they weren't supposed to tell you about her because then all your decisions would've been based on her thoughts of you, her feelings, her opinions, her agenda, and can you say with any honesty that you would've been living in the moment and for you and yourself alone?--you know exactly what would've happened, it's all written right there for you, you've already done this a hundred times, and the beginning, middle, and end are all the same: you come to the core of what you are only to be disappointed that there's nothing there for you to change: the dreams are always of her, and what is it that she shows you in these dreams?--only that you are a hopeless and regrettable case when it comes to women...oh, if you could have been born as one completely oblivious to them, you might've become someone even you would have respected...but as things are, as you dive deeper and deeper into this hole you call a dream, you'll see that yes, the high-rise rises ever higher, there's yet another floor for you to climb the stairs to, and when your body aches and you say it was a good climb, that it was good for your growth, when you look out that window, all you see is the distance between you and the hard earth you've fooled yourself into thinking you've gotten away from...but what have you done, really?--it is night and the moonlight sometimes streams in through the clouds scudding by...the wind rises and falls and rises and again, and it howls when you least expect it, when you don't want it to, which is when you'd like to think of her across the street in that other office high-rise where she too is staying late burning the midnight oil...or maybe she's just ******* her boss, who can say?--do you see where the problem will always be?--you are too fixated on all these women who don't care about you, who have never and will never care about you, and do you see now that they never could because even you don't put yourself first: you are trapped in this mode of thinking that has you chasing after them, wondering how you can get them hooked on you, desirous only of having them fall in love with you so that you can say to yourself that you "have it all" when in fact what you have is a disaster just waiting to happen: you are not whole unless you have one of them who loves you?--and have you asked yourself what in the hell you're going to do when you can't get any of them to fall for you?--will you be worthless just because you are alone in the world again?--you came into this world alone, you're leaving it alone...all you're doing as you allow yourself to become more and more clutched in this trap is validating the lie that there can ever be someone who will be with you in all respects in this life...and even if you could find someone who is genuine, one who isn't a liar, she still couldn't help you with hose terrible episodes you have when questioning the point of everything, the point of existence: she'll just say that at least you have each other, that there are cold nights when you can hold each other and continue giving the lie to each other back and forth till break of day that you gave each other when there you are in your mind all alone as ever, all alone as you'll always be...she knows this, for she is all alone in her mind as well...we can never really be accompanied by another to where we exist within ourselves...no, all we can do is share with each other what it's like to live within ourselves and hope that there's someone out there who understands us...it is this understanding that relieves the pressure because then we can usually follow through with fooling ourselves that here is someone who understands us, and because of this understanding, we are alone no more...it sounds too good to be true because in the dead of nights like these, it is exactly what it seems: another lie our rational minds take to our hearts as the stuff that will allow us to sleep, to go through each day with "proof" that we aren't alone anymore...and yet there is the eternal silence of the mind where the only voice that stirs is this one, the one talking to you now as you look down all those hundreds of feet to the concrete below, and when that gets too boring, you look across the street trying to see if indeed she is ******* her boss when you know she'd never be so gauche as to display herself anywhere near such wall-sized windows...you have the unshakeable nerve of the dead to think that you were ever going to find someone in this life who was capable of getting you out of your head and into reality...the thing of it is, though, that you have been fooling yourself for too long: just because they spread their legs for you doesn't mean the melancholy is going away forever...no, it will return just as soon as you've finished with them, as soon as you begin thinking dispassionately of your seed running out of them, of them getting pregnant or of them unable to get pregnant because you just might be sterile after all, that's when the sadness will settle into your bones again, that's where you'll feel like you're a million years old, like you've always existed in this world, like even when you can't remember what it was like to be alive, there will be the unshakeable feeling like whatever you are, you are meant to be this weighty, because there is too much to think about, to be cautious about, to be indifferent to, to be against...because aren't you the warrior of another era, aren't you the one who wants to resurrect them just to slaughter them over and over until the end of time?--oh, you could tell her, couldn't you?--and the crazy ******* within you would be willing to do it too, if you knew where to begin or how to explain who it is you're killing to resurrect to **** all over again: is it your mothers who knows no one and cares for no one but herself?, is it your father who passed onto you his blinding need for women to fill him with purpose by controlling him?, is it every single woman you'd ever been with whom you'd tricked yourself into believing you loved just because you were ******* her, just because you were making plans with them to exist in some near-future world when you were happy and content and wouldn't look at any other woman?--but had you ever asked yourself how that would have been you being completely independent of them, of her?--yes, you had wanted your own life and you'd wanted her to have hers as well, you'd wanted to be the type to not care about what she was doing nor with whom she was doing it, but is that who you were really, or is that who you kept telling yourself you wanted to be?--and even if that was who you were, had you been telling yourself to become this merely as a form of protection?--because if you could become such a man, then they'd never be able to hurt you again, could they?--you'd never find yourself crying that you'd allowed yourself to be fooled into thinking you'd never have to be alone again, you'd never find yourself hating the person you'd become, that ******* who thought everything was going to be fine when he should've just been working on getting his life together, of creating a good life for him to live so that when she left him, he would've been just fine, just as fine as if she'd never happened into his life... but the chandelier did not sway, it just hung from the ceiling as you approached the spiral staircase in the lush apartment where you two had lived...she had gone, and you liked ******* with yourself from time to time like this asking if she'd ever really been here to begin with, asking if she ever existed when she walked out that door...but you knew you never would've rented a place out that was as nice as this without having a woman in your life, for you could live almost anywhere and it would've bothered you only a little that it was in a ****** neighborhood, or that it wasn't the perfect apartment in the nicest part of town...this too was done under the influence of whatever you wanted to call this thing you were...and what could it be called, anyway?: were you co-dependent, or were you just desperate in a very common way?--were you deranged for both wanting to be alone and hating that you'd be alone regardless if you had someone?--were you ****** up for having conversations like this within your mind, or were you merely being honest about what a byzantine piece of post-modern life post-modernity had told you it'd made in your brain?--you weren't just living in the here and now, you had always been this, you had always done this, for "out there" in the æther that transcended time and space, there was the presence of darkness and how it called to you to come back home, that this was where you'd been speaking, that this was what you'd always meant when you'd said "god"--it was neither good nor bad, it was neither nothing nor everything...it was only what always had been and what would always be, and right now it was calling to you, smiling at you that there would be plenty of time to be alone for good and for all, but just what did you consider being alone when you had all of this to consider: the window and what she was doing, the walls here and what they contained when you were looking at the moon, the chandelier and how she'd be back and how even if she never came back, there'd still be all these thoughts staring back at you asking how you knew there was a smile there in the blackness of eternity...and how you knew it was for you--



