I Got Your Message…

I always do.

But I don’t know what to say so I never get back to you.

What do I tell you?

That I’m not doing well?

That I’m even more boring?

That I’ve lost what I thought I had.

That I’m penniless.  At lest my thoughts are?

I don’t want to tell you that.

I want to tell you that I’m fifty feet tall.

That’s how you remember me.

So I’d like to keep it that way.

I’d rather you not know this fallen me this stupid me, this idiot that I’ve become.

If you remember me that way it means somehow I’m that way.

You keep me preserved in ice.

And maybe I can come back to it one day and you’ll never have known what a joke I was.

I can kill myself and be myself again.

That’s my plan anyway.

So I’ll get back to you.

Misspelled text message.

Late night too short emails.

Voicemail.

I’ll keep that frozen me alive.

That’s my plan.

This how it is…

And there’s nothing I can do.

I wake in the morning and it’s around me like a shell.

Not a part of me, but inseperable.  Grafted to me from so many yers.

I can’t remove this now.  My skin will come with it.  I can’t survive that.

So this is how it is.

I can keep trying to jump the ship or I can learn to sail this one.  And in the end , when I sail off the edge of the world, it will be lopsided and imperfect.  But I will get there the best I can.

Because this is how it is.

Get born or get lost.

Get out or get downed.

This is how it is.

It’s Monsoon season somewhere…

And we’re driven inside as the curtains blow in from the sea.

Everything stops and we wonder what’s next.

A time to make nothing.

A time to do nothing.

Nature gives an excuse.

Those are rare.

Stop returning letters,

stop working on your plans,

stop trying to see friends,

stop all those things you think are important.

It’s monsoon season.

Stay put.

Stay still.

Don’t be convinced to stinke out into the rain.

You won’t make it.

You’ll be driven back and have wasted that time.

That time you should’ve spent doing nothing.

Sipping coffee and watching the rain.

It’s some of the most imortant time.

The most important you’ll ever have.

That time when you do nothing.

Stay put.

Stop living.

Stop dying.

Stop fighting.

It’s monsoon season.

On My Roof

They come down in spades sometimes on my roof.

Pointy knives and sharped forks and things that people say.

They lodge themselves into the the shingles and stick.

They come down in a deluge sometimes.

Sorrors.  Happiness.

Sometimes in bluk they look the same.

When there’s too much of anything isn’t sorrow the default?

They come down sometimes in trickles.

Insights.  Feelings.  Hints.  Signs.  Clues.

A slow dripping down.

They kind of rain you don’t even notice until after it’s gone.

The kind of thing you look for but never notice.

You just walk outsede later to see that there’s something on your roof.  Something on the ground.  On the grass.

And you missed it.

A Crosscut Across the Jaw After My Birthday…

I laid there in the bed.

So sick.

Beaten down by something.

Thinking to myself:

This is terrible.  This feels terrible, this is like hell, this is, this is, this is, this is what I want.

It’s what I felt I deserved.

You want to wait around for your life?  Here.  Here’s a REASON now to wait.

Doens’t that suck?

Now you have to sit there, the sickness said to me.

Now you HAVE to watch the world go by.

Having an excuse doesn’t make it better does it?

No.  It’s worse now.

Be careful what you wish for,

But more careful of what you’re not bothering to wish for.

Like health.

That’s what usually gets taken from you.

The things you never thought to wish for.

So I sat there.  On the edge of my bed.  Becaomeing more and more of a joke every day.

I’m hilarious now, I bet.

To others.

Not to me.

This Joke is not funny anymore.

I’ve fallen out of love with being myself.

So once I’m feeling better, I’m going to walk down to the store and buy some alcohol.

The kind that burns

Like literally burns.

I’ll dump it all over myself.

Light a match.

And run.

I’ll keep running until I stop or the fire does.

I’ll scorch the earth of me.

The crusty soot will flick away and underneath will be…

will be…

will be…

If I make it through.

If I make it through I’d like you all to be there.

Everyone I’ve left behind.

I want you all to be there with me.

Those I hate.

Love.

Never met.

Hated even though I never met.

I want you all to be there.

I don’t want to leave anything behind.

I want to take it all with me.

I’ll fill up every suitcase in my house with you.

The carry-ons.

The wheeled ones.

Garbage bags.

Canvas grocery bags.

Filled up with all of you.

All of my life.

I want to take it all with me.

All of it.

I’ll miss you all so much.

I already do.

I want to take you all with me.

Leave nothing behind.

I can’t let go.

I can’t let go.

I won’t let go.

I can take it all with me.

You can’t take it away from me.

It’s mine .

I’ve earned it and I wont  give it up.

It’s mine.

It’s mine.

I live in three square miles…

…The grocery, the plant store, the liquor store, the bar, the radio shack, the little restaurant.

Why see the world?

What more could there be?

Isn’t the world just a quilt of these three square miles.  Why trust one and not the other?

Why trust another part of the world.

Is it so much better?

There are poeple there that mistreat you.  Mistreat themselves.  Mistreat that little three square miles of their own.

What’s the difference?

It’s hotter or colder and the bulidngs are maybe made of grass, maybe made of clay, maybe made of ice.

Bur the peope inside.

The same.

Have all the good people travelled to the other side of the earth?

Dribbled to one side of it like oil and water?

No.

In fact nothing mixes better with a good person than a bad person.

In fact isn’t one quite unstable without the other?

In fact isn’t that the world?

Squares within squares.

Good people and bad.

Middle ground, high, ground, low.

And what’s the difference?

Fountains

The woodwinds creak into the air.

I don’t belong here.

I don’t belong.

I’ve been a ghost everywhere,

and flesh and blood where it’s the worst.

I’ve been everything halfway.

But nothing to the end.

A lover, a fighter, a father, a friend.

I wait in patient hallways.

My dreams wrapped up in a book.

I’ll use them someday.

I’ll use them someway.

I’ll use them now.

The Flood

That’s where we met as the desks and beds rolled by as we sat on the roof.

The lives of others rolling by in the river.

We wated for help that never came.

Unless help was the drifitng that took us away .

Down the river.

There we went.

And here we are now.

A diaster pushed us together , then pushed us to the high water mark.

To a safe place.

And again we watch the refuse roll down the river; the wreckage after wreckage that wrecked up stream.

We look at it all float away and think “hmm.  there it goes.”

There it goes.

Here we stay.

Above disaster.

Below heaven.

The high ground that floats in the middle.

I think it’s okay to envy the destroyed, right?

To envy those who are being washed away.

Because away is somewhere.

Away could be anywhere.

But here is here.

We know what it is.

No mystery.

Above disaster.

Below heaven.

Waiting for either to rise or fall.

The Hill

It was deep but it had an end.  They all do or at least I tell myself that.

Suppose I’m scared that one day I’ll get to that endless thing.  And there I’ll be.  Thinking there’s an end.  But it goes on and on and on.

I’ve stopped searching.

And that’s strange.

It used to be all I did.

Now it’s just travelling.

From one place to another.

I don’t know where I’m going but it’s on rails now.  Bound to the earth.  Gray smoke shooting into the sky.  Winding through the hills and along the lakes.  I’m headed there.  I don’t know where but I’m no longer searching.

It’s on rails.  Iron and thick planks.

Driven into the earth.

Defined.  Steel.  Coal.  Certainty.

And that’s strange.

Not wrong I think.

Just certain.