the time she had been so delighted at the big department store sale to find the sheets, she now wishes she could go back and choose something else. Now she knows that she should have turned the merchandise over with a critical, disappointed eye, frowning and sighing, taking her time well and good before settling on the same kind of lushness that Melissa had.

(Then again, Melissa would not have been caught dead shopping at that place in the first place. And, of course, even if she’d been there Melissa would have thumbed her nose at all their merchandise, with their third-world provenance and paltry material. It tries too hard and achieves too little, she would have drawled.

And, of course, Melissa would not have sprung for anything less than one hundred percent silk.)

So, of course, more silk. A dark red silk robe, so dark it almost has a sheen of black to it, lies thrown casually over a minimalist black lacquered chair. So effortlessly Japonesque! Japonesque, a little kitsch by now, but honestly, who can resist? Melissa had said, her crimson, wry, and lopsided smile curling at the corners, gesturing at a vaguely Oriental vase in a corner of the gallery. A careless drawl, from a woman in an ever so elegant frothy and creamy concoction of a dress, the remark tossed ever so casually into the pearled, tight-lipped and French-bunned glittering strong. Cindy was hooked from that moment on. She would not have been able to resist even if she’d wanted to.

Cindy had decided in that instance that Melissa would be the mentor that she’d always longed for, and quite frankly, deserved. She determined that this was so. And as always she got what she wanted. She willed it into being with a ferocious and single-minded intensity that had earned her the scorn and unease of the small-town crowd back home, and which had propelled her this far in the city. She knew that Melissa would be able to teach her the ropes, show her what was acceptable and what was not; what was to be desired, and what was to be simply cast off—those things that had the ever so faint odor of tastelessness about them. (These were to be subtly disregarded and scorned with the slightest wrinkling of the nose and an almost imperceptible narrowing of the eyes.)

It was a fair trade. Cindy would become a second-generation Melissa, a dim but approximate replica (or so Melissa liked to believe.) Cindy could secure a wealthy but distant businessman of her own (though of course this was never said out loud, being a little too gauche); shoulder herself into an elite social scene a fair distance away; cut people down to their size by merely changing the tilt of her chin. Melissa would be entertained by Cindy’s faux-pas and desperate failures; regain some of the self-esteem that had been shredded by her husband’s many and well-published affairs by being constantly reminded of her superiority and accomplishments; have something to fill up her languid, same-old same-old days with.

Melissa kept the whole affair hush-hush, not wanting to taint her own reputation by socializing with this bumbling Southern upstart. Nobody even knew that they were anything more than passing acquaintances, if that. Cindy took the bus and then walked a fair distance to Melissa’s when her husband was gone and the servants were sent away for Melissa’s ‘meditations.’ This suited Cindy just fine; when she was making her own scene somewhere else, she did not want to be associated with Melissa in any way at all.

Cindy picks up the robe, runs her hands through its airy weight, its dry-wet smoothness. She crunches it up and slips it so smooth through her fist, amazed that it doesn’t catch anywhere at all, even though Cindy has yet to receive her first manicure and still has those ever so shaming hangnails, callouses everywhere except for her fingertips, and even clay under her nails. She buries her cheek in the folds of the precious fabric and rubs her cheek and nose in its heavy, exotic musk.

This perfume must have cost her tons! I’m sure it’s got some exotic name like Shangri-La, or something. She pauses, looks around and moves on to the delight she has saved for last—Melissa’s vanity. And oh, what a beauty it is! The black and lacquered stand, the gilt standing mirror, the handheld mirror, and its companion brush—Of course, real silver! Look at that patina—it’s antique, too. I wish Mom had had something like that… But even if we could’ve afforded it, she wouldn’t have wanted one. She would have gone for bright plastic, something too bright, something trying too hard.

She wishes she could erase these thoughts. She feels a tad guilty and besides, even thinking such things in Melissa’s ghostly presence, leaves her feeling small; and worse yet, rural. Kitsch, very forward-thinking, young and energetic, Melissa would say, gracious but damning with faint praise. Then Cindy would shrink upon herself, wishing that she would’ve just stayed quiet.

Real silver, real Swarvoski, real gems, real pearls and real… are those diamonds? Cindy gasps, then covers her mouth and quickly scans the room. She feels like she’s been caught doing something truly shameful. Then she laughs nervously, feeling silly. Though she longingly gazes at the necklace, she does not dare even reach for it. It wouldn’t look right on her, anyways, not right now. She has yet to go through that transformation. She would first have to shed the ugly clothes, the sensible but drab shoes. Not even a strand of pearls would look right on me right now.

Well, she’d wanted to keep it simple today, anyways—it wasn’t like she was trying to impress anybody, right? Once she is through, though, like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, the diamond will be just puuuur—fect on her. Even Melissa would have to acknowledge this, though she would probably say it in that mockingly faux-Southern drawl, with her half-lidded gaze. She does pick up the long, dripping pearl necklace, though. She runs it through her fingers; it quickly warms up to her flesh and a quick grin spreads on her face, a crooked smile full of crooked teeth that have never been blessed with the ubiquitous American middle class rite of passage, braces and retainers. Oh well. She will get porcelain veneers soon. She can afford it now.

So many pots, tubes, jars and wands. Magic, simple magic. She carefully unscrews the lids, sniffs the contents, sticks her fingers in the rich creaminess of the cosmetics. She has seen the advertisements for some of these, exotic foreign actresses smiling their brilliant perfect white smiles and claiming the most outrageous magic; the products not even just freeze the aging process but rewind the biological clock. Some of the labels are, goshdarnit, even in French. She takes a few dabs and pats it into her skin, luxuriating in the silken rich emollients and feeling soothed and beautified by the rites of womanhood she has longed for so long but cruelly been denied. She has started out later than Melissa had, a princess groomed from birth into old money. But of course, by making judicious choices and maintaining constant vigilance she could, and would, freeze herself in time. Possibly, even rewind. Of course she could. Why not? She was one of the chosen, the selected, the elite, at long last.

Some lipstick. Lipstick always brightens up the face like nothing else. Even my mother knew that. She picks the tube gingerly, feeling rather intimidated by the dizzying array of crimsons, pinks, browns, golds, mauves, red-browns, pink-golds; matte, creamy, silky, sheer, glossy. Finally she settles for a pink-gold creamy formula. Crimson would have been too obvious and passé without an otherwise understated outfit of sheer elegance. She smiles and puckers at the mirror of the vanity, then decides to spring for mascara, too. A French label. All the better. Black, thick lashes, without that spidery clumpy effect. Great. Then again I’ve always had great lashes, if nothing else. She carefully screws the lids of both the lipstick and the mascara back on.

She starts to open the top right drawer of the mahogany dresser. She pulls it out far enough that she can see the beginnings of the frothing laces of Melissa’s lingerie, but then feels guilty and pushes it back in. She doesn’t feel the right to plunge so deeply into the intimate, shameful details of Melissa’s life. Cindy had already been unsettled enough by the sight of Melissa’s high heels, stored so carefully in their open individual boxes—she even had the original tissues and padding. Her shoes ran from pale neutral pumps, to the rare jogging and tennis shoes, Melissa’s only concession to an aging body that found it harder and harder to keep up with younger models.

And, of course, the high heels that had, for the first time in their acquaintance, earned Cindy’s disapproval, a slightest wrinkling of the nose and an almost imperceptible narrowing of the eyes. Upon discovering the heels—a pair of shocking red purples, size 7 and a half with garish oversized bows; anklet boots with leopard print; and that most egregious offense, black stiletto fuck-me-heels in disgusting patent leather. How could she. Melissa had just barely resisted the impulse to throw them into the trash can. It would have been too much effort, anyways, since there was not a trash receptacle in sight.

Indeed, she hadn’t even seen a garbage dump within driving distance of the house. It’s just too much for her, I suppose. She would have had to gotten botox every other day, from crinkling her nose all the time. Maybe her chaffeur drops of her secret stash of trash at a faraway dump, kept in a secret room behind the wine cellar until then. She laughs at this, no longer the quiet laugh she has carefully cultivated for Melissa but her harsh braying laugh from her childhood.

No garbage dump. I’m amazed she even has a toilet in her bathroom. You’d think, since she doesn’t eat and she doesn’t have an anus, she wouldn’t need one. Ha, ha, ha.

So where the hell am I going to get rid of this mess?

She looks over at the barely opened door of the bathroom, feeling miffed and put-upon. Sighing, she pads over silently to the duffel bag she has left just outside the bathroom, and unzips it. She pauses and considers its contents with the single-minded intensity that has brought her this far. Only further still, won't it now?

Finally she squats and fishes out a mini electric saw, a scalpel, an ice pick, a hammer and a triple sealed giant container of industrial strength acid. This is going to take some careful planning, she thinks. Good thing I had to work around the house and the butcher shop all the time, huh? It’s not as bad as you think, Melissa-hun. She wishes she could say this to Melissa; maybe she will once she gets in there. And these gigantic and inelegantly muscled arms that you so despaired of, well... It will help me take all the better care of yo, Grandma! she thinks, giggling. So, Grans, I’ll sculpt you into something— oh, I don’t know—something really, really kitsch.

Smiling grimly, she raises her hands to adjust her hair, then belatedly remembers the double layer of the hairnet and shower cap covering her head. Feeling rather sheepish, she tries to ignore the burning pinch in her fingertips, the top layer of skin shaved off and peeled with a weak acid solution. She puts her tools back in the duffel bag. Before heading for the door, she pauses, thinks. The she decisively steps over to the vanity, sweeping some of its contents into her bag, concentrating on the things that she has played with. Later on she would trash the room, much anguish that it would cost her. She will only take the most expensive things, and a few keepsakes for sentimental reasons—like the exotic French perfume she has nicknamed Shangri-La. Then there is also that set of slinky red lingerie that Melissa wore that drunken night by the pool. When she is done with her pickings, she shoulders the bag with gusto and pushes the door open with the gentlest push. Melissa, please pardon me if I take your diamonds. I don’t suppose you have a use for them anymore, though, do you?

No, you really aren’t looking too great. Whatever is the matter? You most definitely don’t look like you merit diamonds anymore, dear old girl!

Not even pearls.

Steppenwolf

- Herman Hesse

There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering on tip-toe. But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or if it cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.

deja vu-tilt it a little further

haven't we been here before?
this blurry friendless station
just two stops before despair.

this beginning of a tunnel, right before
vision turns sightless and cold
bleached, desaturated
ash gray monotones
foggy memories just barely
creaking along.

haven't we been here before?
this short sparse interlude
after which (surely) we must crash.

this expansive nothingness,
this perfect equilibrium where
none of us can find
the words to describe
the melting alone-ness
held in our hands,
how life creaks by weary and
unknowing.

the passing of the seconds,
the incessant ticking of the clock,
a blue-gray accompaniment to
our faded songs.

if we have, if we have
been here before
what do we do here still
immobile frozen lifeless
just barely surviving
wondering the breadth and extent
of our restless beings,
the tilt of our dreams sending out
our only beautiful memories
that which are lost?

what do we do here
still?

White Flood

Not being able to manage hope, instead she writes beautiful lies.

And please, tell me, did you ever believe them?