© asgarth 2017
Creative Commons License
This work by asgarth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at midgarth.blogspot.com.

zombies eat the living and ghouls eat
the dead and i ask which you're going to be
when they lower you into a hole in the ground

because there's no god, no jesus to save
you or any of us--
maybe i shouldn't have spoken out of anger,

but what did you expect when you came at me
once more with exhortations that i
"not do that"

when we've already had that talk,
a million times we've had that talk
and it end in the same way always,

with me not swayed and you not swayed and
the two of us exchanging the same ****
words we always do

when you've found i've injured your dead god,
your absent god, your non-existent god...
but maybe, too, you've forgotten

i used to be like you
all pious and looking at the yellow moon
shrouded in freezing clouds like

he had made it when all he had made
was a ******* mess of your life and mine--
and have i held my tongue?

for too long you know i have,
but i think you like it when i lash out
because it gives you just cause to lash right back

and we both know you're good at that, but
now the question is will you be good at it
when they're gnawing away at your face

and you've found you can do nothing about it,
or will you simply smolder as you curse me
for being right when i'd said it a hundred times

already: i never wanted
to be
right--


© asgarth 2017
Creative Commons License
This work by asgarth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at midgarth.blogspot.com.

have all the fun you want--
sleep in the clothes you wore the day before--
you'll have to rise and wait for them to rise--
you'll have to sit there in the dark and know
what's coming next--

because soon enough you'll be in a car
headed for home--
and soon enough you'll be looking
out the window--

and how the meadows will churn into
a blur--
how the sun will shine so bright to
make you sick--
and all over again you'll be re-living
that ******* childhood--
just wanting to be dumped off where
they're going to dump on you some more--

and you'll want to go all the way back,
back to where you are now--
in the dark listening to them breathe
their slow and tired breaths--
it is yesterday for all they know,
it is tomorrow for all they care--
they are dead to the world as you should be--

but instead you are imagining what it
will be like to be "home"--
and all you want to do is freeze time,
as lousy as it is right now
in the dark--

