Autumn marks your counterfeit advance. Affected, we perfect the rituals of romance, your chilled caresses burn my frozen trance.
Fondly our follied chemistry brews, in the pounding void of a laser lit milieu, fumbling in darkness, a unity eschewed.
If you listen to me I'll listen to you.
Deeply we drink pinhead gunpowder tea, tongues steeped in intoxicated expectancy, swallowing the chemical scent of graffiti.
Two for you and one for me, through smiles seep translucent teeth, brimming full, three shots of GHB.
If I listen to you will you listen to me?
Gills flap like fish, thirsty for the infinite ocean, while sound waves breathe our drowning devotion. Life is a drunken dream, careening on lovesick potion.
What law keeps my axis spinning on this notion? We hear without listening, we feel without emotion.
This poem was written to my best friend after we abandoned an isolated but carefree life in the nowhere-ville of Williamsburg, VA. He went to Germany and I went to California to begin new, separate chapters. The words in white are song titles from Deadmau5 tracks.
When the day is done, I turn off my brain's chatter And pace through dark, drafty corridors,
Skin soaking in neon blue and orange light. Trapped, mindless and numb, at the violet threshold,
Waiting here in the shape of warm flesh and bone, For some elusive, overwhelming urge to action.
Excess of thought wastes the spontaneity of youth, And a bleeding hourglass responds only to gravity, Emptying itself of every last plummeting grain.
A belly says to feed, so I gorge, A tongue says to wet, so I drown, A mind says escape, so I inebriate.
I am this corporeal vessel mired in quick sand. Days, weeks, years flash by and disappear into inky infinity. A voluptuous simulacrum in the mirror stares back with no answer.
Return flight. Return to my newer, truer world. Maybe truer isn’t the best word. California has become more real to me than I ever imagined possible. It exists in my present, whereas my home of the past is no longer home. My parents are transforming from distant, idealized figures of my childhood and they too have become more real than ever, as individuals just like me, on their own journey.
I always feel a sense of betrayal when I’m about to leave my mother after a visit home. This time her voice shook a little and I saw the tears welling up when we kissed goodbye four or five times before I walked out the door. I’ve been doing this since college, but every time I feel a stronger sense of tenderness towards her finally, rather than immature exasperation at being loved so immensely. This time I almost cried too, but with the prospect of reuniting with my new love in only a few hours and reentering the excitement of West Coast life, I can never stop to miss her for very long.
My brother and father don't show their feelings as much. I gush over brother, and hug and kiss his stiff frame, now much taller than mine. The brief chat with dad in the car on the way to Newark International is the most we've spoken since Christmas Day. I barely spent any time with him, aside from a few moments of intimacy, once when I linked my arm in his while we waited for midnight Mass to end on Christmas Eve, and then the next day when we sat together in his sister's living room, discussing literature and film beside the tree.
The problem with this old world is that it’s become static for me. Everything is based on rituals and traditions, even down to the smallest details, like my Aunt Callie making pigs in blankets every Christmas because they were my favorite as a kid. Now I’ve reached a point where all these details and traditions no longer matter in the same way they once did, when they were all I knew.
I have to say goodbye to my oldest friend too. On my last night home Alexandretta brought over an old VHS home movie of us as toddlers at her second birthday party, splashing in a baby pool while our parents stood by watching. We sat there on my living room floor, fully grown, analyzing the scene before us with decades of hindsight to complicate it all. Young parents are maddening to witness, fretting and fussing almost as much as their babies. They were so quick to pick us up and move us away from potential (or imagined) harm, feed us, and compare notes with each other about our special baby idiosyncrasies. In between these attentive moments, they talked of yard work and home life, finding common ground inside a middle class paradise.
"I’ve been trying to clean up the backyard since we just got this new swing set for the kids. Next I'll trim those branches to let in the morning sunlight so the grass will grow back." Alexandretta's closeted-homosexual father explains his landscaping plans to my dad, who stands there with his arms crossed, leaning back on his heels away from the conversation, smiling with thick, black eyebrows raised, nodding his head in splendid agreement. My dad always seems a bit awkward at social functions. From watching this, I could see it in him even then. It was odd witnessing the him who existed years ago, a much younger and seemingly less jaded man. It made me wonder if we all aren’t just living multiple lives within one, dying and being reborn over and over each time, some aspects of us remaining the same and others changing completely, to form an entirely new being.