The sky is achingly white today. It isn’t the soft, downy whiteness of cotton candy and baby birds, but, instead, an absent, clean, forgetful kind of blankness that's almost painful and jarring to look at.

She finds that she cannot walk properly today. She has to watch the trees. The silhouettes of bare black winter branches menace her, jump out at her from the complacent bled-white sky. These trees, they mean to snatch her up, to entangle her within their fractal nets, consume her in order to spread their windless, leaveless bare existences a little further into the void. But why? What for? Aren't they lonely too? She asks herself. But, not finding an answer,

She shuffles about with her head tilted so far back that it gives her a painful crick in the neck, hoping against all hope that perhaps, just maybe, she will be able to avoid the self-negation emanating from the aching wintry clean indifference of it all, which inevitably pushes her even further into the isolation of her loss.

Confused, dazed, mouth permanently slack and open, she forgets when the last time she slept was. She wouldn’t be surprised to learn that she is finally losing it. I can’t remember where I’m going. Then again, I guess it doesn’t matter; I’m not really needed, here, or anywhere.

She tries to open up her dry, creaking chest, to take in a long, measured breath and clear out the permanent ache that has become part of the air she breathes--but realizes, not without dismay, that even the air here is odorless, stripped of memories and thoughts.

Everything, and anything, could be begun anew today.

It is a good day for a flood.

instantantaneous love, on sale, now $14.99, at your local grocery store

instantantaneous love, on sale, now $14.99, at your local grocery store

please make your intentions clear.
announcement at your local grocery store.
boston drawl over the PA,
tell me, you staying or going?

silent charades--I’m sorry, the job is minimum wage.
shadows against aisles of geometrically stacked
cans of Campbell's popart,
lowest price and best packaging gets the high prize:
declarations of love sold by the pound,
an invitation to your place--
take me home tonight. it's okay,
even if none of us can afford to be human.

a pyrrhic victory for blind and longing oedipus,
selling heart-shaped discount designer meat at the butcher's.
and for Elektra, too, clad in drab olive uniform mopping up the remnants
of tarnished, dripping dreams labeled; Love, Beauty and Grace.
(We made a fat-free salad out of those.

It tasted alright.)

re-runs are a must when all other scenes fail.
commodities can (and should) replace our broken hearts.
marketplace hymns to soothe minds burnt cold and hot
by neon glares and lights of winding foreign streets.
crumpled dreams laundered and repaired,
almost as good as new. next time, next time
we will get it right, even if our lines and actions are only,
exactly, the same.

reckless burning light, aided by your love for you
(throughout it all he watched himself in the mirror)
and my love for, well, what? for... an image of you
that could easily replace aloneness, but not quite--
something, almost, maybe... like... love,

only--

bought for the right price.

Le Petit Prince Revisited-A Play

Act 20, Scene 3/4

In Which The Little Prince is Found to Have Been Cheating on the Lovely Lady Rose With the Cleaning Lady Five and a Half Planets Down

A hot-pink and watermelon-green styrofoam planet. Above the stage, only half of the sphere, the other half supposedly underneath the stage. Volcanic looking large holes here and there. Baobab tree to the back right side of the planet (to the audience, the left.) Spotlight: A hip, stylish and well-manicured young man, in his mid to late twenties, stands impatiently at the front left of the stage, arms crossed and frowning. His mid-length honey blonde hair is spiked and gelled and he wears a forest green sports jacket over a dark gray cashmere sweater, with black and orange pin-stripe slacks and neon orange sneakers. He takes a drag from his lit cigarette, and lets out a long cloud of smoke. Second spotlight: In the mid-left of the stage, a woman stands encapsulated in a tall bell-shaped glass cage. She is sobbing and banging on the glass cage with both her hands in fists. She wears a stained, old wifebeater, no bra, likewise dirty boxers, socks, and her hair is a mess. Amidst the bird-nest like mess of her straggly hair, a single rose rises on a thin, thorny stem. The rose looks decidedly wilted. Her makeup is smeared and mascara runs from under her eyes. Outside the base of the glass cage, wet and used condoms and ripped condom packages lie littered.

Metrosexual man: (visibly annoyed) Look, I told you from the beginning it wasn't an exclusive thing. So what the hell are you getting all upset about?

Distraught witchy-looking woman in cage: (sobbing) Mmmgffffttthbblllddddd (she seems to be speaking but we cannot hear her.)

Metrosexual man sighs, picks up a remote from the floor, and pushes a button. Distraught woman's voice rings out shrilly.

Distraught woman: ... and you said you loved me! You said I was the only one! You said you weren't seeing her anymore! What the hell! What the hell! You stinking sonovabitch I hate you so much-- (keeps blabbering as the Metrosexual talks, but eventually voice dies down.)

Metrosexual: Yeah, yeah, yeah. (mutters under breath) Like I haven't heard that all before. (speaking to her again) Okay, well, listen, I'm going on a business trip down to Planet Earth, so I'm going to be gone, oh, I don't know, like indefinitely. I'll call you when I get there.

Distraught woman: Oy vey! You'll "call" me when you get there! Oh, yeah, is that the expression these days for I'm going to leave you in a stinking glass bell without water or food so that you'll be dead by the time I want to come back with a new girl? What's wrong with you? Don't you have a heart? I shoulda known when your pappy called to let you know your ma was dead and you never cried--

Metrosexual: Okay, you know what? Now you've gone too far. I was thinking about maybe arranging with the lamplighter four planets down to have you watered every once in a while, but you know what? Maybe I just will let you rot in that goddamned glass bell of yours! (agitated and angry, drops cigarette and grinds it into the ground.)

D.W.: I hope you get gonorrhea down there and die! I hope you get raped by a hairy, fat fairy! AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHH-- (continues screaming)

Metrosexual: I don't have to listen to this crap. (pushes button on remote again. D.W.'s voice is considerably muffled, but a faint echo of her scream can still be heard.) Fucking crazy bitch. Like I was ever gonna stay with her. 'Love' her? Of course I said that. We were having sex. Everybody knows you don't mean anything you say while you're having sex.

Gets cigarette pack out of jacket. takes one out, lights it, and takes a long drag. Looks a little less tense. Looks off into the distant horizon.

Jeeeesus.

Metrosexual turns back and looks at D.W., grimacing.

Man, that was so not worth it.

He shudders a bit, turns around with a pivot on his feet, and starts walking off the planet. A trap door opens in front of him when he is almost off the planet, and he descends into the darkness beneath him.

Narrator With the Deep Voice Who is Obviously Reading from a Script:
(obviously reading from a script)

"For millions of years flowers have been producing thorns. For millions of years sheep have been eating them all the same. And it's not serious, trying to understand why flowers go to such trouble to produce thorns that are good for nothing? It's not important, the war between the sheep and the flowers?... Suppose I happen to know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world except on my planet, one that a little sheep can wipe out in a single bite one morning, just like that, even without realizing what he's doing - that isn't important? If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars. He tells himself, 'My flower's up there somewhere...' But if the sheep eats the flower, then for him it's as if, suddenly, all the stars went out. And that isn't important?'"

Narrator WDVWORFS laughs.

Narrator WDVWORFS: (jovial) Psh. Suuuuuuure.... 'Suppose I happen to know a unique flower, one that exists nowhere in the world except on my planet... Someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars... He tells himself, "My flower's up there somewhere..." (in squeaky, mocking voice) Isn't that important? Isn't that important?'

(reverts to normal, deep, reading from a script voice)

Keep on dreaming.

This has been an Asteroid B-612 production.

the unbearable lightness of being

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
—t. s. eliott, Hollow Men

uno
he gets hit by a car.

dos
she gets hit by a car.

tres
it gets hit by a car.

cuatro
i get hit by a car.

cinco
you get hit by a car.

y el ultimo.
we all die.

el fin.

Quo Vadis, Quo Vadis?

A Procession of (funeral) Homes

1986-1988: Dad, Mom, Brother, Me Flower Road
1988-1990: Dad, Mom, Brother, Me We’ve all forgotten where
1990-1992: Dad, Mom, Brother, Me Post Park Apartment
1992-1996: Dad, Mom, Brother, Me Daewoo Apt.; Greentowne Apt.
1996-1998: Dad, Mom, Brother, Me Summer Ridge Apt.
1998-2001: Dad, Mom, Me Greentowne Apt.
Brother Vassar College
2001-2002: Me Nameless One-Room Flat; Garam Apt.;
½ Dad Samsung Hospital, Cancer Ward
½ Brother Vassar College
½ Dad, ½ Brother, Mom Greentowne Apt.
2002-2004: Mom, Me Garam Apt.
Brother Vassar College
< ? > Dad Where?
2004-2006: Mom, Brother, Me Spencer View Apt.
< ? > ? Where? Who?
2006- : Me
Mom, Brother Preston’s Crossing Apt.
< ? > ? Who’s this? I don’t really remember him anymore.

Three Selections

1997 Atlanta, Georgia
We’ve been back in Georgia for a year now. As always, we’re drifting apart. During the day, Dad’s holed up at the university, wielding his lab coat and professor’s ID like a bayonet to keep people away, always smiling and aloof. Apparently, he does lab experiments on the growth of crystals and writes papers in science journals, for the good of science and mankind. As soon as he’s back home, he walks away into his study where, behind a closed door, he can escape our neediness and human fallibility. He has the habitual loneliness of a hermit disenchanted with the world—I cannot imagine him ever being a child. Mother works at the preschool, which she hates, but as with everything she hates, she stays with it. When she gets home, she’s bitter and snappy, and she draws away angrily whenever Dad touches her or tries to hug her. Other than her part-time job at the preschool, she spends all day long being a good Christian. She reads the Bible, sings gospel songs, or prays—prays, rocking back and forth on her heels, crying, sobbing, screaming that she can’t deal with any one of us anymore. She calls out to Jesus to please come and get her, please. She often tells us that she is waiting for the Apocalypse to come, so that she can get some rest at last, Sweet rest, please, Jesus. At church, during sermons, she raises her arms to God, swaying like a beautiful willow tree; this is the only time I see her at peace, smiling, happy. As soon as service is over, she wilts like a delicate flower left out in the midday sun for too long. She hurries back home as soon as she can, trying to avoid acquaintances and friends. I am not sure what my brother does with his time, other than that he plays computer games after school. I don’t talk to him, and we don’t see each other very much except for when Mom and Dad are fighting. Those times he always comes to my room, talking loud and fast so he won’t have to hear them. I let him talk, not listening, as I stare outside the window into the dark streets, wishing I could walk away from it all.

