Negate the End

"We must travel in the direction of our fear"

- Berryman

"I ain't old just out of date"

-Dwight Yoakam

Rage, rage against the machine
-Dylan Thomas de la Rocha

And yes I recognize the irony in never finishing a blog entitled

Negate the End.

Why end it? What end? I never end anything. I'm always

putting off buying books, reading books

but not finishing books

meeting a girl

not meeting the girl

meeting Kyle instead, in his capacious cargo shorts

meeting a girl named Angela

who produced copious quantities of what

she called

Hole Punch Art:

-tiny agile drawings on the round effluvium of the hole-puncher

and collected some-of in a journal called Exegesis but

handed out most-of to strangers and passersby

who would hold out their hands when she offered hers, cupped, to them

and receive their brittle white offerings,

(if there wasn't a breeze to get them first)

before looking up, Angela already gone, and casting for her

with a look of dismay and accusatory subterfuge.

Expecting perhaps candy.

Curious, the lambent electricity of sadness

pulses when you touch or smell

odd things, like a cigarette or a song,

I never knew what the man meant when asked

"are you suicidal," by answering "only in the mornings"

but now I think I do. I am a clock face set to chime

hollow on the hour, a number on the wall

half falling, the other half lifting myself up that hill

from rock bottom. It never ends.

I'm getting to an age when I have to consciously remind

myself to move with zest. Don't crawl 'round,

zip! Like you did when you were 12 and couldn't sit still.

Ironic too, because I spent most of my teens

lumbering morosely, feeling somehow innately that this

would make me appear older.

Which it did.

Until I met Kyle who was a taut bundle of nerve

introducing me to life so

fully packed with living it

for a time

blew away all my desires in me.

Like a fuse, he, sputtering toward a certain date with doom but

in the meantime igniting me with dates with strippers he knew

named Sibel, & Candy & Butterfly or Jade

and waking me up at 5 in the afternoon after 18 hours of solid communal drinking

to bang on my plywood door and say

"C'mon! Let us arise & away

for I have dealers to pay," and off!

A friend like Kyle is a hard thing to lose but I managed it

when: he met a thin flat-chested girl with a trust fund who

served him coke like weekend cupcakes and

when: I got a job tutoring crippled teens in Brooklyn

like Alice Reardon who

not listening to my lesson one afternoon in

her parent's apartment with the big barred bay windows

said: "Skyscrapers are like penises aren't they?"

and that gave me pause.

The only girl in that time who would willingly

let me into her bedroom and even

paid me for the privilege of doing so

and so young and blonde and daydreaming about penises

while I, reading lines from Blake aloud trying not to fall

into distraction

meanwhile thinking: Oh, Onanism— though actually

confessionary was my favorite position

right after The Butterfly, which

(if you don't know what it is don't ask)

a stripper taught me

and I tried later that year when I

moved to Texas

(you think I wanted to move to Texas?)

and then came to cast doubts on any show of triumphal thrust

because what developed was a slight burning

while I pissed

and so I moved again

and went back to school and drank heavily

Because while my life was over, yes, also, it wasn't.

Surprising how often you live through your deaths

and wake up to new dawns shining through

strange windows and notice you have an erection

like a skyscraper.

The community college princess-

es stroll by young and

leggéd long, my love

now, an Aquarius, is not getting any

younger. Fuck. You

know that the only way for thems to

stay sane is to get frigid.

Like water.

Otherwise they fall all apart.

It's been a long time since I was young.
I know what they say about believing in something and getting it,
but that's bullshit! Because I believe in cake and there's no cake in my bag!
Life is like the primer book they give you to learn to read
at the start of the 1^st grade in the early 90's
when all the pictures in the book were hold-overs from the mid-70's
even the though book itself was copyright 1983.
Everything was magical about that book when you first got it,
from the doughy smell that the pages gave off when you rifled through them
to the fluffy grandeur of the name on the fraying cardboard spine
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN.
But by the end of the year you sort of despised it. The
outdated clip-art, the formatted readings, questions,
never varying from chapter to chapter, even the glossary at the back where
some kid two years ago had written in with a dull leaded pencil "Faggot" and
"sexy balls".
All of life has been a variation on the disappointment inherent in
that experience with
that primer book. Including
in the 3^rd grade
when you were finally confident enough in your skills to check-out
a Goosebumps book at the library
all on your own,
it's pimple-textured velour cover glistening between your greasy fingers
as you rushed home and stayed up all night reading it,
then the next week the next, and the next, until
about 4 books in
you realized they were all the same and kind of lamentably formulaic. What next?
The middle school dating scene? It got old.
And if you don't remember it getting old it's because
you didn't date enough people in middle school for the thrill to wear off
but I bet the thrill ran off soon afterwards
in high school
when all the girls your age started dating pathetic or angelic older guys who
pimpled, you despised, and vowed you would never ever be one of until,
a few years later,
when you forgot your vow and started dating that adorable
freshman who had a crush on you for about 2 months before
hanging out with you all the time caused her to realize
that you were a troll
and she could do a lot better.

I've been listening to a lot of Dr. Dog because it is memory-neutral for me.

Won't be for long.

What sucks about music is that it's charged with memory

and the songs that harken back to the girls you can't forget

are played while you're single and yearning.

Or the songs that you overplayed while single and yearning

play when you're on a bad date, sitting silent over uneaten food and thinking, secretly

Damn man it was better when I was single.

We await the retrievements that never come.

Negate the end.

This ain't no roman à clef.

Life is hard

and no one goes out of their way to make it any easier for you.

I have no doubt about this.

The nights are long,

the days are tough,

there ain't enough money and

apartments are too small and

classes are too long when life is too short and

fuck it.

You've gotta get it while you can and

if you don't well, maybe you'll get wiser

but most likely you'll just get older.

So yes, I've been putting off this blog

entitled Negate the End for a month or more now.

I would put it off longer because

it's finals next week and I've got homework

left to do but

Here I am

stopped along a roadside six miles east of Sierra Vista

and brake fluid on my hands — I don't know anything about no cars

whom I fuckin'

kidding? — so maybe I should call a tow

or maybe I'll sit here and write it

and be done with it

and then hitch.

The sun is going down.

She won't start and I feel the sharp chill of nightfall

on the backs of my cracked and dirty fingers.

Is this the end?

This isn't the end.

This is just another

beginning.