Apartment hunt

I'm going to Carbondale to find an apartment! Wish me luck.

What Love Is

Loving you is inconvenient. You think
it's callous to talk about love that way.
Your love is
heroic rhetoric. Big as
a canyon, full of air.
My love is a coal mine, all
tunneled out, no light.

Walhalla

I took the road hidden in the dead
of the city, where a heart of forest
canopied the cut-out path
past homes I could never
afford. Where everything fell away
for the five minute drive to its
conclusion. I shift
the car to neutral. My friend once said
a kid hanged himself from the bridge overhead
where my car slows to a creep
under its arch, cowered in shadow.
Trees shake in the warm wind,
branches waving like a warning.
I could keep going. I could
drive all day and still be here.

Overcast

Today, my father's face is full
of shadows, his age showing
like cracks in the sidewalk
we walk along now, talking
about next year and the move
south. I don't want to leave
Ohio, its constant gray, the way
it makes me feel a little sad
most days. How overhead, like
my father's worry in each line of his brow,
the clouds gather around the edges
of the dull sky.

"You've trained me to be crazy."

---Jon Chopan

Mayday

Today I saw a woman walking a three-legged Pomeranian. I don't think
it gets sadder than that. Or maybe I was just sad and saw what I wanted
out of the thing. The way it hopped along on its one front leg like
a pogo stick. Mouth open and tongue unfurled and breathing hard
in the heat of May. Reminding me what's broken can't be fixed.

Joseph

A black man on the corner says,
You are the dreamer, you

are Joseph. Someone howls, Get A Job
and he pulls his technicolor scraps
tighter around his waist.

Overhead, a single pidgeon
sits on the wire and one feather
drops to the street.

Traffic, heavy at midday, stalled.
Hot city air, metallic city noise.
Who has time for dreams

when all we can do is unravel
our threads.

Beatitudes

I woke early to hear the remnants of rain
after an all-night storm. Gray morning, diluted

light coming through the shades. A bird from
the willow chirped, each note

another beatitude. I took my time getting
up, an unfinished dream still warm

in my head: it was two autumns ago
and you were there with a half-smirk,

scarved neck, framed in sunlight.
All the leaves scuttled to your feet

and far off somewhere, a woman’s voice
wisped like a westward wind against my ear.

But this morning I find no love where
once it glared like a thief who overturned

all I own and still wanted more.
My bed was empty and it was spring,

another season without you, had you
been here at all.

.hold.your.breath.

I'm thinking, now that Ruth is back, I might take a brief hiatus to recompose myself and not squeeze out little turds for updates.

I will be back!

French Kiss

The story is that I was just a kid when Mom left us, me and my father and my two sisters. My father gave me her old bathrobe she left behind, ratty blue and white striped cotton. Smelled like her perfume and Aquanet hairspray. She had a life to get on with, a life that didn't include us or who she used to be.

The next time I saw my mother she was living in Murfreesboro, Tennessee and remarried to a man she'd known for a month or two. His name was Lee and he was a burly Southern prototype who believed that heavy discipline was all it took to rear good children. Naturally, he had none of his own. I was eight at the time and I remember how my mother used to kiss him full on the lips, open mouth. I'd never seen her kiss my father that way. Me and the sisters sat in the kitchen of her two bedroom apartment and tried not to stare. Lee poked his tongue against his cheek to make sure we knew Mom had her tongue down his throat. "And that, girls, is a french kiss!" he'd bellow. Mom lowered her eyes and shook her head, her cheeks flushed. I couldn't decide if she was embarrassed or amused by the way her claret-painted lips twisted into a half-grin.

The story is that was the first time I knew I'd lost her for good. Until that visit, I thought she'd be back, thought she'd drive up to Bluffton, Indiana to that crappy rental house next to the gas station off the highway, thought she'd knock on the door in the middle of the night and we'd take her back like she hadn't stomped our hearts into dumb red confetti. I wanted the mother who hot rolled her hair into big, puffed out curls. I wanted the mother who handmade my Christmas dresses and knitted new sweaters for our birthdays. Not this mother with her fishnet stockings and dyed black hair. Her deep V-neck dresses and heels and cigarettes and french kisses.

MIA: a defense

Sorry for the complete lack of posts lately. I don't really have a good reason for it other than being sick & lazy. I'm gonna get my ass back in gear after I'm done wallowing in mucus-soaked misery.

