Stop pretending
You don’t have a choice
When choice was always there for you:
Hate the life you live
Or live the life you hate
Say you’d do it differently
But history disagrees you
Protest you can’t go on
But heaven knows you will
Genuflect before the truth
The only one that’s clear to you
Whatever doesn’t kill you
Still really hurts like hell
As a young man, I loved love
and the idea of love
everything about the ideal love
and the humming, golden idol of love
so I did everything in my power to avoid its reality.
If only I was a conniving, greedy bastard.
If only I’d wanted to use women for their bodies,
Or their money, if I’d only wanted money,
Or their time, if only I’d wanted to waste their time which is more precious still.
If only I’d developed a heroin addiction,
I could have woken up 5 years later,
With everyone gone, $60,000 wasted,
No sense of who I was or where I was meant to go.
I could have spared so many so much heartache.
15 years later and a half million dollars poorer,
I know no finer addiction.
Romeo is a joke, folks.
Read it again and you’ll see what I mean.
Love, birth, and war are bloody affairs.
It takes TV to make it antiseptic.
Till you lose everything on a hit,
you have no business hustling with the professionals.
Love is waking up at 6 a.m. after a night of crying
It’s so cold the linoleum hurts and so dark you think your gods have abandoned you
on an early February morning.
You still do the dishes in the sink
Pick up the broken pieces of crockery
And make her a cup of coffee.
Because you do, that’s why.
And because there’s no one you’d rather talk to,
even when she’s not there and you can’t remember having anything to say.
And because you’re sick of your own shit.
That’s when it’s worth it.
If a starry-eyed poet tells you otherwise,
turn around and run.
Or, better still, break his nose.
I should have known it would be like this.
Her letter was written in allegory
about a little house and a pet and love, of some kind indeterminate.
It rang like a bellhop and flew through my mind 80 stories up to open air where I set it free.
My reasoning mind, ever my impediment, told me the feelings behind it were genuine,
but genuine doesn’t imply “real”.
The way it stuck to my fingers with sweet tenacity was real and taunted me, so I hated it.
In a time when calls could be avoided and transponders weren’t glued to the hip or shoulder bag, in a time when caller ID was $10/month and $10 was a feast or two pitchers of beer and a ransom to me,
calls were more rare and still more rarely avoided.
Tenaciously, she cornered me by the telephone locked to the wall of our briefly mutual bed.
The feeling was genuine, so I listened.
Listening was something I did only when I couldn’t speak,
but I couldn’t speak to her and I couldn’t avoid her and wouldn’t ignore her (like I wanted to).
I took a few words from my rare bag of promises
and offered to meet at a neutral location
where hopefully I could speak
freeing me from the withering act of listening.
Only in retrospect, I knew I had every intention of forgetting to remember.
But she had power, she had emphasis, she was a writer,
the kind who worked in backrooms you didn’t want to visit
to labor over cryptic texts you wouldn’t want to read.
As I labored up the dead incline, sun on my face, free of the glue trap of her letters and intruding calls,
she was there.
At the time and place we had agreed and I had forgotten.
I saw her waiting, chin on shoulder.
She was a good girl.
Prettier than she would realize for another ten years,
smart and talented, full of ideologies,
including the one that rested on my chest
smothering me like a flapping, demented sparrow, bent on breaking its wing
or biting me bleeding, or both.
An accolade I didn’t remember asking for
admiration I hated a little her for giving, though I couldn’t say why.
I saw her, and though I genuinely didn’t want to hurt her,
genuine, geniality, deities, and fortune all take a similarly dim view of fair.
I left her waiting and I cursed her.
How dare she be where I told her to be at the time I told her?
If she would have refused me, rejected me, and hated me
I would have had something to work with.
Maybe I would have called her.
Maybe I would have asked her to come back.
I walked and she waited
and I hated her for being genuine.
The sun of my face had become a mirror
and without the smoke, the reflection glared uncomfortably.
I never called or spoke to her.
Nothing is harder for a young man to forgive then when he’s done something wrong to someone else.
Ten years later, I found her.
I had put aside some special words from my bag of apologies,
nearly empty from frequent use.
But the bird on my chest was nowhere evident
and there was no sunshine on the face of this no-longer young man.
She told me
“Apologies are for assholes.”
Of course, she was right.
The heartbreak is realizing that nothing is personal.
A bleary-eyed 8 a.m.
Sees you fumbling past the detritus of unidentified crumbs and clutter to the shelf above the fridge.
You feel the cold, cylindrical weight rolling forward and stop it with your hand.
Leave the cabinet door half shut and step back trying to work the turgid hamster wheel of your creaking consciousness.
And, like Pandora, look again, because what else can you do with your higher reasoning still snoring in the nascent warmth of the human formed sheet you left 21 minutes behind.
The second time, the unidentified shape is waiting.
And the full bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey, forgotten from mid-March
crashes spectacularly into the cheap roll out linoleum
the thick concave bottom where the glass is thickest
ejecting like an escaping spirit
giving up the ghost and a liter of proof 80
onto the cluttered floor of your cramped, disjointed kitchen.
No one asked if you wanted to spend the morning cleaning the most day lit and unexhilerating bottle of liquor you’ve ever smashed from under the corners of the refrigerator and depths beneath the cabinets you should have cleaned last year.
No one is awake to hear you swear.
Nothing smothers the spark of outrage like the lack of a caring audience.
You dip like the end of a damp cigarette into the growing pool of alcohol
with a rag wholly not up to the task
to welcome the birth of another day
with the stench of late night promises and forgotten idealizations
sticking like tar to the recesses of your lungs.
In the brandy glass light of the beside lamp
Fluted like the hips of some ancient fertility goddess
She thumbs the satin elastic coral straps of her underpinnings
Over the rounded promontories of diminutive shoulders
Into the hollows of her collar bone
With a muffled snap that fills the plush, padded cell of Room 656.
On close examination, in the amber drip of the bureau mirror
Her body seems a half-formed thing
A slight, stripling sally, ribs and elbows sticking at opposing angles
Who fills a midnight dress like rolling choir crescendo
Of deep wine laughter, subversive mouth corner smiles, and music unplaceable
She tries to imagine what she’ll look like in ten years
But no image will come, no beginning and no ending
She tips an ash into an empty water glass next to a “No Smoking Please” plaque on the desk
The barest strip of lace borders an unremarkable breast
Barely a shadow at her sternum
She twists at the waist to examine the bruises
incriminating thumb marks at her hips and waist
To the small of her back and the nape of her neck
Whatever is out of place she’ll put right lock by lock
Auburn curls, burgundy lips, swelling lashes, and the hug of her midnight dress
All removed with frenzied, primal, violent discord
Returned in unremarked silence
Alone in a room that snuffs the life out of sound and time in a susurrus hush of dignified understatement
Alone in a room that’s paid for till 11 a.m.
Five minutes from the crack of a closing door
The solitude is stifling
The liquescent blue of her eyes streaked with ceremonial ash
Impossible to tell if she’s been crying
In the buzzing of her head she’s not sure
She averts her eyes as she finds the bathroom
She’ll look for her shoes
Before the walk to the train
SensibleUnsensible 