2001 Seoul, Korea
I’m fifteen, and I live in Seoul now. I’ve moved because I’m going to a magnet high school in the city. The one-room flat that I live in is claustrophobic, and it’s an hour’s ride away from my school, but it was the only place we could afford. My mom comes over on the weekends with food. Sometimes she talks, or tries to smile, but most of the times she looks grim and defeated. At night, after I’ve unlocked the door and let myself in, I stare out the window, looking at the white walls and fenced-up windows of the mental hospital opposite my flat. On the weekends, when I’ve just come back from visiting Dad at the cancer ward, I think about checking myself into that place, if only to get some rest. My schedule is set and sacred; I spend two hours a day on the subway, fifteen hours at school—the rest of the time I watch Dad die, each and every second bringing him closer to his grave. For the first time in three years, Brother leaves college to come live with us. Strangely enough, suddenly we find ourselves together, united by a common goal—my father, to die, and the three of us, to watch him go…

2005 Eugene, Oregon
There are empty spaces everywhere. For the first time in a long while, we’re all living under one roof… except, there’s one less of us (but I’m not supposed to mention this.) I keep myself busy so that I don’t have to think about where he is, if anywhere. Sometimes, I can’t even remember who he is. Still, when I hear the approaching footsteps of a man, heavy and slow, I expect him to be standing there in the open doorway. But instead of him, with his closed-off smile that’s so beautiful and tentative, it is only my brother, looking fazed, tired and confused by the unexpected, heavy responsibility of being the new head of the household. (He’s only twenty-three. This, too, I am not supposed to mention.) As at the doorway, there’s an empty space at the dining table, where he used to sit. Even though we’ve shoved it up against the wall so we wouldn’t have to remember, sometimes I can almost see his ghost sitting there, looking off into the distance while we try to draw him in into our conversation. At night, when I say goodnight to Mom, I feel the void of his life in the old, tired, lonely way she curls up in bed, trying to take up as little space possible now that all around her is the vacuum of a man who is never coming back. We are haunted in this place we call our home, riddled by empty spaces, blindly trying to fill them up by anger, laughter or worry, while his ghostly whispers keep us awake at night and trouble our dreams.

Talk to Me

Even the rabid bunny man deserves a little love.

june nineteenth. year two thousand and seven of our lord.

checkmate: black

We’ve been dreaming all night long. It’s true: We’ve been dreaming all night long. And, believe me, there is no shame in that—no matter what they say.

-Hey Honey, how’ve you been?
-As well as can be expected.
-What do you mean?
-I’ve been waiting around for your phone call everyday, you know. You never called.
-But, sweetie, it’s just a few minutes’ ride. Why couldn’t you have just come over?
-Because I wanted to hear your voice.
-Yeah. That’s what I’m saying.
-I didn’t say that I wanted to see you.
-… Look. You can’t keep acting like this.
-Why not?
-Because I’m not going to love you forever.

It’s not you I’ve walked this long to see, but since he is Out at the Moment I guess I will have to convince myself It Was You All Along.

Russian Roulette...blank

He plays the game as well as he can, considering. It’s not much, but we all know that’s the best he can do. Can you blame him? He wants to be happy. Where’s the sin in that? Tell me, where’s the sin in that? Don’t we all want to be happy? Don’t we all need to be happy?

Don’t you need to be happy?

Talk to Me

how often do you do it with her? did you tell her you have a girlfriend? or am i not even that. did you do it with her on the futon or on the bed? how many condoms did you go through? did she scream or did she squeal or was she one of those silent suffering types. how did you like it. was it better than it was with me. did she give you a blow job. did you give her oral. how big were her breasts? was she thin or was she big. was she pretty. was she prettier than me? do you want to keep her? if it was me and her who’d you choose.

what would you do if she got pregnant. what would you do if i got pregnant. what kind of a man are you. would you fall silent would you handle it well would you fork over the abortion money and then run away uncomfortable pretend you never knew me (her) would you try to do the honorable thing even though it will kill your free soul at first of course and then after a few years of marriage it would deteriorate. you would of course find some pretty girl and you would smile at her and lean in close it would be the coffee shop maybe and with your hand in your pocket you would take your wedding ring off and she would notice the tan line on your finger but she would pretend she doesnt notice. you would keep coming home later and later and i would know what is going on (she wouldnt) but then i would be caught in inertia and i would maybe cry but most probably not. most probably i would just stare outside the window in a darkened room sigh and accept it the dirty screaming baby the aching breasts the shapeless body the lost girlhood the long nights lying awake and the murderous jealousy inside my heart. i would just sit there and stare outside the window and watch the birds fly away free and beautiful and i think i might silently hate you and her but i’d most likely hate myself more.

why would you do that to me. why do you do this to me. why do you make me wither inside myself and why do you give me nightmares instead of romantic dreams. why does every minute of my waking life have to be spent in worries about you. why cant i just walk away. i should just walk away. i should just leave you while i can. before you do it. i should. and. i know i should. i should have known when they said you were just another dirt bag just another fuck up. i know im just being played but i still want to hope. but i know i shouldn’t. i wont be able to respect myself if i found out after all you you didnt give a shit because i already knew i knew and i shouldve stopped it when i couldve but i didnt because im stupid and im weak and i need to stop it right now.

im going to stop it right now.

im going to say goodbye.

Talk to Me... try a little harder.

she ended it today.

i don’t understand why.

i thought she loved me.

Russian Roulette...BANG

She plays the game as well as she can, considering. It’s not much, but we all know that’s the best she can do. Can you blame her? She wants to be safe. Where’s the sin in that? Tell me, where’s the sin in that? Don’t we all want be safe? Don’t we all need to be safe?

Don’t you need to be safe?


checkmate: white

I’ve been dreaming all my life. It’s true: I’ve been dreaming all my life. And, believe me, I wish I hadn’t—no matter what I’ve said.

-Hey Honey, how’ve you been?
-Good. How’ve you been?
-...Alright, I guess.
-Hey, listen. Can I come over on Saturday to move my stuff out?
-...
-I told you I’m interviewing for a new firm, right? I need to get all my portfolio stuff and my equipment.
-Saturday, huh.
-Saturday.
-So that’s the way it is.
-What do you mean?
-Click

It was you I walked all this way to see, but since I can’t hold on to you I guess I will have to convince myself It Was Him All Along.

Noxious Noxious

dear, dear, dear, like i told you, i simply don't care anymore.

don't call me again.

“I’m practicing agoraphobia today,” he says, his thin, uneven voice almost cracking—almost, but not quite.

He reminds her of dying autumn days easing into the very first of winter; of thin, brittle ice sitting uneasy, without substance, on the surface of a lake.

She tries to smile, but finding it impossible, only manages a grimace turned upside-down. Even that small gesture of forced warmth, she can't hold onto; it slips away almost instantly. She stands, a silhouette framed in the doorway, backlit, dark, featureless. She watches him folded in upon himself like a tall, gaunt and broken doll, ridiculous and pathetic; the grimace-smile drains out of her face until there’s nothing but cold, fishlike deadness in her completely still face.

He crumples in upon himself even further. Garbage ready to be thrown away into the compost. She catches her breath, chokes back the words—not out of mercy, but simply because experience has taught her better; it won't do any good.

“Aren’t you going out today?” he asks, voice timorous and trembling. The frightened, childish obsequiousness of his voice, meant to placate, does the exact opposite, as it usually does. She barely holds back a snarl, feeling the muscles of her face tense up as her usual mask of carefully composed blankness is almost peeled away, leaving her bare, exposed, and barbarous. He blanches, parchment white, bone white.

He is ugly, like this.

She feels a shooting pain in her temples.

“I’m not sure. Let’s see how you’re feeling first. If you’re up to a walk, we’ll take a walk together, around the park or something, okay?” She tries to make her voice gentle, like she’s talking to a big, tall, monstrously old and helpless infant. Instead, the forced softness of her voice only highlights the submerged anger in her voice, and he cringes; her voice, a blade cutting into his soft, useless, limpid flesh; her voice, boots stomping into the thin, brittle ice of his being, liberating him of that fragile cohesion which barely, just barely, holds the fragments of his mind together.

“I can’t. It’s too bright today. They’ll see me. I can’t let them see me.” He whispers, turning away from her and burying his head in the mound of fleece blankets piled high all around him. She takes in a jagged, short sharp breath; forces it out just as quickly. She stomps out; slams the door behind her.

Inside the room, he wilts, clutches the soft warmth of the blankets, his very own only armor and barricade; lets out a low, pained cry. He moans, rocks back and forth; hits himself all over with trembling balled fists.

From down the hall, she hears him keen—thinks she hears him keen—“If you hate me so much, why don’t you just kill me?” his voice trailing away with the slow weight of dragged feet and limp arms.

She stops dead in her track, as if those words had corporeal substance, weight and velocity; as if they had crashed into her, breaking upon impact.

Her breathing quickens, roughens, to the beat of her rushing blood. The sound of which, she can even hear in her head, until each inhalation, each exhalation, scratches, burns the insides of her lungs. She bites down hard on her lips; barely succeeds in holding back a scream.

She punches the wall, hard. Once, twice—slow at first. She does not realize what she is doing; but then, faster, faster. One, two, three, four… five six seven eight… nine ten eleventwelvethirteenfourte

en; until she loses count; her fists bruising the wall the walls bruising her fist she can't tell; pain shooting up and down her fists arms, everywhere; but unnoticed. Just, somehow, trying to get the sickness out of herself, out of the house, out of him—as though, with her arms flailing, flailing—she, barely holding back a scream (which if she could, would, could, let out, then, this scream, which she wouldn’t ever be able to stop); if she could, would, if she could just beat it out of herself, out of him, if she, could, end this, end this, end this all, she would…. She would…

But can’t. Can’t.

And she pounds her fists against the wall. But she—end it. Can’t. And punches. Keeps punching. Until her arms can’t move anymore; won’t. And even if she doesn’t notice the pain—refuses to notice the pain—her arms, they refuse the pain; swing limp at her sides. She doubles over, as though eaten inside out by the same old familiar empty weary rage.

She, cries, sobs, low keening wails, each drawn out of her from deep down, from deep within. The universe is trying to breathe her in; instead of her breathing of the world, the world breathes of her; as if her screams, her rage, her sorrow, her despair, has become the air which the world breathes in, just to limp along its weary path. The world, which sucks her in sucks her in; and she, forcing breath out; as if she could, as if she could perhaps possibly just possibly perhaps throw out everything within her that needs to be thrown out; with each sob, each moan, each keening wail, throw out that which constitutes her consciousness, her mind, her being—in those cries, as if she could, she would, throw it all out; stand there blank, and empty, but at least finally freed of the pain and guilt and failure that has come to be the sum of her existence.

But she can’t.

Can’t.

So, like every other day, she stands there helpless, weak, practicing her fears of this noxious world; this gray eternity, which is devoid of salvation, of possibilities, of miracles, this our very own world lost and thrown away like so much dirt, like so much garbage. She practices, just to get along. To survive. And the world, bruised, stripped of grace and dignity, limps on, still.

silver finned fish ride the nights of loneliness

hermitage. ah, ah, ah

they think they can outrun us. they think but they are wrong. we are, we always were, and we always will be. we, the one and all, the all and one, endless, forever, riding, singing,

No, you will not outrun us- no, you will not.

in the end, you, too, you, the beautiful,

must die.

you,

must, die.




(and then they will mourn you.)

and then they will mourn you

quo vadis?

i.
"grief"

i keep seeing faces like yours
voices likes yours
shadows like yours
but when i turn around
it's just another stranger

and then
i start
forgetting
your name.

ii.
"elegy"

i saw a movie today
i heard a joke today
i read a story today
i listened to a song today

that i thought you might like.

i made a note to myself to remember to tell you
and then i remembered

you're not here anymore.

the gutter nights, which stole away too fast, and too far-

please do not park here because it is cramped quarters, even for me.