.pneumonia.

Do I have pneumonia? I should probably get that checked out tomorrow. I know I have good health insurance through my parents, and yet, I feel totally incapable at using it.
Where do I go? What do I say?
None of this makes the least bit of sense to me. I've never believed I was sick until my body staggered and fell, a nation of cells caving under internal strife. And even then, it'll pass. I have a certain degree of denial when it comes to my body, I suppose, although perhaps in a slightly different way than, say, a teenage girl. If I were 20 years older, we could chalk it up to believing I'm young and healthy, in my prime.

The last time I remember being really sick, I was so zonked out I couldn't even get out of bed to do much of anything. At most I staggered to the washroom to drain myself of bile. Was I on meds? Probably. I don't really remember what I took. People threw pills at me. They landed in my mouth and slid down my throat.
I still don't know what I had. And it makes me think of ancient times: everyone exhibiting unmistakable signs of sickness, and only in our modern day can we give our afflictions names, a pale grasp to control them.
But you can't fight that cough. And despite rubbing your nose raw, the snot still drips onto your shirt at inopportune times. So don't go on dates when you're sick. Stay home. Enjoy the company of your favourite pillow. Drink something hot. Read something. Take a nap.

And really, who am I kidding. I just got home myself.
You can't control your afflictions by giving them names, so why serve them when they have titles?

.clean.nostrils.

So many birthdays in such a short span. It makes me think that no matter how much we're muddling up our lives right now, we can all think of at least two people that were having a good time x number of years ago.

Yeah, that's pretty gross, but I just went there. It's ok for me, because I've never witnessed my parents doing it. But I've never witnessed them really fighting either. The question, then, is whether or not they were being considerate, or if they are just the Asian robots that society wants to believe they are.

So ask yourselves: with the recent spottiness of our updates, what are Ruth and I doing? Are we being lazy? Are we casting doubts at our literary ring fingers?

It's tough to tell! But don't be surprised if a hiatus happens, and maybe you'll shuffle back and forth every other weekend. You'll probably be better off with her for most of the time.
But don't be surprised either, if we come back at this blog project with the full force of a spring-borne sneeze, expelling all the seeds and pollens of ideas inseminating into the air.
Eyes closed,
lungs emptied,
there's not much left to do but inhale

.untidy.mitosis.

Sometimes - actually, most of the time - I enter a certain illusion that my return home will be ushered in by receptive cleanliness. And below that tidy surface, enough undercurrent of discombobulation to prove that someone has lived here in my absence. I did not leave a tomb. I am not returning to one.

It's rarely the case, though, as you doubtlessly already know. Everyone leaves in a hurry, clothes strewn about: last minute exclusions waiting for the next suitcase out of town. And if not a comparable degree of disarray, entropy does as entropy will, and piles multiply and subdivide, never quite garbage, but never quite clean. We return to the messes we left.
Or how does the saying go?
You made your bed and now you must lie in it.
The inverse is also true. With every surface littered with forget-me-not-but-I-wish-I-coulds, there's hardly a place to be knocked down onto.

.dc.

If your car should get broken into, let it be a shoestring around a brick, holding a note: "drive safely. i miss you already. godspeed."

May

The fan, switched off on the window's ledge, still turned
when the wind ran through it.
I didn't feel so alone. Traffic
slicked by on wet streets. Everything
was motion, everything was stopped.
I sat around watching the spring rain like one does
when their lives become a slow unravel.
Except for those few moments of stupid joy
I took from you, I didn't have much.
But it was enough.

manifesto II

Dogs > people.

Samara Key

Sugar maple seeds spiraled groundward, pelting
the sidewalk, each landing haphazardly
across our path. It was spring and I was
feeling better, if only for the stupid
seeds, their dizzy descent
toward a dizzier world.
I wanted to shake loose from what I knew.
I wanted to learn how
to leave what I love most.

.philadelphia.2.

Like a hot shower, home-cooked dinner with new friends steams up the glass; you'll never see us not peering back out.

.philadelphia.

Another Chinatown (the same Vietnamese cafe across town) has me convinced that pieces of cities are now following in our wake, a toilet paper past tucked unknowingly into the back of my pants.

.new.london.

All the hispanic children on the pier, so ready to race you, cover their ears when the train arrives.

.cape.cod.

From the catwalks above, all our actors' skulls are crosshairs, waiting for the lightning.