Sarah the Schizophrenic says the ugly old woman who wanders vacantly down the hall is ugly because she’s filled with demons, that if Mary was a good person her skin wouldn’t be a bunch of crushed tissue paper bruised under the eye-sockets. She’d be beautiful, Sarah insists. Like you.
Well, I don’t know about that, so I take a drag on my cigarette, hold the smoke in my lungs, let it circulate around for a little while, then exhale, flick the ashes off the **** with a swift snap of my thumb. Mary doesn’t do this, I think to myself, ******* off the stick once more. She’s not the one really inhaling Hell. All she does is lie in bed all day with her nose to the wall.
That woman makes me feel ***** Sarah hisses. Half of her face is concealed in the night, the other half dipped gold in the weak porch light. She’s hideous. You’re beautiful though, honey. You’re a doll.
Touching my face lightly with the tips of my fingers, I take another meditative pull, stand and walk a few paces, peer into the darkness. Beautiful. A lot of people say that. A lot of men. No matter how much I try, they still say I’m pretty. Ask for my number. Where’s your man at? I can chop my hair to bits, sleep so little that red and purple rims my eyes, walk so long in the chilly autumn air my cheeks are carved planes, no longer round and soft, but harsh, cold. I can smoke in order to purse my mouth into a puckered sphincter, destroy my image with oversized sweaters and baggy jeans and lack of make-up. Yet they never leave me alone, stare at me unabashedly, hungrily, take a seat next to me on the empty bus, follow me a ways down the street until I have no choice but to take the long way home, just to lose them. Want to know my name, my age, where I live, where I work, but most importantly, am I taken? Do I have someone? The lie always comes easily. Yes, I do. Then, I turn on my heels and walk away. He’s a lucky guy, a lucky guy to have you, they call. ****
Of course, they know. They all know I don’t have anyone. They can tell by how I quickly avert my eyes, incline my head to the floor. That’s why, I think, they find it so easy to talk to me. An empty, hollow shell, I can be what they need me to be at the moment: vulnerable. Am I pretty? I’m not sure. But still, the notion is enough to make me want to pour a can of lighter fluid all over my face, touch a lit match to my flesh and shave my head just to make them quit coming after me. Leave me alone. All I want is for them to go away.
Yet simultaneously, I find it difficult not to humor their silent pleas. Yes, I want to tell them, I will sleep with you tonight. Come pick me up around eight and make sure you have a bottle of Jack with you. No, I don’t care what your name is, and I’d rather not look at your wrinkled face, your ****** defeated face, either. Sure, I will make you feel worth something and you will allow me to forget where and who and why I am for a few hours, and then early in the morning I will slip out unnoticed and never see nor hear from you ever again.
You okay? Sarah asks. My cigarette has burned down to an angry red stub. I drop it, squash it beneath my feet. Yes, I say, sticking another one between my lips.
Are you sure? she shudders. That woman just walked by. I think she’s trying to possess everyone. It’s enough to make someone go crazy.
I do not answer. A few minutes later, a man walks out, joins us. His face is haggard, unshaved, his shoulders hunched, hands in his pocket, a tangled marionette dropped by society. Fumbling with his cigarette, when he finally stuffs the lighter back in his pocket, he glances up, sees me, freezes. I look up at the sky, legs and arms crossed, smoke seeping from my mouth.
You’re real pretty, you know that? He asks after a while. I shrug, waiting for the inevitable. After a brief pause, it comes: You got a man?
Oct 27, 2010
Oct 27, 2010 at 9:30 AM UTC
Sarah the Schizophrenic says the ugly old woman who wanders vacantly down the hall is ugly because she’s filled with demons, that if Mary was a good person her skin wouldn’t be a bunch of crushed tissue paper bruised under the eye-sockets. She’d be beautiful, Sarah insists. Like you.
Well, I don’t know about that, so I take a drag on my cigarette, hold the smoke in my lungs, let it circulate around for a little while, then exhale, flick the ashes off the **** with a swift snap of my thumb. Mary doesn’t do this, I think to myself, ******* off the stick once more. She’s not the one really inhaling Hell. All she does is lie in bed all day with her nose to the wall.
That woman makes me feel ***** Sarah hisses. Half of her face is concealed in the night, the other half dipped gold in the weak porch light. She’s hideous. You’re beautiful though, honey. You’re a doll.
