It’s been a prolific day
David Berman and I spent it together:

Me on his Wikipedia page,
Wondering at his language
Broken hearted over his final great collection of art,
A self-titled album released under the moniker Purple Mountains;

Him a genius
And dead
Tortured by his inability to change the world
Self loathing and addicted,
The son of a gun and liquor lobbyist who is quoted as saying, “I will miss him more than he was able to realize.”

It’s the ultra absorbent ones who make the best artists
Walking around in a store somewhere and wanting to die for the brutality of it all
Nothing brings the raw desperate animalism out from where it’s buried in the Stone Age like good old fashioned American capitalism.

(Last week I ate a gummy before going Christmas shopping and had a panic attack in a cute little boutique while buying a puzzle for my niece.
My sister-in-law told me I looked like I was seeing things
But it was the loosening of the barriers,
the flood of conflict and dissonance,
every person a song and all the songs playing at once,
tidal wave,
a cacophony of primary and secondary emotions.
This is why I don’t eat gummies).

It isn’t fair
I guess
That the ability to be so penetrated by truth isn’t beautiful
It should be beautiful
Like that shrimp, right? That can see a whole universe of colors unreachable by any other animal in existence.
An elevated understanding of truth should be like that shrimp
-The mantis shrimp, I remember now-
Truth cones like with sight…every texture and flavor of enlightenment.

In David Berman’s case, he piled substances onto the fire of his brain to ***** it out
And haven’t we all lain in a dark room on a sunny day
Haven’t we all found our habits

Instead of lamenting the curse of the truth addicted artist, as I have done most of the day,
I will tell a story
(this is true)
of my 17 year old niece Sophie
Who, when she was 9, demanded to know the Real Truth about Santa Claus.
Her friends were insistent, and she didn’t want to be left behind.

My sister, not one to mince words, told her directly and plainly,
and when Sophie asked, who then? Do you buy all of our Christmas presents every year?
again my sister gave it to her straight.

Sophie’s eyes began to swim, just as my sister suspected they might,
But when she went to comfort her daughter,
to try to convince her that magic isn’t in the elusive but in the every day
She was met with simply,

“Oh, thank you, mommy. Thank you.”

In the gas station mirror I look frayed and stringy
The word that comes to mind is “threadbare”
Which I quite like as a descriptive term, but not as an accurate appraisal of my own appearance.
Pale and too thin, wrung out, stretched, and hung up to dry.
****, I always wanted to be thin and now that I am
Turns out, I’m still me,
just thinner.

“And older. No one tells you that when you finally lose the weight, you trade in that fullness for some freshly minted crows feet, smile lines, forehead creases.”

My reflection smirks at me.

“36 and no baby, never even a scare. You know what they say, better get to it, if your insides aren’t already dust.”

Ouch. *******. I pout at my own face and the crease between my eyebrows thanks me for the job security.

A knock on the door, ah! How long have I been in here?? Feeling like an alien, I run the water for a few seconds and hastily exit,
narrowly avoiding a collision with the huffy brown parka waiting for her self evaluation.

- - -

I wonder where it states in the Gas Station Code of Interior Decoration
That all gas station bathrooms must douse each user in the inevitability of their own mortality,
cast in green from the regulation fluorescents.

Predawn is the most underrated time of day, if you ask me
Blurry lines and street signs
Cast in hazy yellows and oranges from the burning sodium vapor in the street lamps
That iconic suburban glow,
Stark against the impenetrable blueblack sky and all the mysterious silhouettes cut jaggedly against it.

(A staggering feat, to beat back the darkness. Humanity.)

The pavement shines bright gold - must have rained - fading to bronze,
rose,
purple,
finally disappearing into nothingness,
a question mark.

Pillbox houses,
neat rows in every direction,
squat mutely,
some with their own brief reach of a lamp in the window or the warm assurance of a porch light -
Even the occasional sharp cough of a security spot,
high beams razor white,
primed for each raccoon and every vague, faceless fear.

“We never thought it could happen here.”

Ah, but the unsalted dough of the middle class is a subject for the afternoon

This is the royal Morning’s expectant hour.
She wanders eternally,
accompanied only by her barefoot unrest, bathing the earth in her wealth of unspent moments,
untold riches of possibility streaming from the many secret folds concealed within the depths of her ermine cloak.

(Am I hopeful or fearful of the coming day? Are the paltry occupations of one electrified grain of stardust worth a thousand words?)

The flat sleepy windows of the sleepers and the risers,
grumbling caffeine addicts and early birds, night owls with their midnight oil long spent,
dreamer and seekers lost on the astral plane and the merry punching rumble of the bustling workforce’s well-rehearsed choreography hold court over this rarest domain,

while the Fates, ever watchful, hand select the paths to put before us.  
Each choice a thread.
Each decision a stitch.

