The morning started with a shower
Arms braced against the wall in a kind of supplication
Pushing hard so damn hard you want to fall
You let the water wash your  dreams and pain away

The morning started with you leaving
Saying I'm so nice as you walk out the door
I know your tired cause we didn't sleep
I remember your whispered promises that were quickly disposed of

The morning started with you lying next to me
While I played Rilo Kiley
So close I could touch you but I could tell you didn't want to be touched

"Sometimes in the morning I am petrified and can’t move
Awake but cannot open my eyes
And the weight is crushing down on my lungs
I know I can’t breathe
And I hope someone will help me this time..."

I played it in a moment of honesty
My one true expression as I watched the distance grow between us
I wanted to fuck you again cause I hoped it would mean something
Thank you for teaching me that the third time is the charm and the fourth is for sleeping not fucking
It's hard to find this kind of rejection early in the morning. Thanks for staying open late to accommodate me.

The morning started with me laughing  at you when you said where's the underwear?
Writers can laugh at painful parallels and prophesy true unintentionally but not uneventfully
It doesn't help me not want to fuck you again
So we fuck again for the third time. The last time.
You kiss less when your not drunk

The morning started with some smoke and water and generic Advil
Proscribed to all the fallen like vitamins
You look good naked
Next to me
I wonder what this morning will bring?

This morning started with me inside you the second time
You made me cum inside you like you wanted something that I had to give
Maybe love maybe pain -you did like to be hurt
You didn't remember that I said I want to hurt you less cause I actually like you
I choked you cause you wanted it more than me
I feel like Kriegers robot arm sometimes
Perhaps we could just affix a cock to the arm and I could be replaced
Go on vacation to the city of lost whore sluts
I hear the buffet there is wonderful

The morning started with me inside you
On the kitchen floor
I threw you up against the wall too hard
You fell down so I took you right there
On the linoluem Under flourecent lights
You were so tight and tender and tough
You fucked me desperately like you hadn't been getting enough
Sorry for banging your head up against the fridge

The morning started with you next to me
Both of us drunk
You kissed me right
Out of the many there are few that do it
It's a weakness for me and dangerous to believe in the power of knowing through a kiss
You dry humped me like a dog on speed
It felt good
That and the kissing
I said no
I wouldn't fuck you
Like I said before
You said it had been to long
That you never did this
I said I needed to wait
That I liked you
I didn't want you to be just a fuck
Not just for you
But for me
Sometimes even seasoned whores need to feel special
I said that I'd fall too quick
You can be very persuasive

The morning started with me on the couch with your friend
We had makers and he had Jameson
He called it neat but it had Ice
I didn't say anything
You told him that you knew me for a long time and that i was gay
In retrospect it probably helped that I talked about color and carpets and paintings and poetry
I tried not laugh as we tried to pass of our little deceptive parody
Sure it was successful but what does it really say about me that he'd believe it
Oh the irony of pretending to be gay to get a girl
The things we do
He left after a long soliloquy on decorating and fashion
I think you might be like me and sometimes confuse the facts of your friends and stories with your dreams
I thought your adept practiced and surreptitious deception was endearing
I wanted to kiss you all night so I was glad he left
After he was gone I told you in the bathroom that I wanted to kiss you all night and you dropped your pants and peed in front me
You looked at me like no big deal and said what I don't care
I really starting liking you then

The morning started at the bar the night before
You sat down and smiled and flirted with me
You told me I would have to wait a year and a half to fuck you
As we drank way too much and both grew more beautiful and gracious with every ounce of liquid forgetfulness

The morning started the night before at your work when I hit on you cause you were laughing and smiling and had a little halo

The morning started like any other morning
With lies and  rejection and sweetness and passion and loneliness
If I knew I was going to be used like this
I would have used a condom
Not to just protect against the std's but to protect from intimacy
I hope I won't fail on both counts
A little worried
That's why I write this story

Azrael Always James
© Copyright 2013

In between   (a poem)
.
my mind struggles against its own illusion
nightmare tumbles out into still morning
light is heavy,
a fog of echoes...
and I am caught
.
day dreams the sunlight
dreams light the day
and I am caught in between
mourning echoes...
like a stillborn ghost
who can't take a breath in the present

….
  
I live on a tropical island and just want to go surfing with my husband, but the nausea in the early morning as I try to eat  breakfast and drive with him to the beach is so uncomfortable.  Day after day it makes even surfing a chore, and I consider not going anymore.  Background anxiety and unreasonable irritation interferes with our marriage, frustrates him enough to want me out.  