get your head up off that floor and stop making yourself the animal they've always tried making you think you are--don't you see them laughing at you, the ladies' arms craned around their men's necks and in their free hands, flutes of champagne as, in their own minds, they see themselves as jet-setters, stage-stutters, world-changers, male-enslavers, and it's all thanks to what they have between their legs--they are strong, they are women, they are mothers and daughters and nieces and aunts, they are friends, they are comforters, they are salvation, they are life, but they will bring you death if you ask them to--all of this and so much that you can never conceive, this is all that spins about in their heads as one stands and one sits and all smile at the tale of you heading down that hill in a shopping cart--that's you'd even told them you were an expert in navigating a shopping cart was a joke, but for you to demonstrate for them, and then for you to almost **** nearly everyone you'd almost run into: well, it didn't look good for you, and what did it matter that they hadn't invited you to stand there looking up as they couldn't even be bothered to look down on you?--what was important was that you see how you looked through their eyes, that you see you seemed somewhere on the social food chain between clown and worm--and you needed to see yourself like this, you needed to be taken out of your own head where all of your real problems were that you might begin to fix what was the biggest of all these, that this self-image you have of yourself where you are a jester, a buffoon, a trickster, that you are none of these, for these things are not anything even close to what you wanted yourself to be perceived as...but it was all you'd come to take as you couldn't be taken seriously, so you accepted being the one they laughed at--you'd win them all over like that, right?--but it hadn't really occurred to you that they'd never think of you as an actual human being like this, and even as you considered ******* one of them, you came to see that you could share with her whatever you wanted, you could tell her whatever thing you thought was most serious, most pressing, the thing with all the gravitas and drama, but it still could never shake the idea of you she'd already formed in her head that you were a ******* backwards-*** man who wasn't even really a man because you never hit on anyone, you never threatened anyone with physical violence, you never ordered anyone around, and you never even raised your voice--the only way she could tell you were a man was that you kept to yourself, that you didn't talk to anyone, that you preferred your own company and didn't have a wife or a girlfriend or anyone to love you...but there was no way you were ever going to sidle up to her and tell her how amazing she looked in that dress that clutched at her every curve, there was no way she was ever going to accept what you were saying as being part of the larger "dance" that always began with looks and words and ended with ******* and regret and in the most terrible of cases, as you'd already experienced, ******* lifelong regret...which was passing strange to you because she seemed to smile, to regard you in a way she hadn't before, but hadn't you been standing in this very spot in times past where you believed one thing while something quite contrary was taking shape before you?--this was one of those times and you had realized it without being told this time, you knew that she was either lying to herself or she was just toying with the idea of being with you to titillate herself, to pass the time while she waited for something or someone more exciting, more important to come along...but it had occurred to you here and now that that could be said for all of them, and if you were being honest, it could be said of everyone, everyone except you because you were the last one standing, the last one who would pass up the opportunity to be with someone more exciting because you were someone who was loyal, someone who could be trusted to behave like a faithful boyfriend or husband or whatever should behave like...and you despised yourself because of it, and you saw that that whole dream you'd conjured up about her, the one where she had become homeless, where she had lost everything she had had and you had swooped in to help her track it all down and get it all back, that truly, it was in vain because she wouldn't understand your love of antiques and sense of the "old world" would help you be a better person because it would make you see that however fine those things were, that however rare they were, they were just things and when you saw her crying and in need of someone to listen to her, someone to hold her, how could you not come to understand that that love for old things couldn't compare with your love of people, that you'd only ever wanted to be surrounded by people who would try to do as you did, that you too had wanted to be held and stroked, that sometimes you could've cared less about ******* because all you'd wanted was to fall sleep against the breast of the one who'd told you to relax and close your eyes, that no harm would come to you because she wouldn't let any harm come to you, that you should just get whatever rest you could and that she'd be more than happy to be the one you trusted enough to fall asleep against...you could've told her all these things about your but, really, what good would any of it have done you?--remember, you had wanted to win friends, you had wanted to not be alone and so you'd allowed them to paint you as you'd made yourself appear out of thin air: as the one who would make them laugh...you couldn't have known then that it was something that'd be impressed upon them as the one and only thing you'd ever be, you couldn't have suspected that in its own way, it was a ******* death sentence for you and for the kind of life you'd always dreamed about living, for no, you'd never get a woman like that, you'd never attract a wife or girlfriend or any female who'd want to have and raise children with you, for you were the ******* fool, you were the freak of life who'd made them laugh for years and that's all you'd ever be, and that lie you'd told yourself that that's how you'd win them all over, through laughter, that was only for men with money, men with striking hair and striking good looks, men with the patience and the intelligence and the soul to endure the pains of having to reinvent oneself, and this last one, this was most definitely not you--you had told them all in action and in spirit to go **** themselves--you never had to say and they never had to hear it, especially the way you'd gone about things: first by making them laugh and then when you discovered the ugly repercussions of your choice, by ignoring them completely, by seeing them and saying nothing, by not even greeting them--this is how they had come to eventually you, for what were you now but this controllable, unpredictable creature that did one thing and then did another totally unrelated to the first?--yes, you had succeeded in doing exactly what you'd never wanted to happen: they feared you, they stayed the **** away from you, and you were never on their minds in any way you'd like to smile and swell upon...unless of course you had finally sold yourself to the fiend, unless you'd come to see that you had always been the fiend, that you had only tried to re-invent yourself as something other than the great satan and when you'd failed, all that was left for you to do was to smile at your own isolation and loneliness, for isn't this what would've happened in any case, even if you hadn't tried to make them laugh as a desperate gambit to win them over?--so no, you weren't about to share with her the dream you'd had where you two had lived in the same apartment building but in different suites, that one day in this dream she'd come over and after spending some time together you two had come to see how much you'd always had in common and never knew it, so much so that you had fallen in love and married and broken up all in the span of minutes when after a brief conversation you found yourself alone all over again and looking over at the spot where she'd sat and wondering why it always had to be like this even in your dreams--why bother sharing something that she'd find funny as hell when it had been the crux of your soul?--that your suffering would be the cause of her laughter, something that she'd share with her friends and end with, "...can you imagine that?: being married to him?!"--it's not even that it was too much to conceive of, but that it was only more than natural for you to conclude a dream of trying to connect with her, or with anyone--that you had seen failure in your mind long before you would ever consider trying to talk to her or any of them in real life, this is what made you want to walk away smiling at yourself because in some outré way, you'd always been right about them being beneath you, so beneath you that you had to play the fool to entertain the idea that they were worthy of your time...it was only that you'd forgotten your true worth and when you remembered, it's not like it was a celebration of your acumen or ability, no--it was just another ******* funeral you'd love attending in the rain and with that smile spreading wider and wider and that threatened to crack open the very jaws of life and death in its silent scream--