Bent double over the gutter, she shivers, her high heels half a size too big and her skirt an inch too short. He half-heartedly pats her on the back, wondering if he’ll be able to bring her back to his flat tonight, if he even wants to. She tries to discard the fever within herself, while the night lights glitter blinding bright into her stinging eyes. People pass by without seeing, that famous city-blindness, and already she can feel the cold air-conditioned loneliness of the empty subway ride back home, with its torn vinyl-seating and graffitied metal walls.

She can see it, feel it, know it before it even occurs, because all this has happened a million times and more before, already. The grinding emptiness will shoot up from behind her eyelids as she sits with her eyes closed, feeling almost weightless and invisible, but when she opens her eyes, her reflection will inevitably stare back at her from the inky jet black windows, with the mascara running and the lipstick bleeding, this unknowable mysterious self rushing and rushing and rushing past the tunnel lights glinting, glinting, glinting left to right left to right passing each and every unnamed station, and already she can see herself sitting there in that empty train as she retches into the gutter, her trembling fingers digging deep into her knees as she tries to keep herself from falling over, and over, and over again…

Her body, which tries to disengage: Her innards, her memories, everything wishing to escape her, only to lie shining, glittering, steaming and resentful on the rusty rot of the gutter. As she leans over, she imagines her taut muscles snapping, unwinding from the bones to rush out and away from her, beginning an endless joyful useless liberation until the skin, the hair, the muscles, the innards, everything will be gone, all gone, until she will be left just a glittering crystalline skeleton, free at last.

Weightless, she would dance, jump, cavort in the empty night sky. At last, she would finally mean the acidic, exuberant, empty skeletal grin that has been etched into her mask-face for so long out of the necessity of perpetual despair.

Free of flesh, of life, she would jump into the air. Weightless, she would hang there, crucified out of her own will, held motionless and fixed by the sheer power of her desire to be undone. In that empty night sky, she would laugh, laugh so hard, so loud that the moon would shake and the stars fall and shatter on this dry earth.

And this, this is what she dreams of as she retches retches retches into the wet rotting streets of Seoul, as the muscles, contracting, squeeze out her empty guts; a kind of early demise within her being, as she, feverish, almost cries for the sheer incomprehensibility of it all, but holds back, holds it in as she tries, fruitlessly, to drive out the sickness within herself…

i—thee.thine—tryin'

i—thee—thine: blind; deaf; mute—still walk, unfine—'tis mine...

trickeriesdeceits and bleached bone-white lies.

this is all we've got. this is all we got to, to, to make it work, this, this is all we got; we still got miles and miles to go, but, but we're, we're running out of rhymes. we're running out of dimes. the mutual rhythm's starting to falter, it falters itfaltersitfalters—we can't make them bluebirds sing no more. they voices lost in the nowhere between you and me, where we started growing a little closer but then, but then, that little-closer—died. it died. it finally died. we forgot to water it, and it died. it's true, it died.

1. LONELY to walk 'neath these blue-grey skies. jokes would be easier, by far, but time for jokes, is past. being with you, lonelier than without—fact enough to make me want to drown without sound, clear glass underwater. my voice only an echo thrown (useless) to narcissus, 'tis not sure whether he is you or i; but narcissus one of us must be, for then why else our voices do not reach each others' hearts.

To add insult to injury, forced laughter, too—and too-still smiles. say cheese—click, shudder—the obnoxious burst of the flashlight—which reminds you of the death, of a star.

(You wonder if the nazarene's star, the star of the wisemen, the messiah's angel, was meant to die, to die to save us all. (suddenly BAM and all dead) and what cruelty be it that these innocents suddenly GONE in the blink of an eye a wink and then GONE and ... but then the sinners were saved, so perhaps all was well.)

2. HOW am i. (good, fine, thank you.) how are you. (good, fine, nice?) let us have a sincere conversation. let us bare our beating hearts to each other. ha, ha, ha—no, it's true, that's a lie. we've come too far and near to want to risk such things. so yes, here is another fine joke—i bought it very cheap at an antique shop, proud of its heritage, a very fine antique shoppe—and i am glad you like it. i like your laughter. i think you are—what do you say these days, cool?—yes, cool. we are both—cool. that is good to know. i am fondly affectionate of you. i am glad that you are lonely enough to be fondly affectionate of me as well. two incompletes added together make a bigger incomplete. but then again i am not a mathematician, you are—so perhaps you know better.

What would you like to know about me? throw out a dozen questions. better yet, make it twenty—do you know what twenty questions is? okay, i will trade you a question for a question. what is the color of your soul? what mean this day to you? but then again, your heart is simple and pure (is it? is it pure? really?), so perhaps i should start with smaller things. how was your day. really. is that so. (and let your voice lull me into a fine stupor, quite delicious, but in my heart of hearts i grow more and more anxious—)

What is it that you want? that's my question to you. what would you like from me? would you like to make a check list? have you read any self-help books on mate-selection and mate-handling? they suggest that you come up with a list of must-have's and can't-stand's. you are going shopping, remeber; get the best for the cheapest price. if you get one that's the closest to your ideal, then you won't have to make it bleed too much (hopefully not more than a pound, dear shylock) should you wish to take too much out of its soul and exchange for it your own. (after all narcissus, you are who you are and you must love yourself—)

3. BUT back to your checklist. perhaps it looks something like this:

1. warmth in bed
2. less loneliness—less, because total banishment is not to be expected
3. shared (forced?) jokes and laughter
4. lovelier dreams

or perhaps not. i suppose that would require a poet's soul and neither you nor i lead a poet's life. but dream in your head what you will and bring that shopping list to me; do i suffice? for my price, am i good enough? do i make you feel good enough about yourself? am i not too costly? do i make you happy enough? am i pretty enough? am i good enough in bed? or too good? what would you say? what would you say? what do you want?

And what want i? does it matter? wither go i? this way or that way? i drift. directionless, because, as you know, i have no map. even if i did, what use? i cannot read. constantly lose, i, as well you many know. so what use have i for directions and advice and well-meaning friends and self-help books and god and whatever else the light of the world throws at me? so you. are there. and that is enough. probably. perhaps. (should be enough.) and wither go i? this way or that way? drifting, whichever way you want is what i want because i don't—really—want. my dreams too fast turn into nightmares, so i've stopped dreaming. dreaming wanting asking. all stopped. so whatever you give, i take, thank you. thank you very much.

4. REQUIRE no sacrifices and give none. bleeding isn't fair game. distant closeness is enough. what is affection? i think i have forgotten. sorry, i won't be surprised if my approximation isn't close enough to yours. whatever you give to me i will mirror back to you. that's all i know how to do.

And what for to speak i. know i that thou dost not listen but still speak i to thee, to thee my lord. my lord my lord my lord. thy face blurring together with his and some object of affection, someone to love, that would be enough in this lonely trying life, but lord, wither goeth my heart? that i threw away? i forget, i know not, i am not sure. i am sorry, i whisper, but that's not enough you say and that's the last time you turn away from me. i've seen this all before. it's deja-vu; regression on repeat. i never learn my lessons. this life and thousands past. same old dance, can't ever get quite close enough.

Dance solo—dance free—dance lonely—dance me—dance sorrow... can't dance, we.

You will have to try just a little bit harder, if you wish to hear the caged bird sing.

Ms Lulu's Day of the Locust: When the Anchovies Came Home

"I think you have a fever,” he says. His rough and calloused hand trails down her puffy, reddened face. His fingers come to rest upon her dry and cracked lips, where they travel her lips like foreign territory—a little anxious, a little tentative, but mostly curious. When he reaches down to kiss her, soft and dry, she is not surprised at all.

While he undresses her, she looks out the window. The night is blank and indifferent, the way it often is. A star blinks into view, as he enters her; when she looks again, it is gone. She feels a little empty.

‘I think we’ve been here before,’ she says, but he doesn’t hear her. She mouths more such nonsense into the silent night. The jet black inky swathe of darkness neither agrees nor disagrees; it sparkles wet stars and an unblinking moon, careless and unmoved. She reaches out and plucks the moon from the sky. In the night suddenly gone darks she bites off and chews, bites off and chews its silky silver light.

She feels his heart thumping wild and erratic against her breast, and he moans whispers dark and warm against her ear lobes. She looks out the window again. The moon is back where it used to be, as though she had never plucked it, never ate of it. She feels a sharp pang, like regret, and cries out without thinking.

‘Am I hurting you?’ he asks, concerned. His furrowed, frowning face looks strangely familiar and repetitious. She feels slightly ridiculous. She shakes her head, side to side, but he continues to look concerned and stops. His fingers trail her cheeks again, wet, and she realizes she is crying. Without a word, he rolls off of her, tucks her into the blanket. He rolls over onto his side, facing away from her.

He soon falls asleep, his breathing even and soft.

She sniffles quietly, hoping she won’t wake him up.

Eventually she falls asleep as well.


The days are distant and long. Her body grows heavier and heavier and heavier. She feels like a balloon. She feels like there is some mean, nasty kid filling her up with water, in order to throw her against a neighbor’s car, letting her burst all fluid and fat against the cold metal surface. She doesn’t know why this is.

He comes to visit her twice a week. He brings her gifts. At first it is flowers, but she cannot stop sneezing. Then he starts bringing her chocolates, but it makes her retch. He looks more and more distraught, more and more miserable, that she feels like smiling and eating the damn things just to make him smile again, but she can’t help it. Anything except for anchovies makes her nauseous. She’d spend the whole day retching if it weren’t for anchovies.

He starts bringing her anchovies.

She offers him some, but he declines.

He is a vegetarian.

She has an empty potato chip bag filled with anchovies, and brings it along wherever she goes in the apartment. In the kitchen, on the sofa, on the toilet seat, she munches on them all day long.

He is very nice to her these days. She likes that. He only occasionally gets on top of her and does his business in her; mostly he just holds her and coos nonsense songs into her stomach. Or he takes her into his lap and rocks her back and forth, like she is a baby.

She likes that.

‘I love you,’ he tells her one day, and she just smiles at him because she doesn’t know what to say. She would say ‘I love you too,’ but her father has beaten the lying out of her with his leather belt. Instead, she says, ‘I want to listen to some music.’

He gets out of bed, and pads over to the CD player all naked and pale. The moonlight streams silver and blue over his long, skinny body. For a second she feels it is the most ridiculous thing she has ever seen in the world. She shakes her head, feeling disloyal for some reason, and burrows her head in her knees. He obligingly puts on a CD of nursery rhymes, his latest gift to her along with a big container of anchovies.

She munches on the anchovies while he kisses her stomach and rubs his whiskery face all over it. She feels light, very light. She also feels very far, far away. She wriggles her toes just to be sure she isn’t losing touch. She rubs her heels together, and says, ‘I’m never going home, I’m never going home, I’m never going home.’

She floats on a sea of happiness.

‘I love you so much,’ he sighs against her stomach, and she just keeps munching on the anchovies.

They are the only thing in the whole world that she loves.

Today, Too, Marguerita—Today, Too, I Have Failed

It’s not like you care, you mutter,
Swinging thin scabbed legs on the bench,
Jumping down as though from afar.