Touching my face lightly with the tips of my fingers, I take another meditative pull, stand and walk a few paces, peer into the darkness. Beautiful. A lot of people say that. A lot of men. No matter how much I try, they still say I’m pretty. Ask for my number. Where’s your man at? I can chop my hair to bits, sleep so little that red and purple rims my eyes, walk so long in the chilly autumn air my cheeks are carved planes, no longer round and soft, but harsh, cold. I can smoke in order to purse my mouth into a puckered sphincter, destroy my image with oversized sweaters and baggy jeans and lack of make-up. Yet they never leave me alone, stare at me unabashedly, hungrily, take a seat next to me on the empty bus, follow me a ways down the street until I have no choice but to take the long way home, just to lose them. Want to know my name, my age, where I live, where I work, but most importantly, am I taken? Do I have someone? The lie always comes easily. Yes, I do. Then, I turn on my heels and walk away. He’s a lucky guy, a lucky guy to have you, they call. ****
Of course, they know. They all know I don’t have anyone. They can tell by how I quickly avert my eyes, incline my head to the floor. That’s why, I think, they find it so easy to talk to me. An empty, hollow shell, I can be what they need me to be at the moment: vulnerable. Am I pretty? I’m not sure. But still, the notion is enough to make me want to pour a can of lighter fluid all over my face, touch a lit match to my flesh and shave my head just to make them quit coming after me. Leave me alone. All I want is for them to go away.
Yet simultaneously, I find it difficult not to humor their silent pleas. Yes, I want to tell them, I will sleep with you tonight. Come pick me up around eight and make sure you have a bottle of Jack with you. No, I don’t care what your name is, and I’d rather not look at your wrinkled face, your ****** defeated face, either. Sure, I will make you feel worth something and you will allow me to forget where and who and why I am for a few hours, and then early in the morning I will slip out unnoticed and never see nor hear from you ever again.
You okay? Sarah asks. My cigarette has burned down to an angry red stub. I drop it, squash it beneath my feet. Yes, I say, sticking another one between my lips.
Are you sure? she shudders. That woman just walked by. I think she’s trying to possess everyone. It’s enough to make someone go crazy.
I do not answer. A few minutes later, a man walks out, joins us. His face is haggard, unshaved, his shoulders hunched, hands in his pocket, a tangled marionette dropped by society. Fumbling with his cigarette, when he finally stuffs the lighter back in his pocket, he glances up, sees me, freezes. I look up at the sky, legs and arms crossed, smoke seeping from my mouth.
You’re real pretty, you know that? He asks after a while. I shrug, waiting for the inevitable. After a brief pause, it comes: You got a man?
Oct 20, 2010
Oct 20, 2010 at 10:47 AM UTC
Oldest thing I ever did see,
Skin a mountain range of
Crumpled/crinkled crepe paper
Peaking in altitudinous pouches
Under his eyes, dragging with
Their weight dewlapp jowls
Down to a waddling,
Flabby neck, eyes camouflaged
Under light, fuzzy swatches of cotton,
Mouth slack and vacant, dribbling.
Hobbling with a stoop, knees bowed,
Back arched at an angle, a
Tilted arrow. He tottered over to me,
Inches, feet, miles, years too young,
Smiled brightly to reveal an empty,
Gummy mouth rimmed with
Birthday cake, pallid arms
Outstretched, head splotched with
A thin, wispy cloud of hair,
Half-full and forgotten baby’s bottle
On the carpet behind him.
How quickly they do grow.
Oct 19, 2010
Oct 19, 2010 at 12:18 AM UTC
Scars on my arms faded to memories,
faint dirt paths overgrown
with vegetation. Sometimes
I want to carve some new ones,
but don't. Instead I drag
on cheap cigars, pixels,
caffeine and other
more socially acceptable forms
of masochism, like relationships
or political campaigns in the media.
Black under my nails
not from European graphite anymore;
no, just from $3.99 hair dye
and scratching my eyes out.
Haven't picked up a drawing pencil
in almost a year. The closest form
of art I've attempted is grabbing
a chunk of dry hair and hacking it away
with the fury of the insane.
Adrenaline palpitating my heart
not from standing on the lip
of a furious overpass; no,
just from staring at a blank
computer screen, trying to
block out the incessant white noise
of human interaction while
trying to get these words past
the barrier of my mind.
.
Oct 18, 2010
Oct 18, 2010 at 7:03 PM UTC
After smoking my first pack
Of cigarettes
(Cheyenne Cherries, $2.09 at Marathon)
The novelty wore off pretty quick.
It didn’t feel cool anymore,
Didn’t make me feel important.
The cigarette was just something
To stick between my fingers,
**** between my lips,
Inhale and feel something
(feel Hell)
In my lungs.
A prop.
It was just a stick
With a red, smoldering ****
A piece of tobacco
To play with before the ember
Ate way down to the filter
And singed my fingertips.
Now, I think I light up
(Cheyenne Cherries, $2.09 at Marathon)
Because the smoke is so
******* enticing. It’s beautiful,
A kinesthetic work of art
(like a ballet),
The way those silver
Tendrils curl so languidly
From the tip into the air,
So graceful, so smooth.
When I smoke
I can’t help but to imagine
I’m watching a group of dancers.
Or something.