was i expected to just stand there and take their *******?--yes, i walked away, i said that i'd stay and get that information, but they were playing me for a fool and when i figured as much out, i walked out without saying good-bye, for who would say good-bye in such a set of circumstances as this?--wasn't it already bad enough that when they'd seen the planting of fennel happening, the ladies made me pull up to the hedgerows where it was all going on so they could get out and walk around and feel like they were part of something that they actually weren't a part of, something that, in actually, they'd been apart from their entire live so?--oh, i'd wanted to tell them, believe me, that they were ******* hypocrites, but what was the point of ruining a day that, for me, had been ruined the very instant they'd asked each other if that group of cars over there, up on the hill, had been theirs, if these were the ones responsible for all the activity that they considered losing themselves in--wasn't it bad enough i'd been dragged all the way out into the country just to drive through a bunch of cemeteries because they thought it'd be romantic to see what the old gravestones were like?--and what had they done when we'd gotten there other than say that those weren't the headstones they'd imagined, that those were too modern, too ugly, too *******, and why had i even taken them there when i could've taken them to this or that other cemetery?--wasn't it bad enough that for whatever reason the biological imperative had divined, i'd wanted to **** the both of them and knew in advance, knew even before i opened my eyes that morning, that i wouldn't end this day inside either of them?--and yes, i would dare to be this honest with them if i thought they'd be able to look me in the face afterward...it's not like i didn't know they didn't want me--it's that i had had nothing to do with my days so that i found myself in their company and after not a very long while, i ended up desiring the both of them--i'm not saying this makes me a good person, or a romantic person--quite obviously, i'm not talking about holding hands with them or losing myself in the depths of their eyes--no, i said good-bye to all that nonsense when i was still a young man and now that i'm not a young man anymore, i find myself asking if could pull off the whole "lothario" scene, you know?--just sleep with women and not find myself in a relationship with them...it's something i'd feared becoming all my life and yet, i'd ended up becoming a lot of things i'd once feared becoming--just look at how i woke up every morning: alone and in silence with only my breathing out a sigh so filled with the ennui of this world that i thought eventually the ceiling might start raining its own precious tears on my behalf--this was my life now and i wasn't quite thrilled at the prospect of living the next sixty or seventy years of it, not like this anyhow...and yet there they were, consciously splitting off from where i was standing by going off on their own, and was i to presume there were merely taking in the sights of nature around them?--were these two just innocent city girls walking about and snapping pictures of the volunteers planting what they told me was fennel but might've been anything on earth?--maybe they'd separated because they were going to whisper about how they'd been having simply an awful time and wasn't i just the most awful person to imagine themselves having a ******* with?--maybe they were kissing each other and snapping pictures of each other's face of pleasure and repeated ****** as they went down on each other...this is all the paranoia that was trapped inside my head, this is why it wasn't fun to be me sometimes, why i would try to lose myself in the previous night's dreams: because who in the world would want to walk about on his own knowing that two women, possibly lesbians, were ridiculing him as they were making each other *** and keeping their experiences "for posterity"?--yes, this is why when i'm asked at times, "why the long face?" i just smile and chuckle and say, "everything's fine"--again, would anyone want to be the one to say, "well, actually, if you really what to know, i've been dying to get this off my chest fora while now," and let those monsters in my mind off the hook they're barely fettered to now?--it was just here, when i was about to fell pretty deep into the whole "woe is me" routine that the people who'd been planting all their sprigs had found me and asked if i wanted to come inside and read their literature and listen to the tales of their collective journey, so i said sure because what else did i have to do, i was just killing time till those two came back wiping their mouths and looking at each other like i was some kind of ******* idiot not to know when, in reality, they might've just been out there really and truly taking in the sights and smells of the country they rarely got to walk about in...and yet, when those fennel people, as it really had turned out to be fennel they'd been planting that day, discovered that neither of the women they'd seen me with had been my wife or my girlfriend or even a lover, but were both friends--and, yes, i even think they sensed i'd wanted to put air quotes around "friends" when i said it aloud--that's when they understood their collective or cult or whatever this whole fennel thing was a beard for wasn't going to accumulate into its ranks three more that day, that's when they told me to stand there and that someone would be with me shortly, and of course, like a polite ******* i stood there and smiled when one called over two or three more to point me out and crack a smile as they tittered to each other and walked away...i stood there and looked at the interior of that home that looked like they'd just killed someone and assumed control of it for themselves: i stared at the pristine oak floors, the pristine white banister of the steps going upward where the pristine light shone sympathetically down as though it too were laughing at me--why didn't i just ask them who i had to **** to get some acknowledgement that i existed as someone separate and apart from all others, but who was a whole human being and didn't need to be attached to any collective or cult to feel like he was "someone"?--of course, this wasn't a real question, it was just my sheer frustration at feeling like i was being dismissed by everyone in whose company i was in that day: the lesbians who might not've been lesbians, the cult-murderers who might not've been cult-murderers...it all just bespeaks of the kind of headspace i'd been forced to live in all my life, really, i understood this too...and here i sound like i'm writing from the grave of one of those nineteenth century writers with all of this grammar that makes the writer seem so far away from whoever his audience is, but it's only because this is how i've been forced to live--i've been forced to accept that i just don't get along with people and this is so because i just don't trust them and this is so because i've been betrayed too often to ever trust anyone again--yes, it all makes me sound like a child, but isn't trust what everything in a relationship is based on?--true, there must be respect, and there must be some kind of human feeling or caring for the person, but without trust you're just going to end up like me: don't you see me looking all around the room, using my eyes, swiveling my head, turning around so or three or more times when it feels like there's something happening, something about to happen behind my back?--it could go on like this forever, and yes, with me holding their stupid ******* pamphlet in my one hand looking and swiveling and turning and turning...which is why i just left, i didn't even wait for whenever was supposed to get back to me with the time and number of their first meeting to return with that information because it was probably all just their way of having fun, of taking a break from the break that was their life doing all this "conservative work," which we all know is the labor of the rich, the pastime of those with too much money in their banks accounts and too little imagination in their heads...but i know, i know, here i am with far too much imagination in my head, here i am heading out and leaving those friends of mine, who are no true friends of mine--but who i wish were "friends" of mine--to their fennel fields with with fennel sprigs and to those who might be cultists or murderers or both because they all deserve each other, and whether or not it's all true isn't my concern anymore because i've been made to feel this way, i've been made into this creature now stalking its way back to the car--yes, i am an "it" these days, i am a sort of post-post-modern and meta and very self-aware monster that should not be and yet look at me, just look at me: i'm not even looking around when i start the car, i don't even care who i back over even though i know already no one's around, and when i reverse the car and get ready to turn back onto the highway, i roll down the windows just so i can try to hear what might be taken for the strains of their cries over the engine and in the distance, but i try to hear them so i can feel some sort of satisfaction as i press the gas enough to begin a gentle roll--i don't think i'd ever stop even if i could've heard them screaming for me to come back for them, to come back and save them--for all i know, they might've been in on it the whole time...or they still might just be going down on each other back there--