For me, a trip to the grocery store or meeting a group of people awakens the same dreadful fear as rockclimbing a cliff. Perspective has been lost in the extremes.  I try to gain some control over this hindering nuisance, seeking situations that bring the same surges of adrenaline so I can learn to master it.  If I can just push past the avoidance that would keep me inside doing nothing, if I can just ignore the feeling I want to throw up, if I can just get out there, I am rewarded with life’s potential beauty eventually.  Many days I do enjoy the thrill of mountain biking or connection with nature when surfing, but there are too many days that reduce fun to a relentless chore of wrestling inner demons.

The VA offers a few sessions of marriage counseling, and the doctor begins to explain PTSD.  WTF, I’ve learned to cope with an unreliable brain, but now there’s this?  The website for the National center for PTSD says.  “After a trauma or life-threatening event, it is common to have reactions such as upsetting memories of the event, increased jumpiness, or trouble sleeping. If these reactions do not go away or if they get worse, you may have Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.”  

“Common reactions to trauma are:
• Fear or anxiety: In moments of danger, our bodies prepare to fight our enemy, flee the situation, or freeze in the hope that the danger will move past us. But those feelings of alertness may stay even after the danger has passed. You may:feel tense or afraid, be agitated and jumpy, feel on alert.  
• Sadness or depression: Sadness after a trauma may come from a sense of loss---of a loved one, of trust in the world, faith, or a previous way of life. You may:have crying spells, lose interest in things you used to enjoy, want to be alone all the time, feel tired, empty, and numb.  
• Guilt and shame: You may feel guilty that you did not do more to prevent the trauma. You may feel ashamed because during the trauma you acted in ways that you would not otherwise have done. You may:feel responsible for what happened, feel guilty because others were injured or killed and you survived.  
• Anger and irritability: Anger may result from feeling you have been unfairly treated. Anger can make you feel irritated and cause you to be easily set off. You may:lash out at your partner or spouse, have less patience with your children, overreact to small misunderstandings.  
• Behavior changes: You may act in unhealthy ways. You may:drink, use drugs, or smoke too much, drive aggressively, neglect your health, avoid certain people or situations.”   It lists four main symptoms: reliving the event, avoiding situations that remind of the event, feeling numb, and feeling keyed up (also called hyperarousal)”

Four words strung together: Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.  They’ve become a tired cliché, exhausted from the endless threat of random cruelty camouflaged in banality, weary of the weight shouldering back the wall that separates death and gore from the living.  Living was a reflex beyond willpower and devoid of choice. Control was self-deception.  The mind was so preoccupied with A: survival, B: sanity, in that order.  Rest was a cruel illusion.  The tank was drained, no room for emotions ditched.  Empathy took too much effort, fear was greedy.  Hopefully they can be remembered and found on the other side, if there is one.  Sleep deprived cells were left hyper-alert from the imminent, shot up and addicted to adrenaline.  Living was Fate and Chance, and meant leaving that time and place sealed in forgetfulness.  

Now PTSD is a worn out acronym, a cold shadow of what it feels like.  I try to think of something more personal that can describe the way it randomly visits me, now resigned to its familiar unwelcome influence.  It steals through my brain, flying ahead of me with its own agenda of protecting sabotage.  Its like the Guardian Trickster of Native American legend, an archetype but real enough to make mistakes: Chulyen, the black raven.

A decade after the ER, contentment is found in a garden of slow tranquility as a butterfly interrupts a sunbeam.  My heart fills with bittersweet and just then Chulyen’s grasping black claws clamp it with painful arrhythmia.  My heart fills to burst, tripping in panic trying to recover its pace.  The sudden pain drops me to my knees, in the dirt  between fragrant lavender and cherry tomatoes.  Pain stops breath and time and makes me remember the ER, when my heart rebelled its ordained purpose for a week.  I had tried to throw my bitter life back in God’s face but He didn’t take it.  Now that I have peace and a life that I treasure, He’s taking it now.  The price for my mistake is due.  It was all just borrowed time and I’m still so young, my children just babies.  God with a flick of cruelty reminds me not to put faith in the tangible, especially when its treasured.  The sharp claws finally relent and I can breathe, looking up with a gasp and the Raven takes flight overhead leaving a shadow.  Bright noon warmth, unusually heavy and foreboding, seems to say ‘there will come a time when you will not welcome the sun.’   Doctors run an EKG and diagnose ‘stress’.

The bird perches on my shoulder two more decades later, always seeing death just over there.  So I sit on the porch just a little longer and check my list again, delaying the unavoidable racing heart and rush of tension when I fix the motorcycle helmet strap under my chin.  I know all those stupid drivers have my life in their cell-phone distracted hands and hope my husband knows how much I love him, and my daughters too.  

Chulyen wakes me at 3:00 am when autumn’s wind aggravates the trees.  His rustle of black feathers outside unsettles the dark calm.  An end-of-the-world portent hints that this peace is just temporary, borrowed.  Tribulation will return.

