Behind Him with the Bit of Lead Piping

It is the unfortunate truth that we spend all day creating our own problems, and then solving them, and then we go to bed thinking we've accomplished something when in reality all that's happened is the torpid turning of this frivolously sardonic wheel turned sideways on itself. World hunger and climate crisis and genocide and 90s sitcoms? If Earth even ever grows the meat to unbury the solutions to these problems, it doesn't matter because they were created here anyway. The entirety of human behavior is so physically inactive, so devoid of function, so circular, the whole deal kind of undoes the magnificently fertile evolutionary procedure. How could such a steady, plodding scheme built on the strong back of guess and check culminate in fast food and Jay Leno? Its like life, all of this strange, prepossessing, tenuous, planetary life auditioned beautifully and then slept through the performance. At the end of the day, the winner of the rat race is still just a rat.

Adulthood is unforgiving, cold, devoid of generosity. It exposes you to certain miscarriages of intimacy like identity theft or when you're driving behind someone and you can see their fingerprints on the trunk.

You see fat mothers hanging their laundry on their fire escapes and you see huge men in their creased, beige work boots draped over the benches around Honeydew Donut shops and you see yourself in the mirror at the end of a day that was too short and all of these things seem to burn the same image onto your retina - an image that will be dissected by your neighbors, misunderstood by your children, sneered over by your coworkers, and borrowed by the actors you watch on TV every weeknight.

Some Water

I fed you
Italian pasta with sun-dried tomatoes and Parmesan cheese
Because the past 19 months have felt
Like you stuck a fork in me
And twirled it.
You are like cutting through sweet fig fruit with stained fingers -
Expecting a seed that is, pleasantly, absent.
And I swear I can smell garlic sautéing when you're thinking.
You, spilling yourself onto me like lemonade,
Running smoothly over my ice cube smile.
What am I supposed to do now after letting both our bellies swell
In comfortable happiness?

You said once that some water tastes better than other water and that's how I knew you understood me - you'd have to notice my thoughts the same way as they drip like subtle condensation from my glass exterior. Truly what you deserve is expensive wine. So I wish I came with a lemon slice or a sprig of mint or a salted rim. I'm sorry I was so filtered back then.

But we grew, like a gourd on the vine. The meat of our conversations was flecked with wonder and strength and a courageous leap into our future together. The spices tasted of ancient families and wrinkled fingers and burlap. These promises, like bell peppers, taste so good but are mostly empty space, I feared.

Lately it's been tasting like the vegetarian version.
Substitutions of you
Won't do.
I'm no baker but I find myself sticking a diagnostic toothpick into us more and more just to test if we're...

And then:
Like butter.
You melt into my arms and you fill me
With your moscato musings and
I am helpless but to the buzz of us.
Us.
Somewhere in the expansive, weedy field,
Another gourd ripens.

One Skeleton

Dear Band-Aid Girl,

How are you? I am fine. When you pulled my life close to yours, you were sitting in a cab somewhere in New York City. I felt so powerful that I could have been driving the car. I remember you told me once or twice how awe-struck you are by the size of the seafloor and how so much of it has been untouched by humans and I thought I detected a note of sympathy in your voice. "Me too," you told the seafloor.

How are you? How are you so... hard? The hard days and the easy days are so mashed together in my mind like beans that you taste like working from home. When I've been swallowing ocean water all day and my body feels numb from the cold, it's your helicopter I ache to see as I come up to the surface. Because you could never make a clean getaway. You could never leave me in a silent saltwater darkness, just loud, tumultuous gasping - storms never leave on good terms. Loving and being loved are two different rivers. Sometimes they meet, but eventually they'll both rush into one ocean.

How are you? "How are you so hard?" she asks me, still in shock by the ease of my attraction and my comfort in being naked even though it's been so many times.

How are you doing this? You must have pretty strong shoulders to be carrying this crap around all day. I could write down all of your secrets and they would fill every square inch of one of your white oxford shirts - I have never seen so many closets in one skeleton.

All Ten

Walk further... Further still. No move back slightly.... Yes. That's where I love you. I love you right there. Don't move.

Look down at all the glitter you're wearing!
Look back at all the alcohol you swallowed.
When you float silently into the gym tomorrow,
Recognize that you are simultaneously playing villain and hero,
Burning yourself up every night
And watering yourself back to life every morning,
A scorched earth puppet show with a GPA.
Half an appetite for success,
Half a hunger for rock bottom.

Fucking think about this.

Rewind your VHS tape mind until you start making the whirring sound that you hear when you're not letting any other sounds in. We all think you can do better but none of us care enough to keep watching.

"It's ok. Cry. It's ok if you do," they hurried me into a rushed kind of emotion; I was struggling to choke it back.