I don’t love you, I repeat, and you
Don’t hear me. I don’t speak again and you
Look like you will cry. It’s not like you care,
You sigh, and I don’t know what to say.
It really isn’t like I care, and belaboring the point
Will just make us tired, already. You look like you
Want a little more, but I’m poured out empty, and you
Sit there sulking. Like a little child. Which, I suppose,
You are—a little, hungry child.

This starry, starry night;
You blow the dandelions into
Surprised strangers’ faces,
Puff-puff-puff-puff..., another chance, to try.
I didn’t mean to, I say, kicking the pebbles to the side,
Wishing you weren’t there. It’s enough, I whisper to myself,
This is quite enough. You
Don’t take my cue, you just sit there,
Reproachful as you dare.
(I don’t know what to do.)

Give me a little more, you cry, wordlessly
Hands held, in broken prayer. I
Am not a savior, I never learned to lie
That well. I grimace, look away embarrassed,
Try to toss a joke, fall flat. It goes like this:
Mary had a little lamb, a little lamb, a little lamb…
I dare say she lost it on purpose... Sometimes it gets
Too heavy, too dark, too quick—. Like this.

You, eagerly. I, back off; and it’s back and forth
Back and forth forever on repeat; until I can
Summon the courage to permanently retreat,
But how can I. you are me are you to be. Sweet
Love that I cannot give, perhaps I can fill with
Bitter-sweet persimmons, and orange-brown scents
To fill the air. Like this. Like this, Marguerita, like this;
Today, too, I have failed. Just like you. To love you.

Conspiratorial Mutterings and Tightly Wound-Up Echoes

uno

We take the ride downtown. My muscles are aching from working out at the gym too long. I don't know who I'm trying to impress, anyways; certainly, not you. You said you'd like to go see the beach, but I just kind of looked off to the side without saying anything. You hurriedly told me that the weather looked bad anyways; we might as well stay indoors. So, here we are.

We take the light rail and there is a man with no legs dragging himself through the train. I ignore him, because that's what I do, I always ignore people like that. You, however, hurriedly open up your wallet and give him a five and some change, upending your wallet even to empty it of any reluctant coins. I fidget. You pretend nothing happened and the train moans and creaks along conspiratorially. You talk about school and work and life and I half-listen, nodding and inserting uh-huhs and aha's where it seems appropriate. You like to talk. I don't like to listen, not very much, but I've got nothing better to do. Outside the dirty windows, smoky gray plumes rise from the three red and white striped towers of the shoe factory, hazily dancing against a clear blue summer sky. The weather looks bad, indeed.

I stare outside like that for a while, and when the silence grows thick I realize with a start that you aren't talking anymore. "Hmm?" I ask, slowly turning around to look at you. There is a shy, hesitant smile on your lips and for a moment I ache. "I'm glad we didn't go to the beach," you repeat. "I think it's going to rain."

I shrug.

dos

"Why can't I just have what I want?" I say, slamming the cupboard shut. I grab the can of tomato and basil tuna and half toss it, half throw it at her. She catches it smoothly, irritating me.

"Because sometimes what you want isn't good for you," she says, leaning against the counter tops and shrugging unconcerned. What I wouldn't give to hit her; wipe that smug expression from her face.

"You do realize we're just going in circles? We're having the same argument we've been having for the last week?" I say, attacking the salad greens with the big wooden mixing forks. The green looks almost virulent against the orange and red striped plastic bowl and I'm not sure I want to eat it when I'm done. Oh well.

"What the hell are you trying to do, kill the salad?" she says, annoyed. "And to answer your question, if you'd just accept what I'm saying, we could move on to more pleasant subjects. Like, oh, I don't know, how you're acting like a little baby?" She looks like she's about to say something more, but she looks at me, bites her lips and stops.

"And just who the fuck do you think you are? My conscience?" I spit out.

"Actually, I am. And I'm getting tired of trying to convince you of something you already goddamned well know is true. Also, I'm kind of tired of trying to open this fucking tuna can so you can do that all by your lonesome, as well. I think it's time for some soul vacation," she says, and just like that, poof, she's gone. I realize I've cut my fingers on the half-opened sharp edge of the tuna can and curse. The blood is red and thick and it drips into the salad. The salad looks truly unappetizing.

tres

Winter. The winters go by so quickly. Then again, so do the summers, the falls, the springs. All year long, the years go by so quickly; if you were to stop for a second and take a look behind, you'd feel dizzy, like you were standing at the top of an unending cliff looking down, down down. But you don't. That's your secret to survival; you never look behind, you only look forward. It is what makes you strong, or at least, it is what keeps you going when you've run out of options. You try to temper your need for the future with tolerance for the present, but you really just don't have it in you to care much for the aches and pains of today. You'd like to make it all better before you ever decide to live. So you screw your eyes shut and blindly grope around, hoping to the high heavens that you won't damage anything permanently.

Sometimes, of course, you do. But even when you do, the winters go by so quickly and the summers, and the falls, and the springs as well. If you just wait for a second, hold another breath, the moment passes and another moment gone bad replaces it. It gives you the illusion of momentum, of control, that you are getting things done. What you are getting done, you have no idea, nor does it matter. But life is life is life, and who really cares if this isn't quite the life you pictured? It is a life, anyways, and you are surviving, if nothing else. That is all that really matters. It's all you can afford to care about, anyways. "Carpe diem," you answer when somebody asks you what your motto is, but to be honest you haven't got a clue.

It goes like this; the songs that you've garnered are not ones you sing. (Do you sing, anyways?) The melodies, the rhythms, the down-beats and the up-beats, you have no idea how to make it all come together; you're floundering, you're drowning in the sea of noise you did not help to create. It rushes all past you, a dizzying whirl of faces, voices, fumblings and mumblings. Unfortunately, you do not know how to make music. You don't know how to listen, even. So you don't look behind, because if you did you'd tilt forward and start falling from that lonely high summit of yours, to never, ever stop. And this, this is unacceptable, because you know anyone who could have ever caught and arrested your fall, you have felled on that private nightmare battlefield of yours. They will never rise to your rescue again. So you, today too, screw your eyes shut, hope for the best, and let the days flow loose and wasted from your fingers.

"Carpe diem," indeed.

Lie to Me

Tell me your little lies.
Let me dream on...
Please.

Tell me that all will be right
That our parents will never
do us any harm
That you only mean me
good
That our days will never end.

I don’t want to look at the
dark night sky
I don’t want to feel lonely
because you’re gone
I don’t want to care about the
people dying inside those lonely white walls
Let me think of nice things

Like maybe the way moonlight
glistens on the raindrops
hanging onto the leaves
of summer night

Like maybe the way you’d smile
at me, like you’d never seen
anything more beautiful,
anything more precious

Like maybe the way you used to be
alive, and free of little
things that corrupt and
kill the body of the one
I used to love, and,
perhaps
still do.

How Often Have I Lain Beneath Rain

How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof,
thinking of home. --As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner

I never wanted life to be a series of forever afters.

why, then, does it hurt so much when it's not?

i always think i've become an adult, finally, at last, until i'm proven otherwise. woke up this morning with tears in my eyes, a shout in my mind saying "please no not again let me stay just this time for once."

if i had raised my voice and shouted out to you, would things have been different?

somehow, i doubt it.

can i, please, just this once, stay?

please?

This Cruel and Unusual Business, Life

The Business of Living
—and Why It is Futile, Unusual and Cruel

And there is nothing new under the sun.
—King Solomon, Ecclesiastes 1:9

1. THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING

When I was younger, I was a fool.

Not as foolish as others, perhaps—but still, a tremendous fool. Youth is synonymous with foolishness, and if you do not believe that—

Well then, you must still be young.

So.

Being a fool, I believed most of what the other fools believed in. (It is but part of the definition.)

What is the goal of life? I asked myself, like a thousand, million other fools.

In and of itself, the question is not particularly foolish, if not especially wise. Besides, it is a function of the human heart, and no amount of aging or knowing better will stop you from asking that eternal same old question of yourself. (What do you think religion is about?)

What is the goal of life?

Being happy, isn’t it?

That’s what the goal of life is, right? Being happy. And if you haven’t the fortune, then, to become happy. That was the only conclusion I could come to then, and that’s the only conclusion I’ve arrived at now.

So. How can you be happy? (How can I be happy?) How can you (I) carve out a better life for your(my)self?

That’s all I’ve ever wanted, from the time I was young. Surrounded by gloom and misery outside and inside, I wished for happiness with a fervency that would have allowed me to kill. And I knew I could have it—why not?—I deserved it. And certainly, with hard work and a little luck—

The first thing you need do in order to be happy, is to leave the past behind. That is what I have learned. That is my hard earned truth, that which I have lived, bled and cried for.

This, however, is impossible.

Perhaps that is why it is impossible to be happy.


2. THINGS FALL APART

Sex was really easy. There was sex everywhere. It didn't really mean too much. Love, love was the hard thing to find. Even if you were looking for it, which not too many people were. And even if you found it, which not too many people did, even if it was right there in front of you. No; how could you see it with all the sex in the way?
—T.J., from “Gia,” 1992


In a perfect perfect world you could fuck people without giving them a piece of your heart. And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.

Until walking (walking? calling?) on your own is unsupportable.

—Neil Gaiman, in the story “Bitter Grounds,” of Fragile Things

When I was younger, like many other Americans I believed in the mission of self-improvement. Life could be better. I could tell. With a little hard work, ingenuity, I would relinquish the hold the past had on me. I would forgive, forget, and be healed. I would live fully in the present and in the future, realize my full self-potential.

What an idiot was I.

I believed in everything my therapist said. Why wouldn’t I? Gods, all of them, demi-gods ruling over us rustics, nodding their thick-spectacled nods, bestowing their knowing analyses like blessings. Millions of other fine upstanding citizens were going along with me, with them, so I felt I had a warranty, a guarantee. 100% refund if not fully satisfied.

So:

I believed. Once I let go of my childhood wounds, I would be ok. Once I forgave my parents but at the same time fully recognized the damage they had done me, I would heal. Once I got over my fear of rejection, once I worked through my commitment issues, once I abolished the negative self-talk, the dark rank emptiness inside would disappear. I would be filled with light. With happiness. So I talked things out, dutifully doled out the cash, and scheduled myself for the next vetting. I believed that my misery was a unique phenomenon, for although they all took great care to remind me that pain is a part of life, that I wasn’t in it alone, the assumption was that my unique circumstances had brought about my unique pain. It amounts to the same thing in the end.

Want to know something I’ve learned over the years?

It’s all bullshit.

Life is the business of hurting.

The business of hurting is life.

So what if your cold, volatile mother and your cold, distant father left you with a fear of rejection and a dread of criticism? If not that, it would be something else. What’s more, that will always be true, even in the future, even as you grow up and are no longer at the mercies of powerful adults—if not that, then something else.

I know, I know, I know. I watched all those self-help talk shows too. I read all the self-help books, the magazines. Yes, I know. We repeatedly live out past traumas in an effort to show ourselves that we can do it better this time. We develop defense mechanisms in order to compensate for the weakness and vulnerability inside.

So what?

(You think knowing all that will change anything?)

It was difficult but one day I arrived at self-understanding, empowerment and happiness. This was achieved through hard-work, courage and self-love. I am proud of myself.