so now: you've arrived at this place you've been calling success for the last three years of your life as you struggled through all the ******* that came along with getting that ****** degree and now that you have it, now that they have to call you "doctor" regardless of what they end up trying to prove about you, how much farther along on your journey toward actual success are you?--do you yet have a wife or a girlfriend or a woman who cares about you, has feelings of tenderness for you?--you definitely don't have any children to speak of and now that you've come to see just how selfish they've made you, and how much you don't want to be mistaken for your own child's grandfather, it really is too late for the family you sometimes found yourself wanting and sometimes found yourself being terrified of being shackled to for a lifetime--because, really, what if you did end up with two daughters who were even worse than your sister?--wouldn't you have wanted to disown them outright after awhile?--and that would've just ****** them up even more than you not telling them how much they disgusted you in the years where their personalities were still forming, where you were still trying to shape them into something other than the type of **** your sister was, for wants she just a composite of all the worst traits of your grandmother and your mother?--and what had those ******* been like?--the worst of the worst when it came to the hag, the parasite, the user and abuser women had been understood to be as regards those stereotypes which existed for a reason, and you had seen the minuscule truths in those reasons, you had lived through each of them, but it'd been your sister that concerned you most of all because she was your own age, she would go out and propagate and turn her own children into knock-offs of herself, and wouldn't that be a crying shame for the world of men and women, to have yet more people like her walking the earth?--but wasn't it even a greater indignity to you as you lived and breathed in this present moment to know that there'd be more people like her because she had made children and no more people like you because you hadn't?--there'd been phases when you'd been too frightened by the responsibility of a family, too spooked by what might be born of half your genes and half of someone else's "crazy" and so your time had now passed and even when people tried telling you that they knew of this or that couple where the father was ten years older than you and they'd still decided to have children, that just made you feel old and sad, as though your terrible choices really had finally caught up to you in body and in spirit--but then there'd been phases where you wanted to hold your sons in your arms, where you wanted to teach them how to tie their shoes, how to read, how to write, how to solve problems without using fists or angry words, how to make life work for them, how to get along with people, and just how were you going to teach them all these things when you were still learning how to do them yourself?--you'd learn together, that's what you'd come up with, and you'd become their teacher because they needed you to be, and if you had some more learning to do, then there was always the "on the job" training that all of life was every ******* day, but you'd be there for them and you wouldn't abandon them when they ****** up, you wouldn't make them feel like **** when they didn't perform up to your standards, but hopefully you'd be able to show them the path and they would take it and not take so long getting there as you had...but how long had those latter phases lasted where you had wanted children?--not long enough to warrant looking for a woman you actually wanted to have children with, and that hadn't been the woman you'd been married to, which was unfortunate because she'd wanted them with you...and for good reason: because she'd wanted to use them as a crutch to enslave you to being the breadwinner for the rest of her life--it'd all become part of her grand scheme that had gone bust when she realized you wouldn't play along with her, that you wouldn't give in, and if it cost you being with her, then that was fine with you, but you weren't going to surrender who you were and what you wanted...you weren't going to play mad ******* scientist with her and her ****** up genes with her family's notorious history of mental illness, and that was enough to put the both of you on each other's **** list for nearly six years, which means, yes, you were going to have to start all over again, and even worse than this: you had known six years before she divorced you that you were going to have to start all over again with someone else, maybe even with no one else because how were you ever going to build yourself up for a possible **** up like this again?--there you were halfway through your twelve-year term with her knowing that however long it lasted, that it was going to end because sooner or later, she would end up erasing her misgivings and wanting to be with someone who wasn't going to be hesitant about having children with her because of her genetic history and that person wasn't you: you both knew as much at that moment in the summer of '00, and yet you did nothing but nominally reconcile so that she could attempt to wear you down with pleas and begging and when these didn't work, indifference and threats until everything you'd loved about her was gone and she had become just as much of a stranger to you as you'd become to her...it was all of this that came crashing down around you over the course of ten years as you saw just how depressed, just how miserable you'd been with her those last six years until you started asking what that whisper had been inside you when you'd first met her and then it hit you like a sledgehammer: you had been warned by your instincts, by that weird "people sense" you had about you that she was someone who was spoiled, someone you'd even called in your head at first a "spoiled brat" and yet you went ahead and got her number anyway, you called her and met her even though you'd already had a relationship that was a failing and flailing relationship until she had let you between her legs where the other had not, and so your mind was made up that at least with this one, you could have some fun, at least with this one, she knew how to live, that *** wasn't a bad thing or something to be ashamed of, and so you ignored your instincts because you thought you were alive, you thought you were trying to make a life with her and who cared if you saw what her shortcomings were, everyone had them...but you had ignored your own warnings about her that here was someone who was always going to be selfish, who was always going to want you to live for her--didn't that sound like someone you'd grown up with, someone you had come to despise, someone you said you couldn't wait to get away from so you never had to see her again?--yes, she was just a different form of your sister, and in some bizarre oedipal twist, you had married an analogue of your own sister...no one's here to judge, though, just you and what had you decided other than you'd wasted twelve years of your life on her?--only that you could never allow yourself to go to sleep like that behind your eyes ever again, because somewhere within, you had known--you'd been too smart for your own good and it hadn't been good for you, all that wisdom, all that knowledge: you didn't know what to do with it, and so you ignored it because to act on it would've left you all alone again, and how would such an outcome have made you feel after working so hard to be anything but alone?--because by the time you'd figured all this out, you were out of college and away from all the foul-weathered friends you'd made there so that all you'd had was her, and when your finally moved out of your house and away from your family, what would breaking up have gotten you except a one-way ticket back to that **** house because you still weren't financially independent--life was taking too long to live, you were taking too long to get started with it, to get good and making it work for you, you were ******* up too much and somewhere along the way, at some point, you were going to have to pay: and so here it was, here was how you'd have to pay, with your time, with the precious years of your life you'd never get back...so that yes, you'd been in a prison, of sorts, but it'd been one partly of your own making and partly that of how you'd been raised to think--it had been deflating more than anything else to discover that no, you actually didn't need anyone--you'd wanted someone, sure: someone good, someone who'd be patient with you, who'd understand your moodiness, who'd get that sometimes you just needed to be held and stroked like some beast laying down to die in pain...but these were only wants, not needs--you stared up at the ceiling this morning knowing the meeting was tomorrow, that you might well be written up, but so ******* what?: in a sense you were dead already and in another sense you'd never die, and their ******* threats and paperwork wouldn't mean **** even as they were putting everything into place because you had all this reality unfolding within you so that you could see how you might've avoided all this beginning with this meeting and ending with the woman you'd should've been with, the one you'd always wanted to be the mother of your children, but now that was as impossible as everything else was as you readied and steadied yourself for what is yet to come--

i know, kid: it can't be any fun for them to tell you
that you're almost a woman now, that just because
you're sitting in what's going to become a pool
of your own blood that this means you can have babies
and it's a sign you're growing up--

who needs any of that ****...but how much
worse could it get has been spared you because
you didn't see what i did, your friend finding
the pencil case you had your ****-pad in only to have
no clue what the hell it was, so she waved it in the air
and said that she'd found someone's diaper, and what else
was i going to do but laugh within as i cried at her
innocence if that's what you wanted to call it--

