carmelo-rodriguez-jrWhisper
American
Lullabies of doubt turn nightmares into waking moments of truthThe soft whirling hum of a fan works its way from one corner of the room to the next. I succumb, defeated, deflated, shoulders slouched over, to passing wafts of air that briefly foam over the drooped skin of my emotionless face. Its touch invigorates the senses, momentarily reminding me to take in a breath of the foul and arid air that lingers lifelessly in this second story bedroom. As a sliver of light makes its way slowly up my chest and falls back to its original place, a muffled sound of pain boils over slowly softly searing through my torpid ears. Meanwhile, transparent tendrilous hands of memories begin to curl through my mind appearing and quickly vanishing like steam before I can grasp the true gravity of their presence. / It must be ninety seven degrees in here. A drop falls from my face onto the back of my clenched hand and for a moment the fan is at it again pulling my head with it from side to side. Oscillating, it dictates a hypnotic lullaby, an opium riddled rhythm sanding away at my rigid thoughts. Another drop falls toward my wrists driving me away from the blissful moment. Then losing its grip a metallic clang reverberates throughout the room as the object leaves my hand and finds the old wooden floor. Looking back at my hand I see where the two drops had fallen, now glistening in the dimly lit room. Were those tears? When I direct my sight down to meet with whatever had fallen a rush of blinding pain jaggedly inhibits my vision with a flaming wall of white instinctively calling my eyelashes into the backs of my eyelids painfully. My voice cracks and I hear the same singe of grief from earlier reflect ballistically throughout the room and into the hallway where ghosts gargle back an echo of my anguished voice. Am I hurt? / Afraid now of what I may have done,I cautiously work my foot away from the chair and navigate it across the floor until it hits the handle of something sending it spinning around. Reaching down, the once trance like hum of the fan falls deaf and gives way to a steady beat of drips that are accompanied by an ever increasing tightening of my chest. When I reunite with the object I had dropped the image of blood and steel mesh a murderous hue onto my fingers as I fumble to recover it. Realizing what has happened my mind fizzles and pops with panic and I begin to beg for respite, for a chance to revisit the moment before I had slit open both wrists. Cold anguish flushes the heat from the room and out into the hall as the dam of reality breaks and in with it a torrent of emotions and images of the blood peppered hardwood floor that now seeps dauntingly with the new life it is drinking. In desperation my eyes fire off in every direction, finding an open journal perched on a coffee table. The pages are in a fretful fury revealing pages dotted with smudges and smears of bloodied ink and teary paragraphs. Confused, I begin to search the room again and there beneath the window blinds lies the woman I have loved for eleven years lifeless in a pool of blood. Lorraine.
Shipwrecked FoolI am angry, but am not sure if I have a right to be. Between all or rather among all the other emotions I am feeling it is hard to discern and clarify the balance and reasons for my anger. Naturally I want what is best for you, that in itself is a conundrum. Is having what you want best? Or do I actually believe that what I have to offer can ultimately elate you to a higher level of happiness than that of your current situation? Another question comes to light now and that is, is what you currently want what you actually want, or is it merely that it was something which at first appeared to be and has over time slowly dissolved into something far less, into something you thought you had wanted but now see that in it's current form, really is not? / Suppose one of these speculations takes a solid form and settles as the true idea, then in what way could any of this upset me enough to reveal itself as anger in my mind? Primarily, it would seem my own jealousy or want of you could be a proprietary perpetrator in this matter, but I am sure that the true identity of this perplexed feeling runs much wilder and entangled with a slue of uprooted inner conflicts. So then, what are they? As I reflect on the many faces of this anger, the feeling of pain surfaces, but not the kind you feel for yourself, rather it's more of the selfless type. I am, by all means, a bystander on looking the trials and troubles that lay ridden in your path. I see you struggle to hold on and in turn attempt to stay as composed as a rigid coastline baring the constant battery of each careless and possibly calculated undulation of every crashing wave which from where I stand rises more often than not than the natural course of a waxing and waning tide. And it's as if from a distance I can see and hear bits and pieces of you crumble and crash, slowly receding into the horizon with each unrelenting wave. / At times finding myself diving into the chaotic and churning crush of waves to gather and salvage whatever I can mange to and still keep myself afloat so that when the tides recede I, with safe passage, climb ashore to safely return to you whatever it is I managed to cradle from the depths. As I take those sandy steps I now understand the reason for my anger, if but only for a portion of it. Watching as I do from my ship, it hurts to see the waves crash, to see something so paramount in beauty, in life be so carelessly attended to. Yet, the fault is not but of one, but of two. It can hardly be helped, you are who you are, and the beauty in you is as with most, your flaw. The core of you, revealed more and more with each crashing wave, smells damp and sweet of hope. Such a hopeful being, that even after the tempest has risen a tsunami to thunder coldly on your very shores, you merely wince and hope that just maybe a windless day will break through to passing clouds to ease each tide to a lapping kiss upon your now jagged shores that in time, piece by piece, return to you what is rightfully yours.
