Q) A: Despair, get used to it

The good women have got to do what the good women have got to do. I was weak and I was stupid.
The worst crimes are committed by those who are trying to punish themselves.  They tempt fate because they’re scared to be direct. 
We keep giving the world a chance to have at us.  Searching for psychic reconciliation. 

I hate waking up to this.
This isn’t war it’s commerce. This isn’t identity it’s salesmanship.  Where are the real monsters?
I close my eyes, you laugh.  The solace of martyrdom, set off on her own.  The torment of the crowd, together panicked burning. 
Newspaper, hand me last year’s crossword! Let us enunciate the syllables of our parents’ virtues. Let us close the door and put our books back on our shelves.
Let us whisper “More” and “Harder” like that in the frontseat again. My subtler points are best impressed with your subtler points.
Those that are lost in your anger.  Impossibly.  I dream life were eternal every morning as the aching sun rises over the hill
  and every night it gets quietly dark which makes me positively shake.   
Rage, what we desire is space.  Sigh, what we desire is hot and primal. 
I am like smoke hovering in an exhalated curve, if it could remain there forever, smoking.  No, slowly the smoke dissipates in the distance. 
It is quietly agonizingly dark. 
I think of you no more. I think of you one more time.

I hypothesize interesting experiences cease once I forget about them.  I forget in the mornings when I get in line like a sleepy slackjaw.
I hypothesize somewhere tonight adjacent or nearly touching my simple impotent reality is a discrete orgy.
Tonight is so far away.  I already forget what happened last night.  The news graphs out loud. 
I silently protest macropolitics by skipping breakfast.  I adhere to postjudicial situationism by continuing to live with myself. 
I’m afraid to be happy because I’m afraid to appear that I’m not afraid to be happy.
I’m afraid that sounds like a really lame excuse to not try and remain status quo.
I don’t feel the same as yesterday. I can't get up in the morning unless I get off. Doesn’t everyone get off by coming around to what they mean?
Writing wordless pleas in the pleasing colours of your eyes.
Our consumer exchange society demands going to work each day but only suggests buying you flowers.
Begrudingly I open the door. Sunlight hits the floor and I think about you.
I’m afraid you’ll need to define "random aporiae" for me.

You see we don’t see eye to eye. My reality moves at a different speed than your reality, and this is wearing my empathy thin and your heart out.
Somewhere on the wordless edge I am rocking out, doing everything wrong.  Sorting out the palette into categorical themotions.
I reason away my actions in a sea of irrationality. I think glory is a kind of tide. I think my past is everything I failed to be. 
Something for the cat to piss on in the corner.  I don’t miss the feelings I had back then. 
After waiting for the late news to tear me apart I love going to the supermarket and getting lost in the aisles.  The I’ll’s.  The Eye’ll’s. 
 The whole universe is a story I tell.  Turn the page, a new color. 
My own simulacrum sensations coming out surrounded by dairy products and crackers and you and I. 
Racing carts in this remembered hope and possibility.  Everything is of course nothing. 
But let us suspend the so-often suspected bulletins and surrender to the unexpected.  This just in, again. 
An evening so full of little conscious sensations like the melancholy of the surrounding streets beyond the parking lot, where we drive and listen.
I regret already something beyond those streets, beyond the trees’ tallest branches, where the old stars are again coming out like an old old story.
I’m trying to forget.  God got lonely with his themes and colors and created man.

I think so long as words come when I call I’ll be okay.
 I am told me that "oleaginous" is the right word, but innappropriate.  My stringy hands running through her hair on the pillow.
 Stop.  Please start all over again.  "Like the time…"
 Stop.  The mind, like a politician, can play dirty.
I think God is a poet.  Those pale stars are just bones in their embryonic molding, reaching out and yet to connect.
The beautiful pre-skeleton of the universe.   Everything will come together, all light will touch and hold us up, a bright big ball.
The Light of all colours in the fucking darkness.
But until then we go home alone and put away the groceries, and grasp and ponder. The lights out, the door closed. The future is a memory.
Nothing remains except what I tell you she tells me. "Because" I wrote, I said nothing.

I cultivate anger in the greenhouse.  I dissent from life and I am proud of it. The flowers love to listen to me talk I tell them to tell me.