but you can't blame her, she weighed maybe eighty pounds if that, maybe toward the end of this year, maybe at the
beginning of the next one, maybe that's when she'd find out
just like you did, the hard way, the messy way, the way
lots of little girls found out because no one wanted to
have that talk with them--

so i thought about my own mother and the day she'd
decided to tell me and how i'd held her responsible
for this horror she was disclosing, how i'd lost my mind
in a way because it's not like i could ever feel close
to women ever again, not knowing what this curse was that
nature had cast upon them, upon you all--

but was this what made a woman, or was it the breaking
of the *****?--was it getting married, having a baby, paying
taxes, being destroyed by others around you, having to rebuild your life up from nothing, looking around and finding no one around whom you could trust, no one you
wanted to trust?--

everyone seemed to have their own idea of what it was to
be a woman, and what with all the rites of passage, and
everyone having their own definition of what was what, and
with everyone being different anyway and chiming in about
solidarity even as they preached individuality, you could
play semantics with them till your head fell off, till the toll of the final bell, till you had enough like i had--

so that menstrual blood and ****-pads and the embarrassment of everything that surrounded "the talk" and everyone finding out what you were (that you weren't a little girl anymore), all paled when placed against what was still awaiting you because i have only listed those things i know
anything about, for they can happen to anyone--

and you  will endure this cycle until your body begins to fail and falter,
until you enter what they'll call a new phase of life because no one wants to call it what it is,
which is the unraveling of the body as incarnated in the form of woman, which you have only just begun to begin to understand you are--

the flower unfolding, the flower dying even as it unfolds,
it just takes time, and from here i can tell you, don't
leave that friend behind, the one who still thinks a
****-pad is a diaper because soon enough she'll need you,
and your eyes will exchange things i will never know--

i cross and uncross my legs and the look of
disdain goes from sour to worse and still worse till
it feels as though i'm going to implode through my nose

and we're on this journey together, or so i tell
myself still that i get to sleep at night,
so that doesn't keep me up all night,
this feeling that a fear i can't escape is
something that will with me always...

so i summon up worse fates to endure, worse lives
to live...but in truth this is the hell i've always
tried to escape--

and anger ideas great ensuring self-worth when
self-worth is nowhere around, but just look what
it does to sleep, look how i'm up like a shot
when i need to be dead took the world that i might
rise when it's really my and pretend once again
i'm alive,

look at how there is no journey but this one
and
how there is no "we," just me--

come on now, you didn't think you were going to get away with not dreaming about the undead after all this business at work, did you?--that was the problem with you thinkers: all you ever did was thinking!--the truth is that you thought far too much--you should've been out there living, trying to get laid, trying to knock the hell out of the world with your next verse...but instead, there you were lying awake for hours, literally hours, and all because of what?: some witch at work who wants to run everyone's world by being what she can't help but being?--you'd even said it to yourself driving home, that she wasn't a bad person, she was just a petty and sick ******* who had to make everyone's life that much lousier, that was her "power," if you wanted to call such a thing power...but it's not like she was your boss, she'd just said something that had injured you because you'd allowed it to injure you, because it had been true a long time ago that you'd let it appear that you'd "****** up" when in truth you'd saved yourself a ton of misery by doing so--the thing itself was so small, though, that only someone who was picayune was ever going to know that you'd still felt ****** up over it...it just so happens that she had remembered and that she was just petty and picky enough to throw it back in your face at the exact right time...but how often had you said to yourself that you really needed to combat such ******* behavior by thinking as clearly as you could in the moment, by just knowing that you hadn't done anything wrong, that in most cases, you were probably smarter and more capable than whoever it was who was accusing of something ridiculous or trying to make you look bad for whatever reason...and how often had you failed in taking this information to heart, facts that would make anyone else feel good about themselves, but with you, it was just another reason why you made yourself miserable: you just couldn't translate all of these individual positive things about you into a more cohesive and positive whole--to you, you were always doing spin control to get yourself back from the edge you felt they were all pushing you closer and closer toward--and when you got there, and if you went over, what then?--only what had happened last night, which is what was happening all the time...you lie awake sleepless and fuming over feeling like you were made to look bad even understanding in the moment that you would never remember this ***** or anything she said, that you'd even forget her name in time because people like that were nothing to you, they meant nothing to you--but how long would that take?: five years, ten years?--you wanted to forget all about her now, but it's not like you weren't ever going to see her again, which is why you were getting all stressed out, because in a few hours, you'd have to drag your sorry carcass out of bed and go back there and do it all over again--so you were going to have to figure out a way to evolve through this experience, you were going to have to sort all this out in your head and get right with it somehow because in fewer than twenty-four hours, you'd be right back here, crawling into bed and asking yourself if it was going to be "another one of those nights" where you got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and when you returned, found it impossible to get your mind off of anything but what had happened involving this woman, this creature, this **** who was a bought on all womankind--yes, she was really that bad, maybe not a bad person per se, but bad enough to lump her in with all the other ***** you'd ever run across in your travails in this world, these bleeding animals who just wanted the world to serve them in one form or fashion and who didn't care who had to lie facedown in the mud to do it--in such a scenario, that doomed fool lying facedown was you...but you didn't want that to be you, and at the very least you'd wanted to have your slice of revenge by having your slice of life have nothing to do with her, by being able to crawl into bed and get good sleep and if you couldn't, then let the reason be anything but having to do with her--god almighty, how many women like her had you encountered in your life, and already your father's voice was drilling down to the very core of the question: how many times had you met people like her, and how many times had you let them get to you, bother your harass you, ******* up, make you look bad, ruin your sleep, ruin your day?--and you still hadn't found a way to not give a ****, you still hadn't found a way to disconnect from caring about whatever it was that made you feel like it was your reputation on the line?--your old man was right in his own way, though: you cared far too much about how you were perceived than you wanted to believe you did, and wasn't all of this, wasn't your insomnia over this ***** the proof of it?--and now you were going back to your old nervous habit of chewing at the dead skin of your fingers, watching them become gnawed and decayed and all because of this nonsense you had let go to your head--and you wanted to think therapy had made you better somehow, that it had opened up the pathways in your mind to the "self-talk" that was going to save you?--did you call this bit of torture salvation?--but no, it wasn't like this every night, it really wasn't...only when things got to you, only when you were stressed out...but still, the question should be, "why do you allow yourself to get stressed out over situations out of your control?"--invariable, it all leads to these dreams where the undead find you wherever you go to run and hide, and last night you'd gotten especially clever and told yourself if all else failed, you could hide in the walls, and yet, you had seen her climb into those walls, which is when you knew even your dreams were smarter than you--enough was enough though, right?--no way on earth or in hell should you allow any of this to continue: you were a grown-*** man in his mid-forties, you were a hard worker, you were good at what you did, and more than anything else, this ***** did not get to decide what kind of a person you were--you needed to detach yourself from the idea that she was going to make your life a hell, that she was going to do this or that to you because what was all that anyway?--it was just worry atop worry, and all of it was useless and needless, all of it was based on fear and as you'd been asking yourself for the last few decades, when had fear ever served you?--all of this only seemed like you were in prison, but it was one you had built for yourself...wasn't it bad enough your old man had drilled into you not just those words of criticism about how you'd let everything "get to you," but also that he'd made you care so much, too much, about what others thought because you were always trying to please them just like you were always trying to please him?--and how often had you been able to do this successfully to the point where you didn't have to try so hard anymore?: never--you had never succeeded in such a venture because there was always another hour, another day, another task for you to accomplish to another's satisfaction...this was the paradigm you'd been locked into...but it wasn't too late, for look, just look at how you'd analyzed all of this, at how wonderfully you'd dismantled all the **** that surrounded the real reason why you wasted others to accept you, to find you and label you as "good"--that never would've been possible before, you would've just stayed awake the whole night long and woken up in a foul mood and let it ruin a new day...but not anymore, right?--well, almost: because while the slogan "knowledge is power" seems like an empowering one, what is it really?--do you feel any more powerful than you did before you started having this conversation with yourself?--were you going to be able to make all this ******* in your life disappear just like that(!) because you'd suddenly figured out that you wasted people to think highly of you because you'd never been able to get your father to think highly of you?--no, no, because there you were turning over and over in bed trying to unlock the thing that would let you live again, that would let you sleep again...there you were begging for mercy, for a clue as to how to do this nightwork within you, for it felt like you were being made to dig your own grave whenever this happened to you, and the deeper you dug, the more out felt trapped in that hole you'd just made deeper--what else could you do but make it deeper?: but when had you looked up, when had you asked if you couldn't just dig your hands into the packed earth and climb out?--this is how and where your imagination had failed you, for yes, you had managed to fal, back asleep, it hadn't conquered you quite so much...but here you were being presented with the facts all over again that it would happen again and again and that you were doomed to allow it to because, really, who didn't want others to think well of them?--you were always going to be human--