And I think I light up
(Cheyenne Cherries, $2.09 at Marathon)
Because there’s nothing better to do
Half the time and at least
It flouts the boredom
(for a few minutes or so),
At least it interrupts the
Relentless monotony of Life.
Kurt Vonnegut mentioned
Something about smoking
Being a noble form of suicide.
Well, so it goes.
Oct 18, 2010
Oct 18, 2010 at 11:32 AM UTC
Doesn’t run.
Doesn’t even curse.
Just sits there as the tide
Comes surging forward
And the clouds tumble
Over one another in the sky.
Doesn’t run.
Doesn’t even curse.
Just pulls out the tile
In her pocket as dull black
Water sizzles and froths
In a torrent all around her.
No, she
Doesn’t run.
Doesn’t even curse.
Just stares at the engraved
N and the sub 1
On the game-piece’s face
While the water drags her in.
Even when she loses her footing, she
Doesn’t run.
Doesn’t even curse.
Just clasps her hand
Into a tight fist before
The icy water
Swallows her whole
And thinks:
Where are you now,
Ocean Eyes?
Where are you now,
When I really am drowning,
And not just in every word you say,
Not just in every thing you do?
The force of the tide
Is not very strong,
Yet she does not fight it.
She is limp,
Now part of the water
Just as she was once part of him.
Where are you now,
Ocean Eyes?
Where are you now,
When everything is just too hard,
When I really do need
To disappear inside something bigger than me?
Seagulls scream overhead.
The sky is a black oil rag,
The lake a dark,
Rippling curtain,
The wind a shrill lamentation,
The girl a hollow husk.
After a time and with crunching,
Crushing force.
Her ragdoll body collides with a rock.
But she doesn’t move.
Doesn’t grab hold.
Doesn’t climb on.
No, she
Doesn’t run,
Doesn’t even curse.
She floats facedown,
Almost as if to look
after the tile
that falls from her hand.
Oct 14, 2010
Oct 14, 2010 at 4:01 PM UTC
October roads are littered with nostalgia;
auburn and crimson embers sink
like ash to the ground,
perpetually estranged from the spirited conflagration
as an old man is estranged from his wife of fifty years
after knowing her when her eyes bore the lucidity of an autumn sky,
after knowing her when her fair hair was full and gleaming,
after knowing her when she was able to distinguish the fact
that he was the man she loved,
before her mind became opaque and disjointed,
before her skin became as brittle as a desiccated maple leaf,
before she lost the steadiness to hold a sheaf of papers
without causing them to tremble
as a blazing autumn oak tree trembles lugubriously in the wind.
As he crunches down the
worn, flaming path,
his arthritic fingers clumped in a gnarled fist
deep within the recesses of his jacket pockets,
the old man smiles dejectedly as a young couple passes by,
their spry Labrador trotting happily by their side.
How it was, he muses, scuffing a stone along with his shoe,
to hold her hand and walk down here this time every fall.
A few minutes later he happens across a spindly sapling,
its arms thin as matchsticks,
its leaves defiantly clinging to its last remains of green
despite knowing that ruthless Nature will inevitably drain it all away.
The sight of this display of childish insubordination
reminds him of his son,
once a boy as small as that little tree
with convictions as grand as a red oak.
The man turns his face and shuffles along;
he has neither seen
nor heard
from his son for several years now,
not since her death drove him away to a place
where autumn does not exist;
to dwell upon it is to be struck
with great sorrow and longing,
like strained branches keening under intense wind.
Turning around,
the old man hunches his shoulders
in a futile effort to keep the chill from freezing his ears.
He grimaces; his hip never was the same,
not since the accident.
She patched me up, though, he recalls longingly,
she patched me up real good.
Didn’t even need a doctor. He chuckles.
Didn’t even need a doctor.
I bet she could’ve stitched me up better
with a needle and that blue thread of hers
than that uppity man with his nose in the air
like he was trying to find the sun.
And he didn’t do a good job, neither.
But I know she could’ve.
She could do just about anything.
A troupe of jack-o-lanterns grin
with the unrefined skill of young children on his neighbor’s porch.
Massaging his leg as he hobbles by,
he sighs and coughs. He looked so **** cute that year—
musta been around six or seven—in that cowboy costume.
She did a real good job, putting that whole outfit together.
Even made a holster and everything.
Felt a little bad for the kid
when she wouldn’t let him put a fake gun in it, though.
The old man cranes his neck to face the twilit sky.
You don’t mind if I let him have it, anyway,
do you, darling?
I know you always said I babied the kid,
said I’d turn him into a cube of sugar,
but he came out to be a good grown man, didn’t—
He stops mid-sentence,
unable to utter that very last word.
Standing at the lip of his driveway,
he pulls his hands out of his pockets
and pries his stiff, tangled fingers apart.
Night has fallen.
So, it seems, has his happiness.
Oct 14, 2010
Oct 14, 2010 at 3:14 PM UTC