The world is defined by its loudest voices, some of which are quiet looks.  Systems of government are thin air and reminiscence. 
Collective thought is an abyss, I drop my quarter in the slot and feel my mortality.
Winking old men punishing criminals who have committed no crimes have committed crimes.  We punish ourselves indirectly, our motives vague.
Where did organizations come from?  Their history is not who they are! Dear author, these characters are poorly defined.  Please revise.
 We starve for answers amidst the newsfeed.  More deaths in the middle.  Nations destroying nations.
Order a sandwich with lots and lots of meat.  Out the window of the café everyone shimmies and blurs in unison. 
We and the world are superfluous mysteries. I write in color and order tea remembering that you are now unreal. 
What’re flowers?  Why didn’t I get them?
My punishment has stretched from the past and spilled onto the present.  Tea rings on white doily.

My God she wrote in color. My God we say everything. My God I am. My God fine.
Who the fuck knows what my sentence meant.

Maybe you were wrong to say that.
Maybe you thought that I forgot that we talked about making mix CDs and putting them on park benches, dedicated to make believe lovers.
 Former selves and dead rock stars, a testament to us, with a link to our site.
Maybe this sounds familiar.
Maybe we should resurrect the yellow peril.
Maybe love is a rumor going around the social circles we share.  Maybe the red scare.
Maybe enthusiasm and sincerity are only for the young.
 Maybe the demented.
 Soldiers coming home.  Voices rising up and striking.  Prices going up.  Job growth going down.
 Now I am unshaven like the famous man.  Anxiety and luxury is where the continent starts.
Maybe vibrating legs are coming at me! Maybe we’ll never get there unless I lie and tell you a story about getting there. 
 Vast are the fringes we inhabit.
Maybe whisper it, maybe grunt it. Maybe I ought to take a cold shower.

As we go, we grow, searching for psychic reconciliation we die with change. We can be anything in death, spare anything in change.
Until then all understandings are usually probably misunderstandings.  You didn’t love me.  You did.  You are unreal.  Really, you were.

Common sense is vague and compounds the colour of the meaning.  Transcends sentence structure, blur it all together: Datelines.  Nightlines. 
My future is our past which is your Protean present.
To change the future I have to recollect the past and remix it into a portrait of all that I am.
Some that I am:
I am consistently glad that unlike other impulses I cannot justify reprimanding my adrenaline.
I write and I wait, Why, did the chicken cross the road to get to the other fucking side?  I hope to find out what's there.
I comic strip,  -- depersonalized & refetishized -- and my body is a news paper header, a thin blue line parenthetically-distanced from emotionformation.
With no focal summit, no staunch outlook. A faded photograph that triggers in you some roaring vision. 
The puzzle being comprised of pieces of loneliness, and the knowledge that there is more to you than there was.

Throw obscenities out the window telepathically.  If only my eyes were black, gray, yellow, then I would do something with myself this afternoon. 
On the contrary I am bored and alone.  Alright, I have the pollutive sky.  Cursing the lousy sunset.
Like the weather report I tell the truth and scare away all our shared friends.  Fuck like a hyacinth to make my forebears happy.
Envy others who are happy and hate myself for envying others who are happy, and afraid to hate myself, which is not the most radical fear.
I hate it when others are trying to cheer me up and I'm afraid this means there is something wrong with me.  Of course, there is.  But what?

Here we are in a poem brought to you by the people who brought you the people who brought you.  Say the name!  Say the name!
I keep waiting for them to tell me that I lost you.  Other deaths from the front.  Abdications and elections. 
Fire spilling out in all the corners of the screen.  Bit bought by bit.  Door to the world, dreams are coming. 
Mention how brightly my eyes shone as I awaited justice.  I turn out the lights late. I sleep with your hips sometimes.
I am a time traveler anticipating fame.  I am shame and disradiant disaster. I need to obsess less over the concept Of self:

You made me come in 3 dimensions. Your panties told me they prefer the spin cycle. Your breath is all I want to hear. You can't be trusted!
I can't believe you ----------------!  I thought I knew you, I guess I never knew you, maybe that’s why you went off and -----------------!

One can only laugh.  Laughter is a great reprieve for memory.  Isn't it?  My God I’m shaking, still waiting to end up back where I started. 
I re-read what happened as it scrolls past the bottom at the top of each hour. 
Since then your words are explosions that blow apart the floating doors I’m tenaciously clinging to—
 --never was such succinct disintegration so pleasant—-
Are countries really countries?  Are my impressions all of what exists or is there another region?
What was God reading to the good lady before he hovered over her waters and made her belly glow?