"You have a lot of holes."
"So...?"
"So people with holes rarely hold water."

When I met you, I was spending time staying together for the sake of my parents. And now you're still my "something for the pain".

And now everyone I've ever met is crouched in a closet at home waiting for me to enter so they can jump out and yell "surprise". I'm taking each stair like a newborn takes a breath, step, step, finish line, step, (fidget). Chasing something, but can only see the back of its head. Effort for little, liquor is quicker. If I wanted to try hard and then have nothing at the end I'd get myself a kid. I'd get ourselves a kid. All ten fingers, all ten toes.

Parents learn together that "me too" is simultaneously the most empathetic yet self-indulgent phrase in all of language.

Vibrations and Dead Birds

And at last, muscle memory consumes. The act of reaching for the car radio yanks his eyeballs back in time and focuses them on the television in his parents' living room. He can see his small, pudgy, outstretched fingers, grasping for the dials of the brightly colored box. The flickering lights filtered through his eyes in waves. Eighteen months of neural development has taught him well, and his left arm obeys eagerly. He is all at once lifted away from his goal by his mother, cooing in what he would come to know as discipline. He, on the other hand, had none of this. Control was a foreign language to him. Now, in the car, the stereo wailing, he finally stops himself from pressing buttons. Instead he fidgets.

He was a terrible student. Class didn't agree with him. Physically. The metal chair held him like a straitjacket. His legs hollered at him for hours, his elbows buzzed, his entire anatomy hummed for attention. His fingers complained and whined, begged to be moving - combing through the grass under his front porch or poking into the soft, feathered belly of his little brother's parrot Big Moss. Only texture would cease this throbbing. He could recognize it. Compulsive fidgeting gave way to scratching behind his neck and pressing his teeth into his tongue and forcing his toes to move past each other inside their Keds.

Music was always played as loud as it could be. Lungs were perpetually filled to capacity. Everything was always either one hundred or zero - either sprinting or dead. His hands groped for each other like lovers for sleep. As a rule, muscles were sore unless they could stretch. Hair was meant to be pulled. He knew this and had always known it.

So he grew like this. Like a weed. He drove his car endlessly, longing to push 90, 100, 110 mph. Oh, his car was killer. 1989 Porsche 944 S3 model, red of course, like everything else in his world. It thrummed prehistorically when he turned the key. It made the same sound his body always had. He planted one foot in Kurt Cobain and the other in the Bible, even though he knew that neither rock and roll nor Jesus would save him had he sailed off the road on those foggy nights. The highway runs out at a point. The strum of an electric guitar string fades eventually. Big Moss only lives for so long.

Chanel No. 4

I wish you a life of mild inconvenience -
I pray for that bug on the windshield,
Never-ending mildly runny nose,
Keys locked in the car kind of life for you.
I pray nothing that bad happens to you and nothing that good happens either. Like
I hope you only meet guys who wanna fuck you, not fix you.
I hope you buy a faulty phone charger;
I hope your favorite shirt gets larger;
I hope you see all the others chasing dreams while you wait for Friday each week and
I hope you resent your ugly, selfish children for what they did to your body.
I hope you end up on your death bed with the most mediocre look on your face, the most uninteresting last words spilling from your mouth, an insignificant life behind you and a forgettable death before you, I hope you realize this as it's happening.
I hope there's always one more step than you expect I hope
You take enough pain to make you cringe but not enough to learn from I hope you think
Inside that box. I wish you your own foot in your own mouth in public too many times to count.
And perhaps your life time of inconvenience,
Stretched out way too long like a piece of pink bubblegum
In a 4th grader's mouth,
Might just equal out to the amount of direct, immediate, live, in-color pain I felt in that one moment on the porch last summer.

Twenty-four Carat

"Just be honest," she says "Just be honest with me." As if I can be anything with her while my heart is playing catch-up and my mind is a mine shaft of harrowed thoughts and forgotten projects and while she thinks I've got things locked away from her in my brain, I'm struggling to find the words to explain that I lost my key a long time ago. Trust me on this one, facts are fleeting. The truth has never set me free because the truth runs like a rat from a flashlight and has more of a hood on than Trayvon did - the truth is a dick. Believe me when I say that my perception is built on lies and all too often I'm telling them to myself. I promise you: I can't be trusted but I'm in here somewhere, trying to label things with a white crayon. Truth is a con-man. Truth is a terrorist to reliability, collapsing a fortress of preconceived notions that took 20 years, 4 months, and 5 days to build. I try and map out how I feel and then the slot machine whirs again. Cha-ching, a brand new reality. I can't confirm shit. There aren't enough eraser shavings in the world to try and fix what I thought was indisputable. I knew it. I knew it - words speak much louder than actions.