The raven perches relaxed in the desert on the gatepost of a memory.  A bullet-scarred paint-faded sign dangles by one corner from rusty barbed wire:
    No Trespassing    
    That Means You
A haunted idea what's behind the fence.  Chulyen implies the memory with a simple sound:
a Harley in the distance is for a second the agitating echo of a helicopter...
or those were the very same words they said when...
or I hear a few jangling clinks of forks in our warm kitchen...
hinting a cold cafeteria at 5:00 am smelling of fake eggs and industrial maple flavored corn syrup,
and everything else that happened that day...
My cells recollect, brace with the addictive rush of adrenaline.  But the raven denies access to the memory, distracting with nausea.  I trip and I fall hard into the gritty dirt of irritation at the person who unknowingly reminded me.  Anxiety floods in along with fatigue of the helplessness of it all, back then and still now.  I can't go further.  Chulyen’s tricking deception says Leave This Memory, you never wanted to come back.
But I already knew from just recognizing the bird patiently sitting there a sentinal,
recalling every other time he tricked me with nausea and depression.
I tried to tell myself again that behind that gate,
the past has dried up from neglect.
Disintegrated into dust,
Blown away,
doesn't
exist.
…


After everything else, how to work through this?  The VA gave me a manual, a crudely printed set of worksheets with a government-looking blue cover page:  Cognitive Processing Therapy.
“In normal recovery from PTSD symptioms, intrusion, thoughts, and emotions decrease over time and no longer trigger each other.  However, in those who don’t recover, the vivid images, negative thoughts, and strong emotions lead to escape and avoidance.  Avoidance prevents the processing of the trauma that is needed for recovery and works only temporarily.  The ultimate goal is acceptance.  
There may be “stuck points”, conflicting beliefs or strong negative beliefs that create additional unpleasant emotions and unhealthy behavior.  For example, a prior belief may have been “ I am able to protect myself in dangerous situations.”  But after being harmed during military service, a conflicting belief surfaces, “I was harmed during service, and I am to blame.”  If one is ‘stuck’ here, it may take some time until one is able to get feelings out about the trauma, because one is processing a number of rationales.  “I deserved it because…” , or “I misinterpreted what happened, I acted inappropriately, I must be crazy…”  The goal is to change the prior belief to one that does not hinder acceptance.  For example, “I may not be able to protect myself in all situations.”

(chapter continues with recovery methods)

my loose leaf like sway
situates in light, right in
wind, life

leaves me loose
along the precipice of this
coagulated noose

oh hoots and toots!
my boots cannot take me anywhere
today, they
lack distance to stretch

as string stretches all along
our stratified souls
they say, oh
give me a rest

so,
      death;
must you
                  be such an ending
to this terrible mess?
I guess not, i guess
it is not the correct thing to discuss

Let's discuss the
superfluous stuff,
the dramatic tease of interest,
the emaciated conversations of puff,
please, please, situation
and
     nothing
               else, nothing
will tough the brave disguise
of this stuff

the life of this everything stuff

Got up to turn the pages
Let up so I can burn my wages

I spend time like Its money and I am a Forbes CEO

Just when I think I can supersede myself the confusion begins to glow like an expected sunset on the drive home

I smile at an elderly woman leaving a tacky hotel wedding in a wheelchair, cheap dress draped with an oversized man's coat

It's cold in Philly
And the sharp bending wind whips my soul

Like a favorite eerie  movie I inevitably watch again we fight on the phone and you say it's everything that I've done

I sit down with my coffee and smoke a cigarette

I don't gamble with numbers - but the chances I get

Far away in a jet soon to tel aviv
banks' charge conversion rates for currency

the door opens and closes
the places my heart goes when I remember you have to say yes before you can learn to say no

I want to write a poem.
No, like I really really really wanna write a poem.
Problem, stick it to me.
Pause
Poems have to be good.
Okay, so a poem doesn't have to be good
However, the point of the art is to have someone read
Those flippy little words that you pulled out
Of some intangible existence and pasted on
The Internet.

The Internet,
So you don't always put it online but,
Other people are "supposed" to read it.
To enjoy it, give you a pat on the back,
Maybe an "I see what you did there".
So poems are supposed to be presentable.
You've got to pay in sweat and ink but,
At least the words themselves are free.

What if I don't wanna have to make a "good" poem?
Okay so I really do want a pat on the back but
Sometimes I really like pasting things from
Intangible existences.
Fancy words right? Let me pat my own back.
Sometimes I just like putting my emotions on paper
While sounding like I read
More dictionaries than Webster.
Ha, ha, sigh.