"Cacoethes" I read is the irresistible urge or desire to do something inadvisable. What triumph is there in private credence?
Happiness would kill me.  Fuck it.  The world is a stillife painting of me blowing smoke at the mirror naked.   
Your smile is a disease.  My awkward grin is an idea waiting in the wings.  Such intimate disasters tonight. 
A car strays from the highway and is thrown into the lifeless bloody ditch where they suffer,
  listening to the slight white noise of the radio feed them unnecessary adjectives like an unpleasant daydream.
Placate me a moment and remain very quiet and still and unfasten me from my name in your mind. 
Let’s uncouple effects from intention, straddle concepts withour notions of regret. The more alive I feel the brighter coloured my words. 
Come here and fucking don't tell me to wake up this is my dream and I'll wake when when I damn well please now come here.  Come here.  Come here.

Fuck.
I hate waking up to this.

P) Purlieus Pabulum Pilgrim Power

Beware women grown old

who were never anything but young

-Charles Bukowski

I dated a citizen of the world once. I was in the eighth grade when it was announced that students who were interested in participating in a Shakespeare workshop with a group of thespians from Toronto should be excused from 5^th and 6^th periods and would they please report to the theatre. Jon and I were eager to never hear anything related to our Biology class ever again. Happiness was right around the corner.

She was a citizen of the world. Her father was black from Los Angeles; her mother was half Korean from New York. She had lived on both coasts. In Texas, and Puerto Rico, had been to three European countries and somewhere in Asia, once.

She had never been to Africa. But one night at a bar in Eau Claire I met a girl walking away from New York whose name was Mary and I kept after her until the cities collapsed all around us lying intertwined and pandering on the couch, and I found out that she had been to East Africa doing thesis work in Ethnic Women's Studies. Discouraged, I let myself out while she taught 6 or 7 languages to her roommate's cat.

Don't look up. That isn't meant to be important.

There is no way that things are supposed to be. She stopped writing to me when I stopped writing to her and she went back to Africa and got her doctorate and now she's married to some guy in Afghanistan who's neck is as big as my thigh and who killed a little guy just last week and has been feeling remorse about it ever since.

There's no way that things are supposed to be and we all get a little crazy, or at least a little lost. I was watching the sparrows peck at the snow around the great brick brewery stacks on a cloudy day in winter when the sun is an idea that hasn't yet been scrubbed through the veneer of reality. Searching for friends. I stood smoking cigarette after cigarette thinking about the citizen of the world I'd dated and wondering what became of her. Puffing out my breath and looking over my shoulder into the dark bar until it became the only light in the gathering dark night. The dark is cold and one swarms to the light.

“You ever spend a winter high up in the Northern Provinces, read Undaunted Courage. It's like taking three trips in one go. It'll help you settle down into your rocking chair and turn you into a man.” He took another shot and chased it with half his beer. “All men are dead. You can't really be a man until yer dead. Until then, you're just living, and that's not a man. That's pain.” We waited, baited, and I went back.

Oh the clicks and trips one hears in winter. Which way now?

Back and forth across the stage they prance in their tights and a tall-boots as we pilgrims stream in. This holy land in the abscess of the school auditorium where merry actor saints congregate to administer to us their Shakespeare. “Pair off into groups eh?” says the curly-haired wench while the thin-bearded knave dispenses sides to rehearse.

I am paired with her.

“Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,

Which mannerly devotion shows in this;

For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,

And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.”

“Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too? So they’re talking about kissing each other right. Sort of dancing around it.” She spun around me. We turned in tandem like a tango while she read:

“Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.”

“O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;

They pray — grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.”

“Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake. What’s that mean?”

“When they’re talking about saints y’know, the only saints they would’ve known would’ve been carvings. Like statues of saints, which don’t move,” said the knave.

“Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.”

We ran through it a few times, getting the gist for the meter and the meaning. Beneath the little bright lights we demonstrated our parts for the observer who had ceased making his rounds as our parts were so well done. He reconvened the pairings and asked them all to watch us, we two bringing more to bear on the scene than any of the others. Her eyes open to mine, voice cracking as she offered “Then, have my lips. For the sin that they have took” and her long neck upturned to me.

“Sin from thy lips?” I felt guilty somehow and yet, here we were; “O trespass sweetly urged! Give me my sin again.” Then we pretended to kiss and I blushed as she clenched my hand and we took a bow.

“That’s how it’s done y’know? You see the way they look into each others eyes?”

You learn about love by loving. You learn about death by dying.

I looked into Mary’s eyes in the photograph from her wedding in my mind while tapping my foot against the table leg, and signaling Jon over by the counter to get me another drink.

“She has eyes like green tart.” He says.

“Who does?”

“The bartender. I’m feeling an impulse to swoop back over there and say some more stupid things to her.”

“Stupid things?”

“Whatever comes into my failing mind.”