Now I am older, and I know better.

Things linger.

They are not as reversible as I thought when I was young. Excavation efforts of the past only bring up more hurts. More things that need to be fixed.

Fixing is a dangerous business. Besides, there is only so much you can do. So, things linger. And they pile up, too; while you’re trying to fix the heating the plumbing will burst; while you’re trying to fix the plumbing, the foundation will crumble. In the end it will all come crashing down around you and you’ll be leaking all your old guilts and sadnesses again. How embarrassing.

These things linger:

Things people have said to you. Things you have said to people. Things done, things that had better been left undone; things undone, that should have been done. Regrets. Chances lost, chances squandered, love thrown away, acts of self-sabotage. Even those things you could not have helped, things that have happened due to sheer circumstance—even those, you will regret. That is just the way things are. That is the business of living. If you live long enough, if you live true enough, beneath the surface will lurk the dark murky waters where the slightest breeze will stir up a maelstrom, leave you gasping for air.

The more the years pass by the more I feel like a fish out of water. Blasted high and dry in a desert somewhere. Watching the stinging sky with eyes too liquid and too soft for this dry air, wondering how I have come to be here; what sins have I committed, what atrocities condoned. The worst part yet is that in all honesty I know, I know what sins, I know what atrocities. With the unrivaled, excruciating curse of hindsight; I know.

I wonder. I wonder how I got here. I wonder how my heart has come to be such a web of scars, fine white lines pulled taut and shiny, criss-crossing this demented network of my past. Because I remember everything. Even the things that I can’t quite recall at first, even the things that seem blurry, somewhere in the back of my head they are on constant replay, available for recall at the slightest cue. My head is an enormous mansion; I have enough room to house everything, everything that ever happened. It is a haunted mansion. It is a cursed mansion. It is a place where no living being could stay. And so I have died before my time.

They say that time lovingly gilds our memories, renders them more beautiful than they were.

For me it has been the opposite.

Sometimes I stop and stare, wondering, unable to remember what I was doing, who and what I am in the present moment.. People look at me strangely then glance away, hurrying their steps. I so wish I could be like them. Speed up, ignore things that I don’t like. But the more I try to avoid, the more everything presses in upon me. So I do the best I can.

The empty sky, the dry air, the wobbling streets, the trembling trees—inside this world gone so strange and dark, I do my best. I don’t cry out. I go to yet another therapist but only out of a sense of duty. I no longer hope, I only want to be able to say that I’ve done my best. Listen, I’ve done everything for myself that I could—pills, self-help, therapy, movies, exercise, a nutritious diet, relationships, sex, celibacy, etc etc. And all the while a blur of faces and voices entering and exiting my life, except they are not a blur. (Living out-of-focus is a talent and a blessing I have yet to master.) These people, they all leave a shard of themselves behind. And they all take a piece of me with them.

People speak longingly of their youths. I would, too, except that my youth was unexceptional except in its melancholy. I wish I had a brighter past, some golden years to long for, a non-existent paradise to escape the weight of memories. But I don’t. Time floats by uneasy and I remain where I am, adding yet another mistake I cannot be absolved of.

Lovers:

Warm flesh. (It all starts to feel the same after a while, but not in a bad way.) Comfort. Security. In the end that is all it is, beautiful or not, tall or short or fat or thin. Comfort, security, a blanket of warm flesh.

A particular timbre and tone over the phone, its resonance still lingering at the edges of your consciousness. As you drift off into sleep, you will remember. And upon remembering you will cry, if only in your dreams.

Expensive, boring French restaurants and cheap, delicious Chinese restaurants. Whether you paid or they paid.

Boring TV shows watched together; an exchange of favorite books and movies. Museums you wanted to go to, they wanted to go to, you didn’t, they didn’t. Tastes similar, tastes divergent.

Personality clashes due to too many differences. Ennui due to too much similarity. Long relationships, with their attendant problems. Short relationships, with their attendant problems.

And in between everything, short moments of laughter, and love.

Always, at the time I would be somewhere far, far away; planning my escape, wondering what next, who next, how next. Analyzing what had gone wrong; charting out my course of actions. (Therapy is a cursed habit.) I now recognize that this was a bad move: In always sending part of myself forward into the future, the other part was split off to always remain in the past. So even while I go about my daily life, even while I meet new lovers, I am remembering other voices and other faces, words said and unsaid, things done and undone. Words that would have been better left unsaid. Words I had not had the courage to say. Things I wish had been left undone; things I thought I would have more time for.

And it haunts me. All of it haunts me. Sometimes I even wish that I had lived the monastic life, keeping my body to myself, allowing no one into my heart. Then I would not be stretched so thin now. I do not even know if I have any more pieces of myself to give. And what then, what then if I did, what then if I should? In the end, it would be all the same; there would be nothing left for me and I would be lost, lost in the eternal past, freeze frame by freeze frame where the shattered fragments last forever. My own private misery, steeped not in golden nostalgia but in gray monotones, a fuzzy black and white movie scratched and flickering from constant replay. Stretched thin, like a flimsy sheet of filament, translucent, almost invisible, until I will break, break.

Break.

People I need to forgive and people I need to forgiven from. Mother. Father. Lovers. Friends. Colleagues. Strangers met on a bad day. Strangers met on a good day. A network of remonstrance spread from the past into the future, all across the world, pinpointing my private sins. I thought I could leave them behind—board a train, hop on an airplane, charter a moving truck, patiently wait it out, speed through it. A blur, at the time, but time has a strange way of sharpening the memory, even as the exact details are lost. Harsh words I had not lost sleep over, now steal my breath as I wonder how I could have been so heartless. A lover’s back, as they turn away, crashes and burns though at the time I’d thought I would forget.

Things are like that. You won’t know until you’re older.

(Sometimes I wonder how much more I can take.

How much longer?)

So here I am; not even old yet, but stooped and gray, even if it does not show on the outside. I am shriveled up but at the same time too wet, too moist, too muddy inside—everybody comes walking in with their muddy boots, leaving careless footprints behind. And I don’t have the energy to clean up anymore. Fractured, it’s a wonder I’m breathing. (Maybe my spirit’s stopped breathing long ago. I can’t remember what it feels like to feel. I can’t remember when I last meant what I said. “I love you,” it’s just an echo leaving my lips by the sheer force of habit, by the need in the other’s eyes.) Left to my own devices I might just wander away and be lost, lost forever. Dragging unlaced muddy boots, lost in a coat of many colors, crowned with a mane of wild unkempt hair. Rooting through trash cans, living off refuse—but live?—is this life?

No, my body remains but my mind, my heart, is gone. Gone, far gone.

It is like this:

Things are brittle. That crucial turning point, that fine line upon which the world balances and turns, trembling, which divides the young from the old, is the point at which you realize that things, are, so, brittle. Fragile. The slightest touch, the merest feather-stroke applied at the wrong time to the wrong place—will cause things to fall apart. Break. Some people know this, even when they are young; however, they are still fools. What they do not know is that there is no glue strong enough, no fingers clever enough to put it back together. So they fumble through life with a carelessness that is terrifying, heartbreaking, and beautiful.

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall… Nursery rhythms, although supposedly for the young, are written by old tired people, and if you listen closely enough you’ll hear things that aren’t meant for children. You will hear sorrow and old age. So hear me when I say that that which is broken is not meant to be fixed.

They say that that which does not break you, only makes you stronger. But what of it? When do you ever not break? Besides, that is the only time when people try to console you with that particularly useless adage; when you are broken. Will that make you stronger as well? Even if it’s just a fracture, with repetition it will develop into a scar that will not mend. Will that make you stronger? The scars?

No.

Wiser, perhaps. Accepting, at peace, serene; or, put it another way—resigned. Whichever way you want to take it, your choice. Either way, the only strength in growing older, is: First, you know that it will hurt. You know that living is the business of hurting. Second—you grow accustomed to it. Either which way you will stop struggling, stop trying to cheat your way out of it. Those of us that never learn to let go are the ones that end up staring empty-eyed, gun held in hand, entry wound, exit wound, brain and blood splattered all over the wall.

(I wonder why people never aim for the heart, which would be my first choice of obliteration. Too hard to aim, I guess.)

Perhaps, in life, there is a balance to be paid, a debt of pain and anguish owed to a darker god. The mere act of being born is a sin. I truly believe this, although I am not Christian. It is not an apple eaten or a serpent listened to that caused all this, but merely god’s will. A pound of blood, a pound of flesh. With or without or your cooperation, it shall be extracted. But, good cop, bad cop, cooperation will make it much easier for you. Don’t make me do this to you, sonny, and, We don’t want to hurt you. Just go along with us and things will be fine.

That is a lie.

Things won’t be fine.

But until then, until you come to know this, please, remain ignorant as long as you can. Grin your shadowless smile, kiss without reserve, give body, heart and soul. Because believe me, it won’t last long. And when it ends, by God, you will wish that you had remained blind and ignorant.

So, the long and short of it is this; Solomon was a fool.

There is nothing new under the sun. Yes, yes, yes. You are right, you are only right, O Wise One. Those are the truest words ever spoken—There is nothing new under the sun.

And yet.

Would not it have been so much easier had you not known that, O Wisest of Wise Kings?

Death, Dignity and the Exquisite Corpse

Death, Dignity and the Exquisite Corpse

0. The Exquisite Corpse, a Zero-Sum Game

It's funny how people feel compelled to share hardships, reciprocate trust. "Oh, your dad died? I'm sorry! My grandfather died when I was five. I was devastated. I'm sure it was very difficult..."

I nod along, trying to look serious and concerned just enough. In reality I'm looking somewhere over his shoulder and wondering how soon I can end the conversation and leave without looking rude. It's too bad, but I really don't care about these mandatory displays of sympathy and understanding, attempts by strangers to force a bond that doesn't exist. I'm not even sure what his name is. And why should I care? His anxious smile and eager body language annoys me. I just want to go back to my room and finish my drawing. It is of an exquisite corpse.

(An exquisite corpse, also known as an "exquisite cadaver" or a "rotating corpse," is a collaboration of three different people building a coordinated Frankensteinian composition. The paper is cut into thirds, the top third showing the head of a creature, the middle the torso, and the bottom third the legs. Each artist works on the different part separately, and in the end they are put together to form a whole.)

--Of course, since I am obviously not three people I will simply be working on each part alone and adding them all up together. It's a useless attempt at solitary companionship, keeping myself occupied with a temporary internal triple identity, a meaningless exercise in schizophrenia. I guess I'm just bored.

I give myself five more minutes before I tell him I should get going, I'm a little busy this weekend, I'm very sorry but it was nice seeing you again. His face falls and I give him another smile, out of sympathy, before I turn my back and walk as fast as I can back to my dorm. Once I've unlocked the door and opened the window I can breathe easy again. I put on some music and turn the volume up loud, flush his voice from my system. It's easy. Just close my eyes, take in a deep breath, let it out, and think of an exquisite corpse.