An Informal Letter to A Former FriendSocial Network, droll and at times informative: keeping me in tune with out of tune people. Except, this time you did something different. This time you took a life from my web of friends a trend of late: One loss to cancer, one to a fatal accident, another to pneumonia, and the rest deceased from overdoses. It’s been so many that the track marks are beginning to show across my veiny webs, long black thin trails leading to round puncture wounds where the touch of cold steel kissed your skin, stroked your hair back, and slowly laid you to bed exactly where you sat. This network doesn't show me the nights you cry curled in the corner, it doesn't reveal the moment when the ocean came crashing into the Steel Pier you are, tearing away lumps of mangled frame work from beneath, soaking brine and rattling support beams that you depend on. A smile instead manages to froth along the pages scrolled like white curled lapping shorelines pushing foam further up the sandy coast with each eroding wave. Now I stand in the wave of your wake; among seagulls flapping their dense thoughts and cretinous like minds and memories each vouching for the validity of their affirmations about the soul whose body is now center stage like a porcelain doll on a shelf to be displayed and examined exposed to all with each and every flaw highlighted so that they can have a chance at reciting her history, origins, funny moments, and fatal mistakes. The difference here is that there is no makers mark; there is no branded tag, no little black book of logs from which we can pull and decipher or recall every waking moment of your life. The reality is that for those of us who lost touch with you all that we know now is only history or what we thought we knew. It’s such bullshit, I’m not a historian, I really was your friend back then, but because of that I don’t remember shit, just the frame of the picture within, the shell of who you were, of what we did. I can tell you it was fun: the Bacardi filled Gatorade bottles, the sound of your laughter diluted in an intoxicating environment of rollerblades on the rink-floor, contemporary music and house beats reverberating against the circling congregation of equally happy and inebriated teenage youths. But how could I ever describe you today, who you were when you passed. That is not something I can claim as some of these birds squawk. Your social posts were a false facade. Obviously there was something I missed, what was it. Was it so subtle? So much like a light breeze fluttering at the thin frayed thread of a seam that I could have seen but didn't care enough to realize it was there. Were you just a tumbling leaf among a forest of fresh autumn arrivals lost in the vastness, one among millions? It pains me to admit that as much as I would have liked to have been a friend to you during your dark times, I too was in a dark place of my own and in turn was deaf and blind to the billowing smoke signals that tried to underline and emphasize the sorry plights of others. I wish you could have told your story yourself, could have left a memoir of the fucked up thoughts that zipped through behind your eyes while you filtered the layers of shit served in white paper bags that this world seems to dish up like a fast food chain of heartbreak and deep ruts, while every so often rewarding us with a mistakenly placed toy or salad to “make up” for the rest of the empty calories served. I've tried so long to be an optimist, to look at the glass half full, but that glass is shattered on the floor right now, I broke it. My life hasn't been easy, not many people’s lives are and that’s life, I understand that much. If it isn't raining it’s snowing, if it isn't snowing it’s hailing, and if there isn't any precipitation it’s either hot or cold as hell and you have to fight through it to make it to the next day. I’m taking the shoes I wear now off so I can step on that pile of excrement they call a glass half full, half empty. Give me the pain, it hurts and the tears burn as they roll down my cheeks while I stare at this half a cent card with your face on it and some mass produced poem on the back listening to the bullshit eulogy mutterings of everyone around me, but I want that. I would take this shuttering pain, this volcano of discharged emotions erupting from the shaking core of my body. I would take it any day over the numbness that is heroin. Wasn't your child a life raft? Wasn't he the duck it or fuck it of your life? Had you not a fiancé to whom which you could have rested your beaten structure on? Did you not have an array of support, a field of pile driven beams to share the weight in it all? Or was it a mistake? Was it a fault of somebody else that provided you with the birthday batch of heroin? When you blew out the candles and smiled behind the thin line of adumbrating smoke that sketched out the soul behind your eyes did you think to yourself, today will be the celebration and cessation of my birthday; a bitter sweet memory for all who know me: on this day she was both born and deceased. Today she began to live and learned of death. I will never have the answers for the many who continue to fade into the credits of their dismal painful lives, but I will never stop trying to understand and I will never learn to forget or let go. This blood in my veins detest the cold steel rush that so many of you have tasted, that so many of you ran to when no one was listening, when no one was looking, when no one could comprehend you anymore and the only languages you spoke were procured from endless nights on the cushioned wooden floor as you drifted off among the silver linen clouds, as you left this body on earth and spoke with angels perched over the smoke stack that overlooked the back-lit-keyboard of lights that was your city, your town, your home while the strand of rubber slowly fell from your arm. We couldn't hear you, and those damn angels seem to weave such a pretty tale sometimes when you forget that you are speaking to your own deceitful mind. I will learn that language, I will look for those signs, I will place a candle on the sill beckoning every friend of mine to come and share with me in person. Let me reach into that white bag and see what is inside, I’ll eat whatever you pull out whether they are empty calories or not, preservative filled fries cold or hot. You are my friends and Social Networks are a lie, just a wall to hide behind, an occasionally droll and informative medium, until you die and then there is nothing left to pretend to say or be.
Dear You, From Me: In Case We Should Ever MeetDear you, From me: In case we should ever meet. / You have lived in my mind now for almost half my life. When we first met I hardly knew myself, but still through my thoughts you crept; filling up the empty crevices, at times pinching and tugging on nerves and synaptic connections till I fell to my knees and wept. You didn't know then, but you also helped me collect inspiration and hope. Never mind the loneliness you caused inside and the occasional neglect. You got to know me in ways that still don't make any sense. Like, how on earth could you ever know that the thought of ever losing you made my heart full of dread and tense. / You moved me in ways that I will not soon forget. Like that time my thoughts grew dark and grim: when I thought all hope was lost, was lost in life without any sense of how to cope, and then there you were perched upon a patch of white warm sand, directions in hand: A beacon sword of diamond light parrying the vast darkness of the open seas. Still though, it was just a hand. Back then you seemed so far away and hidden above sight that even through my periscope I could not make out your face on land.