“Come with me,” she whispered as she took my hand. Our performance a few days earlier had simultaneously served the purpose of auditions for drama club, or “Players” as they were called, and now between rehearsals of our scenes, she led me around backstage. There were carvings on all the dark walls, dates, initials of actors, their characters and their shows. It was like entering a catacomb. We couldn’t make a noise. The red EXIT light illumined the stairwell where we found two pink chairs and pulled them close together. As we leaned in close I closed my eyes. Her lips were soft and cool, her tongue was warm and wet. I had never tasted inside anyone else’s mouth before. My tongue, with a whole new territory to explore, went a little wild. She pulled away and opened her eyes. Pulled me in closer and we did it again and again.

But kissing her in public was a whole different matter. True, she had just moved into town, but did that make it okay to start “going out” with her? She met me in the hall between classes and wanted me to hold her hand and walk her to class. Was that alright? Was that what people did? If it was then I didn’t want to be one of those people. This upset her. She called me that night and asked me to come over. The citizen of the world had run away from home and was staying with a friend only 45 blocks away. I ran the whole damn thing.

Are you still following me Owen? We only have each other. And the way.

Mary was walking away because her drunk friend had deserted. We searched all of downtown, back and forth until we’d wiped the streets clean. There were tremors then that only I could feel, some sense of everything being alright if we’d only stay in one place, which ended up being Mary’s single bed meant for singly sleeping. First we talked of every which way but empty topics, her father’s orchard or my dreams of seeing Turkey, hot and cold summers inside or the harbors of the heart and mind. She was too much woman, I was not enough man. She told me she hoped to go back to Africa. I yearned for a bigger bed.

Jon was hitting on the bartender who would later become his girlfriend, quickly and helplessly unraveling his soul before her smiling immortal self. The goddess, he would come to call her. Bones, breasts, breath and music to the rhythm of his heart. Jon’s a sentimentalist. I am a reminiscentalist.

45 blocks from home I arrived sweaty and out of breath to her open armed embrace. “Come with me,” she said as she took my tender hand. We had discussed already the impending summer vacation, how my Dad was taking me on a trip across the country, and she led me around back of the house where we sat on the roof of an old dog house in the shade. There were trees all around us, and we kissed again. Her breath tasted like cigarettes then, and beer. All of her was alive and I felt like I was dreaming.

I was dreaming. There was no way things were supposed to be, they just were. And it seems like we all get a little lost, or a little crazy. A little bit of both perhaps when I left New York with an old friend and ended up in a bar in Eau Claire where I’d been before, hoping not to run into a girl I’d met then, or her husband. It would be the death of me, to see anyone so happy.

She asked me to keep in touch, which I did more or less. But when the summer had ended I came home and found she’d moved again. She’d moved to New York. The leaves fell and gave way to snow and suffocation. I read Undaunted Courage and dreamed of going west and made it as far as Eau Claire. Eau Claire and Mary and memory. Mary married and was moving to New York.

The city was collapsing all around us, or was that snow? I was dead. I was a man. All the world was a show and all the players were pilgrims bound elsewhere. Pilgrims with thirsty lips and dirty hearts burning for the good clean certainty of the unknown.

Jon raised his glass: “Let's have a toast! To charity, wickedness, hope, and the day after tomorrow.” The Goddess smiled. Everyone smiled, and I smiled too. To being young and in love, I drank in to the future.

O) Oubillete billet-doux

Days in the hospital blur together for me now. I remember the lighting: blue like the entire facility was under the bio-dome of an enormous urinal cake. Like being underwater, but a little bit brighter than it needed to be at night, and a little bit darker than necessary during the day. My sleep schedule thrown way off, I was constantly drowsy and felt guilty sleeping at night when there was so much to see in the half-light, even with my limited vantage point- the door to the corridor at 45°- and lack of nocturnal activity.

I was 15 years old and resilient. I had three broken bones and bandages wrapped around my neck and the top of my head that muffled all sounds. Everything sounded subdued, which was proof that there was good in even bad things that happen.

I remember the view out the window to long green fields and tall cloudy skies. The green was extra bright, the clouds ungodly sharp, and it hurt to move so of course I wanted little else but to be out of there and running through those fields to those skies.

The morning nurse was a middle-aged woman named Maureen who was shaped like a soft pear, and never had anything to say except comments about baseball. I hated sports, but I had stolen my brother's Red Sox hat-- had been wearing it before (and therefore during) the accident. Covered in blood and they had thrown it away, but Mr. Ambulance Driver had, apparently, felt pity on the poor kid and bought him a new one. I didn't wear it. I figured it rightfully belonged to my brother. How was I going to tell him? If only they'd let me keep the old one, to show him how fouled up it'd been.