I. Head

You can see the tracks of time in her lined face, her drooping breasts and her hanging stomach. She is tan and freckled but her laugh lines are pale and white. The aureoles of her breast are enlarged, and tinged with the barest hint of rose, strangely young looking in the midst of decay. The skin of her breast and stomach and pubic region, unexposed to the sun, are thin and translucent and I can almost see the sluggish flow of blood coursing through the blue veins just under her skin. Her belly drapes over her groin, and her pubic hair still retains a hint of blonde although her hair is now a wispy white halo. But that's all irrelevant, because all that I need is her head and shoulders, let's stare death in the face, why not, so, I chop off everything below--

"Off with her head!"


II. Torso

"This is soooo boring, he drawls, trying to look unconcerned and blase. He looks into my face searchingly, and why not, I'll humor him: "It really is, isn't it?"

He takes a puff from his cigarette and lets it out slowly. He stands with all of his weight on one foot, shoulders slouched and hip slung, leaning against the brick wall. So ironic. I decide to mimic him. I take on his inflection and his posture and his drawl, so blase, so young. I'd say it reminds me of being seventeen, except I never was like that even in that age, it wasn't something I could afford--it's the kind of currency you buy with a middle-class white existence and an assurance of belonging, even if they choose to deny it. I have no privileges to pretend to throw away, so why don't I copy him for a second, so ironic, why not, it's a good laugh.

He eyes the girls passing by with their long flat-ironed hair, Northfaces and leggings, and rolls his eyes. "Jesus, I can't believe there are so many people like that at Brown. They take themselves soo seriously. "Yeah, I like your fashion so much better, it's so individual," I say, and reach out to play with his brown striped scarf and corduroy jacket, salvaged designer jeans. He blushes. I hate it, I don't know why, I should be nicer to him, he's just a kid, he's trying to find his place in life, but I wish I could strip him down, throw out his clothes and take that goddamned cigarette out of his mouth. Stare at him naked and uncertain and precarious, trying to hold onto his perpetual adolescence, honest and real for once.

I'll take his torso. It's all I need. His mouth talks too much his ears don't listen his eyes too self-conscious and his legs can't carry his own weight. So I'll take his silent torso with his gasping lungs and it will be enough.


III. Legs

I look into the mirror and I don’t recognize myself. It’s been happening a lot lately. Same old face, of course, but so unfamiliar, so unfamiliar… and I don’t know why. Like maybe I’m renting these Assorted Features on discount, renting ‘em from some sad, broken down store, a store full of boxes and crates of likewise worn, cracked faces, all those faces just plastic masks plastered with peeling, crumbling paint. My mask-face topping off a tired uninspired costume for some stupid elementary school play, in which I’ve been cast in an incredibly insignificant and bland role, like maybe as a singing, dancing tree… Which makes me wonder—whose play am I in, and why did I get stuck with such a shitty script? I wonder, will I ever get to star in my own play, will I ever work up the guts to write it, to ask for something more? I turn away from the mirror, and I don't know if I will.

On the subway to work, I think, What’s under that limpid, languid, slack-jawed blank-eyed exterior? What lies beneath that oily, acne-scarred skin, what’s there to be found, other than the expected—muscles, bones, tendons, vessels? What silently crawls and writhes there, stirring and whispering ever so slightly, making alien the familiar and disturbing the calm of my dream-stuck morning? If some witch doctor were to wield his mighty staff, strip away the facts and flesh of my paltry existence, what would he find underneath it all? Would he proclaim me almost healthy, or mostly sick? If he were to take my breath, my words and my dreams to form a semblance of my self, what would it look like? If he were to bodily take my self out of myself and display it before me, what would I see?

The crevices and the cracks and the wrinkles and the sodden rottenness of my (mere, it’s true) twenty years, if I could see that instead of cellulite on my thighs or the way my breasts don’t quite fill out the 36-B bra or the lifeless straggly red straw bob I traded in my long glossy black mane for, if I could see, if I could see myself as I am—not as I was meant to be but as I am—what would I see? If I could look past the grime under my fingernails and the cracked heels of my feet and the redness of my watery eyes, what size, what shape, what form, what color would my soul be?

The train enters the tunnel of Washington Park. The sudden darkness throws my reflection back at me on the window opposite and I blink, surprised, before I turn away feeling as though I’ve seen something inappropriate and embarrassing.

This permanent ache in the air, if only I could outrun it. If only I could find warm flesh to bury myself in. Dripping sweat, mingled saliva, temporary oblivion, something to regret, unburden myself of this heavy selfhood. Run, run, run. But my legs won't keep up, I can't run that fast, and today, too, I stand there helpless, weak, practicing my fears of this noxious world; this gray eternity, devoid of salvation, of possibilities, of miracles, this our very own world lost and thrown away like so much dirt, like so much garbage. I practice loss and lies, just to get along. To survive. And the world, bruised, stripped of grace and dignity, limps on, still.

My legs. My useless legs, let's cut them off. Let's paste them to her dying head and his bland torso and we've got an exquisite corpse.

Congratulations, this is art, this is meaning, this irony this permanent ache. Now let's let this Frankenstein loose, and who knows, maybe it will be just enough to survive this noxious world.

At least we can hope.

text messaging you, god, you

idly staring at my cell phone and wishing i could call you up, lord.
then i also figure a text message mightn't be so bad if you're busy.
hoping that you're still up, hoping that you still care and that
you'll just send me that one text,
"it will be fine."

as the days go by and your memory grows dim, i walk farther and farther
away
and this day, too, has irrevocably gone bad.
irrevocably.
the time sounding like tin like the clang of loveless gongs,
and his voice, the devil, ringing out like water rushing in the dark.
how do i keep my hope up in a day like this?

wintry forevers that don't seem to pass. i
can't go on like this, i want to tell you, but
i don't know where your ears are and where your eyes are,
if anywhere.

hope is what i need. just
a few words, a reassurance, a promise
rainbow after the flood, never again.
and if it has to be, please, for some good reason;
never again this needless pain.

i twist, i burn, for what i don't know;
hellfire limning his graceless form
i couldn't scream.
he burned and i took his ashes into my mouth,
'quo vadis, lord, quo vadis.'

his shadow still haunts me.
i think of him night and day,
behind my weary thoughts.
like water running under still ice
memories call out his name,
soundless, reasonless.

i can't can't go on.
i just simply cannot.
lord, lord, lord, i call out, i type in the words, i hit send
lord lord lord help me. lord
please save me.
save me please.

and the silence like winter nights descending upon the
still spring day and i don't know what to do.
cast my wishes about hoping something will catch but
i am terrified and the voices are talking and the eyes are seeing
and. i break down. like salt. spires.
and funeral. pyres.

so lord. so lord. before i break. before this here teeth in my mouth break
sir
the teeth in my mouth,
sir, help. me.

please.

thanksgiving

"im going insane now. i went out into the streets and i stared at lights of oncoming cars. if i got hit i could get some rest. i wanted to lie down in the cold grass because the cold would put me to sleep.
i cant sleep im so tired and i cant sleep and i cant sleep and im going to die if i cant if i could just get some rest..."

huh. around 7,920 hours ago. just that.

but i'm doing so much better now.

thank you, lord; please break the teeth in my mouth.

my dear valentine

I'm actually doing quite well. And you?

Want some chocolate?

Good stuff, dear

I mean, it's alright. Christ, it's alright. Don't mean much to me. I just wish I had a better bed, so my back wouldn't ache so much. Right now I feel like it's broken a dozen places or more. One big ol' crack for each vertebrae, eh? Good stuff. Good stuff, my dear, so tell me more.

Entrance, living room, kitchen, closet, bathroom, bedroom. One bedroom apartment. Ridgefield, New Jersey. 07657. Walls bare and pastel. Rented from Mr. Alam the landlord. Good stuff, good stuff, dear, tell me more. How big? Don't know how to count in square feet. Not too small of an apartment, feels just a little cramped with three people in it, especially considering the month that we shall be together... but not too bad. Good stuff, dear, tell me more.

So: trajectory from day to night, night to day, my itinerary:

Bed --> Bathroom, toilet --> Bathroom, shower --> Kitchen, dinner table --> Living room, Sofa --> Living room, desk --> Kitchen, dinner table --> Bathroom, toilet -->Living room, sofa --> Bathroom, toilet --> Kitchen, dinner table --> Living room, sofa --> Living room, desk --> Living room, sofa --> Bathroom, toilet --> Bedroom, bed

Now multiply that by thirty.

The equation:

[(Boredom + Depression ) - (Prozac + Masturbation)] x 30 = winter break.

A rather sad thought. Negative or positive? Most likely either which way you go. I swing either way. Anything that moves. Know what I mean?

Read two books in the 48 hours I've been here. Cat's Eye, Margaret Atwood; Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut. Rather depressing people, don't you know? People hurting each other and being foolish all over the place. Well, I suppose you could also call them realists, instead of cynics. Is the glass half-full or half-empty, my dear?

At any rate; I rather miss your body. You've got a pretty body. Not a stunner, but quite good. I would like to run my hands over you. I would like to lick you and suck you and have you do the same with me. I'm bored. I just want to have fun. I wish you meant more to me. But the fact is the next one come along, I won't think much of anything, least of all you. Sorry. Just trying to be honest here. Not much to do. Bored. How about you?

Trajectory, stuck. The equations are rather hard to master. He is playing this game, just like me. I play games. I didn't use to. Got burnt last time, figured, what the hell. Can't do it honest anymore, nobody does. I don't like being a sucker. Get a grip.

New Jersey. New Fucking Jersey. And Ridgefield. Mostly Arabs, mostly Italians, mostly Koreans. Not that many Koreans, actually. Of which we account for three. Four minus one equals three. See, I never got past arithmetics but I was rather fascinated by adding and subtracting and multiplying and dividing numbers. I rather felt like an idiot-savant, see, and I didn't mind. I wish sometimes things could be as simple as that, as numbers, as equations, both sides coming out the same, both sides equal, both sides quite comprehensible and tidy and neat. Me? Put me in an equation. Sometimes I'm heavier, sometimes I'm lighter. Sometimes I'm nicer, sometimes I'm meaner. Lately I'm leaning towards mean, and empty. I don't know how that balances out. When it all comes down to it, I guess, Karma will see. Karma will tell.

All I wanted to do was fuck you. And I got what I wanted. Now I want others.

Hey, hey, hey: Ridgefield. I hate this fucking place. So depressing. Run down two-story brownstones with people just like us, poor immigrants and whatnot. Well, at least, I go to , I go to an Ivy League institution. Oh Joy! One day I will be rich and famous and hot and sexy and fucked up. I mean... No... I guess that's for L.A. people, not for us brainiacs.

Time falls apart, splits. I am tired. I've consumed ten thousand words times five thousand words times images times sequences times soundbytes times masturbations times libidos times beautiful boys times ugly girls times vaginas times penises times fetuses times abortions. Shit. Shit. Shit.

Goddamn can't keep sane can you? Can't stick to one thought one feeling one wish one boy? One man? One woman? One man and woman, as a concession? Nope, can't. Eye wandering and so does my ... Won't say what, but you know what I mean, right?

I'm just being brave. Really, I'm not this tough. I'm just a hurt hurt hurt vulnerable soul. Really. I wouldn't dare hurt a fly. Really. You can entrust your poor poor poor hurt heart to me. I'll take good care of it. Really.

This isn't me, this isn't you we're talking about. This is about us. You know what I'm saying? Us. Christ, that word's got a nice ring to it, don't you think?