There’s some action happening off camera, and before you see them, you can hear our mothers’ voices as they enter the scene from inside Alexandretta’s house. A friend and neighbor, Mr. Vanderhosen, is the trusty cameraman, and with minimal finesse he fumbles the lens to his left, capturing the two women as they descend the back steps.
"You've been busy since the last time I was over!" My mother gives an enthusiastic compliment to Alexandretta's mom about all the work they've already done fixing up their huge mustard-colored Victorian, only two doors down from our sunny yellow, matchbox-sized Cape Cod.
“We still have so much work to do on our place, but you know, Bob isn’t really handy so we’re waiting until we have the money to hire someone to fix things up.” Despite having a demeanor as sweet as honey, my mother also has a special knack for pecking at my dad’s shortcomings, and this was a prime and oft repeated example: “he just wasn’t a handy man like her father.”
Stoic Dorothia doesn't warm easily to the polite banter. Instead, her Danish practicality looks through the comment's intention, and questions it. The camera captures the two of them walking down the stairs, each wearing a frumpy dress circa 1987, ending modestly at lower calf range. Dorothia is in white and my mother, Emery, is in pink. Dorothia is carrying the cake and my mother is carrying me.
All Emery gets in return for the attempt at her mannerly compliment is a confused, "What do you mean?" It was always like that between them. They never understood each other. Emery is a chatty ray of sunshine, and Dorothia is a cerebral, logical communicator. Alexandretta and I took a little from both somehow, and are still close friends 26 years later. It's a sisterly bond that I'm certain will last another quarter century - hopefully for as long as we do.
My mother is thinner now, and my father is much fatter. Alexandretta's parents were divorced by her third birthday. Her mother remains a desirable, single woman and her father is now in his second gay partnership since their divorce. So this video we sat watching on the floor of my living room is truly a relic of the past. It managed to preserve—in blurry, outdated VHS footage—the idyllic suburban dreamland that may have once existed for us. I'm not sure if it ever really existed for our parents, no matter how hard they tried to make their marriages work, grow their grass green, or help us blow out the candles on homemade birthday cakes year after year.
Watching my mother respond to my every whim and movement in that grainy filmic otherworld made me sad. I know it's the life she wanted, to have a family, so maybe I’m not even feeling sad for her, but the situation as I saw it playing out before me distressed me. The unquestionable normalcy of was frightening. When this home movie was shot, my mother was only about ten years older than I am now. I picture myself in her place, and it feels so wrong that I begin to pity her past self.
The truth is, I also feel guilty watching her give herself over to me, standing there in some small-town backyard in New Jersey, staring at a baby pool on a beautiful summer afternoon. Could I choose such a future? Will I choose it, against my present 25 year-old 'good sense' to choose my life over my biological destiny to procreate and be a merry vessel of creation? It wasn’t always very merry after all. Our parents complicated their lives forever by birthing us, just so that we could have the privilege to thrive and build our own intricate worlds far away from the one they gave us. It's a bittersweet fact of most parent-child relationships—at least the ones that are 'healthy'—the inevitable fleeing from the nest.
I often ponder about generational gaps. The distance between my mother and her parents doesn't seem as wide as the cultural and chronological chasm between my parents and me. We have the Internet to thank for that. Of course my mother and father are also witnesses to the technological revolution, but they weren't born into it. They can remember a time when computers didn't exist. They raised me in a house with a rotary phone, no answering machine, and no computer or video games to speak of for a long time. They are old-fashioned souls, like my grandparents. I can appreciate that, but it’s harder to connect with them.
My Dad and I chatted about this technological phenomenon as he drove me to the airport that same evening, after I watched the video with Alexandretta. We discussed how the Internet is destroying our attention span, or at least completely reshaping it. "Over the thirty years I've been teaching, I've seen this decline in the kids’ literary capacity – for stuff like simple grammar and spelling, and especially with deep-thought analysis."
As he said this to me, I knew it was something he thought of often. Whenever I overheard his few-and-far-between phone chats with his sisters, he would talk about retirement. "I'm lookin' at two, maybe three more years at the most." He was tired of it. The monotony of grading mediocre essays on the same literature, going stale year after year, it was draining him. He wanted to be done, to relax and finally enjoy his Lazyboy throne, digital cable and piles of novels in undisturbed solitude.
My mother, in contrast, is still a little ball of energy. She exercises obsessively and talks non-stop. Meanwhile, Dad has become an overweight, pensive alcoholic who speaks very little, but when he does, it often holds more meaning for me.