There's a problem with having to be inspired to write shit down.
Do you think someone pays Taylor Swift's boyfriends
To break up with her
So she can write the
Next big hit?
I wouldn't doubt it.
My guardian angel should make the people around me
Say weird stuff such that I can write about
Walking on waves of shattered glass
Or
Singing of birds in circled flight.
Maybe I'd be better off being hit by a car.
That'd be some pretty touching poetry.

Some people write happy poetry too,
I don't know how they do it.
Sorry but, my world isn't flowers and  butterflies
Enough to warrant discussion of
Staying in the fairy meadow of light.
Sorry, I'm just jealous.

Maybe I just like writing stuff down?
What if I just don't want to be forgotten?
Leaving a legacy in my words more indellible
Than a pat on the back.
Doubt it.

I just don't want to forget.
Brain, why don't you get it?
I'm sitting here getting all intimate with an idea and
The next morning Brain's got no clue what their name is.
Like really, even if we invite a friend over and get creative with
Our tongues and mouths,
Brain doesn't remember the moments shared between us.
Paper doesn't think very well but it's got a decent memory bank.
So I save up for a brand new poem.
I thought words were free.

R.I.P
Robert Louis Guerrero Jr.

That's really all there is to say
Everything to be put on my headstone
To mark my final resting place
I can't be certain when it will be my time
I have lied many times over
I have cheated just o get where I am
I have stolen things that should of never been tampered with
I mocked the life I was given
Secrets hold bounty's of truths
That no man or woman should ever know
But here is one
I attempted suicide four times
Each time I failed
I cut my wrist almost every night
I recently stopped for the sake of my heart
I drink like alcohol is going out of style
I have stopped again for my heart
You may be wondering why I have 1996-????
As the title to this redundant poem
Well it's to say that even though I am 17 years old
I am too young to die
Even the good who have died young
Wish they lived to see tomorrow alive
I have been told that I'm too young to hate this world
Yet I have seen enough of it to know
This place isn't for me
I'm not going to kill myself
The world is
They're going to pull this trigger
They're going to carve rivers into my wrist
They're going to determine whether I live or die
That is the reason for the "????"
Because I don't know when
This world will surprise me
By introducing me to Death's cold bony hand

I love you and I always will.
Even when I get on your nerves,
when I annoy you,
and maybe am not the nicest.
                 I love you and I always will.
                 Even when you don't want to trust me,
                 when you don't want to be around me,
                 but at the same time you do.
I love you and I always will.
For all the memories we have shared.
Every good one,
and every bad.
And for all of the ones to come.
                 I love you and I always will.
                 Even if you don't feel the way my heart
                 feels around you.
                 Or you don't understand the way
                 my soul kind of clicks whenever
                 you're here.
                 I don't understand it either.
                 I just know I have a million things to say,
                 and a lot of them,
                 I know you don't want to hear.
                 There's nothing wrong with that.

But I love you and I always will.

Say something. Say anything.
My mind is a war zone.

Ammunition loaded, open fire on my sanity.

We think we’re invincible.
We think we know every dusty corner
and boarded window of this existence.
We think that we are impenetrable.
Not even we can penetrate ourselves.
Until we do.

Until we find the one solitary loop hole
that exponentially increases to ten solitary loop holes
to fifty solitary loop holes
to such an infinite number of solitary loop holes
that you cannot even form a complete thought
because you know it’s targeted directly at your
own consciousness, at your own dignity, at your
own fucking heart.

We manage to discover these loop holes
because we predict their outcomes.
We predict the goddamn future with our
careless decisions and our arrogant triumphs towards
happiness.

And suddenly, we’re humbled and broken
and irreparable because of our own fucking
psychic minds and our own naive
ideas of happiness.

And now we’re all lying in a pile of rubble.

Our souls ruined and tainted with no one
left to help us pick up the pieces of ourselves
because we were all too fucking selfish and
proud in our poor attempts at satisfying this
morbid existence.

Then we wait the eternity it takes for these
self destructive ruins to lose their pulse,
to fade into an alternate universe of silence
so we can quietly slip away from this
vial consciousness.

We wait
until the heartbeat of these run down,
dirt covered left overs of ourselves finally
goes still.
We wait
until we learn to live in the pile
of shit we call ourselves;
until we realize that we
are our only destruction.

You are no one singular Unit;
you are the culmination
of Billions upon Trillions of units
we've come to call "Cells":
Neurons, Organ Tissue, Muscle.

You are no singular Persona;
you are the cumulative collection
of Personas which you chose to wear,
or which have chosen you:
The Teacher, the Student, the Victim, the Infallible.

You exist at no singular Time
for you are the collection of Nows
connected forward though Time
to create the line
you think of as your Life.

You are no small feat;
you are a miracle of Consciousness,
perhaps even an inevitability
but who am I to say?