Maureen had a disproportionately small head. A short straight bob of dyed brown hair, a tight thin-lipped mouth wedged between symmetrical bony cheeks and somewhere between two to four beady little eyes, depending on whether or not she had raised the glasses up from where they dangled from a metal strap atop her billowous breasts to read something. She appraised the hat where it sat on the stand beside my bed.

“Quite the season they're having,” she said in her mousey distant way, “home game tonight I think.”

“Cool.” I said, grinding my teeth. I pretended to be asleep until she had done what she needed to do and slipped quietly into the hall.

The night nurse was a different story altogether. A love story. Could've been a whole novel if I'd been a few years older and it had been wartime or something dramatic like that. Bridgette her name was, and she was the embodiment of wonderful. At last that's what I thought.

I was 15 so this story took place before I fucked around all the time. I didn't drink, I didn't smoke and I wasn't messed up like I am today. I still had a relatively firm grasp on reality, and my impression of myself was still pretty accurate. I thought myself a shy, talented young guy who would one day work hard using his talent to become a really popular talented man. I fantasized about it constantly, and invented aliases for my selves who had already made the leap, characters who were already sociable and successful, with names like Adolphus Gainsworthy or Duke Clemenceau. (We were foreign dignitaries, apparently.)

And although I wasn't so naive as to know nothing about women, my grasp on their role in the grand scheme of things was not thoroughly commanding. I knew about relationships, and I knew about sex, but I didn't know how the two fit together. Somewhere between episodes of Full House and late-nite skin was a behavioral bridge I had not yet observed. Soft-core Porn was deceptive, in that people in it somehow spoke very very little and ended up very very quickly engaged in the kinds of moving positions I found very very interesting. It all seemed so straightforward: man looks at woman, woman looks at man, sex happens. But I was afraid to look at women, especially beautiful women, and when I did summon up the courage or, more often, forget myself staring, women rarely looked back, and if they did, it never amounted to anything.

Bridgette smiled. Her wide eyes were freckled blue and her dimpled cheeks were freckled pink. She had brought me dinner, she said. I had never heard anything so lovely as her voice. She set down the tray and I appreciated the contour of her fingers, the softness of her hands, the way the V-Neck scrubs she wore gave way to the freckled skin plunging down the front of her neck...

“Is there anything else you need that I can get you?”

“Yes.” I answered straightaway, my voice cracking. But what? What was it that I needed. Oh yeah! “Yes. I wondered if there was any paper lying around. I've been thinking about some stories and I'd like to write them down, before I forget them.”

“Oh! Some stories? What kind of stories?” Her eyes were alight and her smile was angelic.

“Fairy tales, I guess you'd call 'em. I dunno.”

“Wow! Well I'll see what I can do. Will you show them to me, when you finish writing?”

“Yeah. Sure, of course!” That 'of course' came off a little to strong, but otherwise I felt alright. Flushed and sweating and dry-mouthed and heart-racing and shaky, sure, but otherwise of the finest kind.

I was already asleep when she brought the paper. I awoke and wrote my way through three pens before I was done. I wrote about princesses and knights, dragons and castles and magic and destiny and love. It was three in the morning or thereabouts. I slept a few hours until the morning rounds started, and slept a few more hours until the sun was high in the windowed sky. I read the best story to Bridgette that night, and I remember the hint of a tear in her eye at the hero's happily ever after with the beautiful woman. Secretly of course, the cavalier was a prince, but even more secretly the prince was me.

“Can I borrow that, to show some of my friends? That was wonderful!” she commended.

“Keep it,” I said. She thanked me profusely, looking very very happy and proud. Happy that I had made her happy, I slept again.

That's about all I remember from the hospital. Its like a strange dream to me now. I must have left soon after but I do not recall seeing her again. I don't know what happened to those stories, that Red Sox hat. I don't know who came to pick me up, or how hot the remainder of the summer days, or if I had completely healed. I don't know how soon after school began.

What I do remember is that Bridgette got married that fall. I saw it in the paper and was sad. She looked so happy in the black and white photograph with her baby-faced fiance. So happy that my sadness was mixed with a strange kind of what I think was hope. I'd shared with her my stories, my dreams, my love I suppose. And even though she was never mine to lose, her smile was like a contract sealing up all the tiny affections I had invested. If she had been sad in the photograph it would have all been a lost. But her smile wrapped up everything I had given her, everything lost in a way, a way that ensured I was gaining something new, something I had never felt before.