"I go to four exercises classes in a row on Saturdays!" Mom tells me this frequently, proudly, forgetting about the last time she’d told me. I'm lucky for the two of them, as quirky and dysfunctional as they are together. She gave me health and wellbeing, and he gave me self-reflection and scrutiny.
The poorly filmed scene that played out before Alexandretta and myself, now adults living 3,000 miles away from our childhood, was both tender and unsettling. Part of me longed to transpose myself back to that one-year old form, splashing in a pool with my little friend, unaware of anything but the present moment. We existed then in pure simplicity. It was strange to dote on our past baby selves, but we laughed watching little Alexandretta's relentless game with a bucket, as she scooped up the water and emptied it back out again, over and over, until finally the predictable loss of balance struck her chubby thighs. With a sudden splash of her bottom against the edge of the pool, she landed safely on her tiny cushion. She nearly knocked me over in the process while I tried to play along, using my miniature hands rather unsuccessfully to pour water on her back. She barely noticed me, and immediately got back up to continue her bucket ritual.
"Filling and dumping is big with toddlers," the adult Alexandretta sitting next to me that night noted matter-of-factly.
"What?" I broke my gaze with the screen, her comment disrupting my attempt to mentally return to the summer day, to that innocent moment in a baby pool. I found myself back here with her, present in the future again.
"Filling and dumping. You know, they love to take things out of containers and put them back in, like I'm doing there with the bucket. I see that with the kids at the daycare, it's so funny." I don't think Alexandretta was quite as caught up in the poignant scene as I was, or maybe I was just making a needlessly doleful interpretation of it.
Being home always makes me reflective, so I couldn't help but look on the past with a tinge of longing for a one year-old world. Of course that nostalgia comes from a sense of certainty in the 'rightness' of adulthood, from which I will never return. What concerned me more than the babies in this scene were our young parents. I envisioned myself in my mother's place, and again a depressing wave of underwhelm grew in my belly. Do I want that life? Will I ever be selfless enough to be a good mother? I'm afraid, because I know that I could be a great mother because of her. Unless I keep running away to some different world…
I know nothing about LOVE, but felt inspired to write about the little that I've learned so far, so enjoy reading my deeply personal musings, which I tried to make relatable to more than just myself.
And make sure you listen to the Luvstep mixes at luvstep.com by Dirty South Joe & Flufftronix. I've been obsessed with Luvstep 2 since it came out this past V-day. They'll get you in the mood to fall in love, fuck, or just say, "FUCK YOU LOVE!"
1-
For so long I was just one.
You were a broken wish, my unrequited bond.
24 years too young.
2-
I waited for you, through ages and phases,
knowing you would never come,
My impatient countdown had begun.
3-
A black, bottomless hunger grew,
I swallowed myself up wanting you.
24 years brand new.
4-
Chasing the far-off, fluorescent high,
To manifest my westward destiny, do or die.
24 years of waiting left behind.
5-
What distant vision glows behind your eyes?
A horizon line of deep thoughts and shallow words,
Searching for my truth, yet to be heard.
24 years purged.
6-
Passing the time from 'me' to 'we,'
For so long, so long, so long...
Now all I can do is love you like a song,
24 years are gone.
PLATEAUING 2.1.11
It's a springlike, February morning in East Oakland,
And I'm tangled in electrical cords,
trapped in a bed littered with blunt ash, crumbs,
and a left tibial plateau fracture.
In 11 days I'll be born, 25 years ago...
Finally maimed after a quarter century of luck.
Proudly, I think, "Not bad for a chickenshit novice." My handsome brown orthopedic surgeon handles me gently. "It's actually a decompression of the bone. Very unusual."
A tear-soaked squeak asks, "What does that mean, doctor?"
Dark eyebrows elevated, he explains, "It's very unusual."
With a black V-shaped scribble as the fracture, he sketches a diagram of the surgery,
marking me, nearly devirginized, dented not broken.
Cut, plate, screw and sew me up good, doctor.
I trust you... You'll fix everything that hurts…
My fingers and toes awaken numb in bed.
With a stretch and squeeze I crack away their stiffness.
They search for heat and find it in a t-shirt.
"Baby, you're freezing" he mumbles to the wall.
I can't ask why he won't fuck me.
Instead, with a kiss to the neck I tell him,
"I'm always freezing."