Oh you fucker. You thought you'd do me under, and so you did. I was guilty of willful blindness. Call the jury out on that; I was indeed guilty of willful blindness. What any other goddamn fool would have seen, I chose to close my eyes and misrepresent to myself. I perjured myself to myself, dear Lord, and I do apologize. I do my utmost best to repent and retaliate, Lord, but seems like it's too far past my prime. May prime. Whatever you mean.

Hmm, he looks like a nice snack. So I ate him. Sorry, sorry, sorry, it's not you I'm mad at, I don't know why I do this. You just look a lot like the one I am mad at. Which doesn't mean that you're him. I know. I know. I know but my eye and my heart have a strict one on one policy, and don't you know what that means? I can't tell you guys apart.

You all look the same to me.

Verbal diarrhea. I apologize. We're falling apart, we fail to make sense. I have to go to the restroom. I hate this place. I hate this place so much; the windows that don't open and the fading watery sunlight and the bare pastel walls and the cold unheated rooms. I hate this place. I hate this place and I hate the people outside who glare at me with their cold dark brown eyes and their angry bitter twisted mouths. I hate everyone except for myself but maybe myself too.

But I'm just being melodramatic; this is how I am without you. You, you, and you. Idle past times all, but so important to me, so important to me. I envy you. You don't know what it's like to be like this, to be all without you. I love you, I mouth, whimper, and quietly prepare my early demise. Which, it turns out, is nothing but early cunning sleep.

I love you, I love you, I love you. (I want you to love me. I want you to love me.)

I hate you, I hate you, I hate you. (I'm worried you'll leave me. Please don't leave me.)

You I we are am (a)pathetic.

Love you.
Kissies.
Have a sweet night.
Sayonara.
(Pull the trigger; quick!

My, oh, my. You have done quite well.)

confusion is nothing new

perhaps the birth of something new is in order, but it is oh so hard when the phoenix dies, even if you expect it to rise again.

ashes to ashes,
dust to dust,
where have i gone before
and where do i walk now?

who are you, my dear, you who i see in the mirror?

who, are, you?

Our Blue Lady's Folsom Prison Prayer

Our Blue Lady's Folsom Prison Prayer: Where She Been These Last Two Decades; Where You Can Call Her Name, And, Maybe, She Might Answer; Where She Done Got Tired Waiting For You to Come Take Her Away,

And Where She Curled Up, Hoping to Die

Her First and Final Two-Sided Monologue, After Which She Must Give Up All Hope and Curl Up and Hope to Wither and Die

Hey.

Hey.

Hey! Mr, over there. Hey! You listening?

Yeah, over there, you. Mr, could you help me out here a bit? Mr, Mr, Mr, you got a minute there? Got a minute to listen to a poor soul's prayer? Please?

It's been so long since I seen another human being—'least one that could look back at me, one that could hear this voice of mine. Look, Mr, I don't even know where to start, but I'll try. (cough) Jesus, man, look at me—me with my rusty-nails-voice and my rictus mortis face—you'd think I never seen another human being before. I don’t know, maybe that's true—maybe I never have.

Still, what’s that matter? Hey, you not getting up to leave yet, are you? Mr, think you got enough patience to sit with me a while, while I'm waiting for the winterchills to creep out of my bones? Come, come here and sit down. Sit down and stay with me while I try to find the words to give some form to the soundless emptiness built up inside me. Mr, Mr—you think you could find 'nough kindness in your heart to listen to this poor rustic's complaints? A minute, to listen to a poor soul's complaints?

You'll stay? You'll stay with me? Yeah? At least, for now? Alright, alright, you don't know how happy you've made me, Mr! Mr, I gotta tell you, Mr, it's nice, it's real nice to have you here. You got no idea, it's so nice to heave you here, I can't even tell you how much.

You know, it's been so long since I seen someone lookit me, seen someone see me, I half thought I musta finally done become invisible. I thought I musta dissolved into this creaky bony lonesomeness. I thought I musta been cut down to sheer-nothing-echoes like waves, echos crashing back, back and back against the empty banks of soundlessness. I thought I was done for.

But that don't matter no more, 'cause you're here now. That's all that matters. Even if you gotta leave when this minute's up, that's all that matters... ain't it?

Anyways, Mr, got a favor to ask of you—do you got some Lovechange to drop here in my hat? I'm so hungry, I'm done right starved. I ain't had nothing to eat in forever—and I do mean forever.

Thanks, Mr, thanks. God bless you.

Hey, since you've been some kind, how about some Sharedwarmth? Do you got some warmth to share this cold winter night, too? A little zing, a little spark, something for the Goodtimes?

God bless you agin, Sir. The chills already leavin' my soul, a bit.

So, Mr, do you got some light to guide my benighted soul? Hey, Mr, do you think you could possibly care enough to spare a little Lovelight? Just a little, so even when I'm all by myself 'least I can see my own hands, know I ain't dissolving into the great great night?

Thanks. That's great. That's gonna get me through 'till dawn. I mean, we can hope.

Mr, Mr, I'm telling you, I've got to get out of here. Somehow, I've got to get out of here. You've got to help me, Mr.

I mean, it's so nice having you here, Mr, but I know you gonna leave 'ventually. Don't shake your head, Mr, 'cause that's the Godgiven truth, Mr—Mr, please don't lie to me; we both better than that. I know you gonna leave, now, or later. Just, before you go, show me the way out. 'Least, point me in the right direction. I done right tired wandering 'round looking for exits that don't exist. Dunno, maybe I just been looking the wrong way. Maybe I be blind and I just don't know it.

Anyways, Mr, I can't do this anymore, Mr—I've got to get out. I stay here a little bit more, I'm gonna forget the reason why I needed to leave in the first place. Gonna forget what it's like to be a human being among other human beings. Gonna forget what it's like to have my arms 'round a man, dancing, smiling, feeling his soft breath against my cheeks. Mr, I'm gonna forget.

I'm gonna forget, and then I won't care anymore. And I gonna stay in this dark dank dungeon forever and ever. And I ain't ever gonna find My Love. Then where I be? Where he be? He gonna forget me before he even meet me, and where that leave us? Miserable, that's where.

Mr, I get so weary sometimes. I don't remember sunshine, I don't remember rain. It's always, always, goddamned always lightless godless Winternight here. It's been so long, it's been so long since I felt Godlove shining down on me. Been lost so long inside the Devil's playpen, everywhere I look it’s like He grinning at me, sayin’, not long ‘till you be one of my own. Twenty long years in solitude, I've been sleepwalking this nightmare, and I don’t know if I got the energy to hold out ‘nymore.

I can't stand it no more, Mr: The air gone stale, the water rotten; my sore wounds festering, my soul so soiled, I break under its weight. Mr, spare some pity on me. Help me out. Please, I got no one else to ask but you.

Wait. Waitwaitwait Mr. Where you going, Mr? Where you goin’?

Mr, Mr, please! Don't leave quite yet. Please. Here, here, sit down agin. I’m sorry I been so whiny and boring, I’m sorry I been so complaining.

Hey, Mr, I know I done told you you can leave whenever you want, but you can’t, you can’t. The long night gonna be so much colder when you gone, Mr. You can't leave; you can’t leave just when I started remembering what warmth is supposed to be.

Mr, Mr… You Godless soul—I thought you was a good man. I thought you had some kindness in you heart. But guess not. Guess you a godless, merciless, cruel stranger, Mr.

Mr. If you gotta leave, you gotta leave. You do what you want. You leave me here, crying in the darkness, if you' got to. Me, I'm gonna get my soul all bloody shredded on those tall wire fences trying to get out, get out somehow, but you just on and wander off. If you gotta go, go, just like that—pretend you blind and deaf and you never seen me, never heard me.

But please, Mr. If nothing else, then at least... Can I just tell you my name?

Mr, could you please say my name, just once?

And could you, would you remember it? Because I think I’m going to forget it soon…

KP Thrive

Kaiser Permanente is a non-profit insurance company. (I'm not sure how that works either; non-profit insurance company?)

So they have this neat campaign going on—"KP Thrive." It encourages people to take up healither lifestyles in order to—Well—thrive! There's all these chirpy posters in the stock room where I work that say, "We stand for broccoli," "Pro-antioxidants," and "Eat your greens."

I agree. People need to eat their greens. And you know why?

Because, in Africa, there are thousands of cows that have starved to death for lack of greens. So you better be grateful and eat your fucking greens.

Why America Suxx

Yes, I am 165 cm tall, and I weigh 51 kg.

The Poetry I Dare Not Live

"He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The others write the poetry that they dare not realise."

i am content.

and yet, how horrible these middling days are.

In the End

i. Fire and Ice (what would you have chosen, dear?)

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

ii. These Hollow Men (i'm sure you didn't imagine it would end in a hospital bed...)

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

iii. When You Are Old... (if you could've; if you'd only stayed.)

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

iv. A Question for You, Father (quo vadis, lord; quo vadis?)

Father, Father, when your world ended, did a new one begin?

Where are you now?

v. Happy Father's Day (the art of losing's not too hard to master, though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.)

Happy Father's Day.

vi. Last Call

...all creation, rise.

Street Song

Street Song

—Sylvia Plath

By a mad miracle I go intact
among the common rout
thronging sidewalk, street,
and bickering shops;
nobody blinks a lid, gapes,
or cries that this raw flesh
reeks of the butcher's cleaver,
its heart and guts hung hooked
and bloodied as a cow's split frame
parceled out by white-jacketed assassins.

Oh no, for I strut it clever
as a greenly escaped idiot,
buying wine, bread,
yellow-casqued chrysanthemums —
arming myself with the most reasonable items
to ward off, at all cost, suspicions
roused by thorned hands, feet, head,
and that great wound
squandering red
from the flayed side.

Even as my each mangled nerve-end
trills its hurt out
above pitch of pedestrian ear,
so, perhaps I, knelled dumb by your absence,
alone can hear
sun's parched scream,
every downfall and crash
of gutted star,
and, more daft than any goose,
this cracked world's incessant gabble and hiss.

Six Apologies, Lord

Six Apologies, Lord

"I Have Loved The Low Voltage Of The Moon, Lord,
Until There Was No Moon Intensity Left, Lord, No Moon Intensity Left
For You, Lord..."

— from Six Apologies, Lord by Olena Kalytiak Davis

I Have Loved My Horrible Self, Lord.
I Rose, Lord, And I Rose, Lord, And I,
Dropt. Your Requirements, Lord. ‘Spite Your Requirements, Lord,
I Have Loved The Low Voltage Of The Moon, Lord,
Until There Was No Moon Intensity Left, Lord, No Moon Intensity Left
For You, Lord. I Have Loved The Frivolous, The Fleeting, The Frightful
Clouds. Lord, I Have Loved Clouds! Do Not Forgive Me, Do Not
Forgive Me LordandLover, HarborandMaster, GuardianandBread, Do Not.
Hold Me, Lord, O, Hold Me

Accountable, Lord. I Am
Accountable. Lord.

Lord It Over Me,
Lord It Over Me, Lord. Feed Me

Hope, Lord. Feed Me
Hope, Lord, Or Break My Teeth.

Break My Teeth, Sir,

In This My Mouth.