as if in answer
the rain starts ******* down on your roof
and instead of wondering what you were
going to do for the rest of your life
if you never found anyone to be with,

you just ended up feeling the heat kick in, the
blower spraying you with tepid air that was
miles above what it was like outside,

and that's all you needed to convince you
you were just the animal you always believed
yourself to be--

it's sad you can't get the day's disasters
out of your head because even you
we're saying to yourself as you pulled
up to your apartment that in ten years,

not only would you forget all about the
petty ***** who made you feel like you'd ****** up
when you hadn't, but you'd be able to laugh that
you thought "******* up" meant that they could
use you until there was just nothing left...

and what's even sadder is that you waste your life
dwelling on these things that will be ghosts of
ghosts, the dead and forgotten, the things you really
won't be able to summon up from the depths of the past
because, truly, that's how important they are:

but right, right...
because it's the present, and because you're in
the "here and now," of course things matter to you,
of course how people see you matters to you

even though you know this always has been and
will continue to be your own individual
path to destruction--

you could get caught up in all that nonsense like you wanted to, or you could just jump right into the fray like you did last night--the choice is yours, but you shouldn't mistake one for the other: the former is filled with nothingness and lifeless characters who are only ghosts in your mind, while the latter is at least a struggle to figure out what all this **** really means and where you need to go, what you need to do to make it all work--take what happened last night when you got on the bus: there was no room left except in the space right behind the punk girl who was chewing gum--now, you knew it was a bad idea, but what were you going to do, grab some ceiling bar and sway, and lurch, sway and lurch till you got where you were going?--hell no, it was supposed to be a civilized world, and so you'd wanted to sit--in your head, you'd already earned the right to sit just by virtue of there being a seat, just by you wanting to sit down without ever wanting to push someone else out of the way to get it...so when you finally did change your own mind and convince yourself that she was just some kid trying to act cool, that there weren't going to be any problems, that's just when she pressed that button underneath the armrest that adjusts the angle of the chair, and the whole thing headrest and all, came crushing down on you so that you had to look across at the women you'd come onto the bus with, the one who was supposed to be your lover and your friend, and you knew from the reaction on her face, which was fear and horror mixed with laughter, that you were once again allowing yourself to play the ******* clown, and all so that it would take the edge off of what you really wanted to do and say--who the hell did that little ***** think she was, anyway?--she knew you weren't supposed to lean the chair back that far, she knew there was next to no legroom back here--it was between the rear of the bus and her chair for christ's sake!--and yet as you felt your face pinging with both the pain of sudden discomfort and with the u deniable and stinking presence of the upholstery that had been filthied by years and years of ***** hands, *****, sneezes, and smoke, you also felt through all this that she was getting comfortable in her chair, that punk girl, that she was maybe even readying herself for a nap as you were living through a new experience of being torn between losing your **** asking who the **** she thought she was and the civil propriety expected of you to solve all of this amicably, or at least without harsh words and ***** looks...but if anything had been the story of your life, it'd been this very thing: how to not lose your mind when almost every ******* button was being pushed and pressed over and over to make you do just that--it wasn't an easy thing to first wrest your whole head from between the wall and her headrest and then lean to the side and whisper to your friend that you really needed to move, that you'd meet her at the next stop if you lost each other on the bus, and her silence meant exactly that: she wasn't giving up her seat for anyone or anything--she'd seen it first and had gotten there first and it was hers by right of this layman's etiquette, it wasn't like you were going to argue the point with her because you knew she was right--the seat she was sitting in was hers, you weren't suggesting that she change seats just go be closer to you, just because the two of you were together--what was this, middle school?--it's not like this was a nightmare or something, you'd just have to find each other later on, no big deal, right?--except that for you, it was a big deal: it wasn't that you were asking her to trade places with you or surrender her place and that she should go find another because she was smaller than you, no--you were just hoping she'd want to give up her seat in order to be closer to you, and you couldn't help but feel a little slighted and you knew it wouldn't take very long before this "slighted" feeling made you feel put out, that once more, you'd be expected to hold your tongue and get over it because when compared with the "big things" in life, what the hell was her not wanting to exchange her comfort alone for being uncomfortable with you possibly in a standing position till the bus pulled into the station?--it wasn't a big deal at all, you knew it, but it did feel a little "larger than life" just because of the physical discomfort you'd been put through just now...seriously, what ***** would've just stayed there being squished like a bug between the wall and that punk girl's seat?