It may surprise you to know that I feel sorry for you.

Yes.
You.

With your gigantic shadow,
Punishments fresh on your tongue
for any unfortunate friend or foe or relative
Who happens to wander across your path and blunders instead upon Vesuvius

You

Ever the open wound,
the heavy hand.
So much resentment to stoop beneath

it must be exhausting.

The cuts on your forehead so deep
The ****** of the sentinel’s spear
You’d have everyone believe they’re real.

I’m sorry to tell you
That every vicious blow and blown blackjack hand dealt:
blow backs from your own blustering
By which those fingers cast the first stone,
That voice eagerly weeps
and gleefully moans
Oh cruelty, oh woe!

You,
The alpha and the omega
The House and the player

I feel sorry for you
and your blindness,
That no one will ever speak up,
but instead will silently watch you run into walls.
You’ve conditioned us all,
As we watch you lay the bricks,
To take the blame for your bruises.

It’s a shame, too.
You have such beautiful gemstone eyes

And yet,
as any professional would tell you,

they lack clarity.

Ida!

What a name
From another world, you are.

It’s still your house, Ida.
Like all the **** I sold to manage this move,
All that **** is still
Mine…in a way…if you consider things to be infused with the life of the owner,
Which I do.
That Holy Grail, for instance,  gave me extended foot problems
From kicking the switch in the soft middle of my socked foot during every band practice at Karah’s house.
No shoes allowed.

So my foot injury now lives as a legacy in that pedal, even though my pipe fitter buddy bought it from me as his first pedal.
(He has money and real deal gear and I feel kind of sad for him that he’ll miss the experience of hacking away on a $300 setup with borrowed effects.)


So right we all get the metaphor, it’s one I use often, that we leave ourselves behind wherever we go.

And Ida, your pink appliances and your pink tile and your pink wallpaper
Well
It makes me
Glad
To know you.

We can share this home, this stake you drove into your own heart in 1960.
I’m glad you got to die here, Ida
Amidst your pink at 98.

I like pink too.
I do hope that if your spectral expression decides to reveal itself to me,
That it is to give me tips on how best to preserve the pink enamel sink
And not to box my ears for snapping the light switch
Instead of placing it.

The air is magic
In the same way a human nervous system is divinely inspired by tree roots

As tree roots seek other tree roots to bind to, sharing nutrients and information underground in secret tongues lost to time (but not to trees),
So too does the nervous system talk to our various insides,
electricity and fat and water and blood,
mysterious even to us as we haphazardly propel ourselves through space,
a mess of actions and reactions.

Magic

In the same way that time exists only because death exists
And death exists both because of and in spite of time.

And I am alive.

(If you ever doubt yourself, remember the incredible odds you overcame just to become).

Months maybe, a year?
We were unmasked in your home or mine,
Or on a walk
Or texting our words into knitted ropes that became our strength and our life line
And you said
“I never realized how connected we all are. That every moment spent with others, I am breathing their breath. We’re sharing breath, all of us, all the time.”

Oh.
Oh. Yes.
Lashes of breath like lizard tongues
Forked and solid and hot
Plunging and coiling;
Ariel losing her song.

(I carry this with me still, like I carry the threat of the possibility of blood drying in the veins, crystallizing there.)

A sharing of totems, airborne on the exhale, between the vastness of humanity.
Maybe it’s a
Heart,
feather,
child,
guitar string,
equation,
pet,
sense memory

- a bit of mustard,
a crumb of cheese -

a shame,
a secret,
an illness,
a loss,
a hope,
a flame,
a diary entry,

a passage in a story that is so written on your DNA that your ancestors will possess its truth and sacredness,

Not ******, but nakedness.

The unknowable intricacies that terraform the gallery walls of every life ever lived,
Each of us a cavern sprawling brimming with a trail mix of escaped fragments of other souls, nestled among our own wreckage and music and roots of trees.

This invisible connection to each other,
so wrought now, warped and vivid
against the sky.  
Drawing breath as drawing sword,
building blocks as barriers built,  
We are withdrawing from each other in our sick rooms,
dosed on breath from birth,
suddenly forced into thickened singularity for an easier swallow, weighted heavy on the chest.
Oh I know, it’s the X-ray blanket at the dentist when you were a kid
It’s Ian’s sweaty shaking hand during that first detox, 20 bars deep, wanting to tell him that I ******* told you so, I TOLD you. Knowing that no one’s voice would ever be louder than his own.

You look at me,
And I’m losing you.
I see it like bitterness on your lips
But I don’t mind.
You’re right, I’m exhausted too.
I wish I was better at being frank.
How, though, to make sense of this new world if not to drag the old world into it?
How to point and name and say “this is”
When all you know is what it is not?