--in your head you were playing alternate ways you could've handled that whole thing that wouldn't have resulted in you squeezing yourself out of what had felt like the jaws of death around your skull, you had started imagining what might've happened if you'd simply asked her to put her seat up a few degrees so you could pretend you weren't a ******* veal being prepped for slaughter, imagined her response to be, "it's my chair," and doing nothing about it, which would've prompted you to say, "but it's my fist," and what kind of trouble could you have expected after that bus ride when the thing finally pulled into the station?--she would've taken a picture of you with her phone, gotten a cop, and you would've been right back in trouble just like you felt you always were, like your old man had always told you you'd be because of that mouth of yours--and in the life you'd always wanted to live, the one where people did sort through their problems using communication, using the experienced gleaned from previous and present relationships, the life you often lived yourself where you heard yourself speaking the words in the way that you'd always wanted to speak them where you could convince yourself that you really and truly were that person, that man who could refrain from all violence in order to serve the greater good of actuating all desire through talk and thought and connecting with other people, like this you had convinced yourself this was the norm, that everyone should just ask things politely and be gentle about getting rejected or when life handed down some pretty rough **** to deal with...how many times had you heard yourself speak such words that you couldn't help but think we're too soft or seemed too obsequious...but were they "civilized," were they peaceful?--yes, they had been, but maybe they'd been too civilized, too peaceful, and maybe the propel who'd been listening, those you'd been dealing with had mistaken your kindness and respectfulness for weakness--hadn't it happened before, and hadn't it brought out the very worst in you?--because, in unwind response, you had become the animal: it started with that look of yours they used to call part of your "black mood" and then sometimes it would escalate into the kind of cursing that pre-empted a scene of violence--between these two things, people usually caved or the situation resolved itself, but how had you felt afterward?: always like an animal and never like the educated man you'd spent all your life cultivating from the deadness they'd given you to work with, from the nothing they'd given you as a blueprint for success in this world--yes, you were a wolf, but life had made you a lone wolf, and now you were growing tired of all of it, tired of being put into these situations, tired of having to do the exact right thing in any given situation even if you knew it was someone else's version of what was right you were being judged by...and what were you going to do?: dump her on her *** because you were expected to "be a man" both by finding another seat and by intimidating the punk girl into submitted to your will?--who could satisfy both at once?--you didn't need this kind of judgment, it was bad enough already that you all "all this" just having a blast with ******* yourself up with all these options that weren't really options at all--if you gave the girl a ***** look, your woman would snub you because if it and she wouldn't let you forget it--for years later, you'd be called out for behaving like an animal...and yet if you said nothing and found another seat, she'd be mortified that she had chosen someone who wasn't a "real man"--god, how many times had you wanted to show her that if being a "real man" meant using violence or the penchant for using violence as a first response to any and all problems, then you would always be the "real"-est of men...there was no way to win this, it was the hallmark of civilization after all--you might've wanted to think you were a "lone wolf," but weren't you with that woman not giving up her seat back there, weren't you on a bus full of people?--weren't you going to busy yourself for the rest of this day and most of the next trying to get your mind off of this flashpoint that had almost become an outburst not "then and there" but in the here and now?--and what had been the chances of you coming out of all of this looking good, what were the chances that you'd find her at the station after you'd both gotten off the bus without a moue of disgust on her face you'd be expected to ignore and also ask her about because both would show you cared too much, both would show you'd ****** up, both would show there was no way to win, which was something you knew in advance, that you'd known just as soon as you got up lurching and swaying from ceiling bar to ceiling bar looking for another seat...but that didn't mean you were used to it, not yet anyway--

did you really mean what you said about sleeping and the tiger biting off your head as you slept
so that you died and didn't even know you were dead till you never woke up again?--

that's certainly a sad story, but it reminds me
of the mountain lion i saw coming to work last month,
the way it's eyes glowed green and yellow,
the way it looked up at me without thought or
consideration...

who was i going to pick a fight with now, right?

and yet here i am doing it all over again to myself,
maybe because there's no one left to battle who
wouldn't eat me alive,

but here i am thinking of meeting you at last,
thinking of telling you i'm excited, but apprehensive, that i'm looking forward to it, but
dragging it in my own way just because
there's no telling what's going to happen,
how you're going to react to meeting me in person
for the first time...

you're right, it might go terribly, it might be
uncomfortable... or still worse, it might be one
of those meetings that is neither wonderful nor terrible,
just one that's "meh," that leaves the both of us
disappointed and turning back to our precious
dating apps once more because what other alternative
do we have other than loneliness, or settling for
someone with whom we already know we'll be
miserable...

that shouldn't be us tomorrow,
we've come to far too settle,
that shouldn't be us tomorrow,
starting at each other trying to make small talk
wishing the other was someone else--