“but not twelve.”

“that’s life,” she said. “we should be dead. we should be stars and perfect tens. and that’s just three off the top of my head. once again, you’re a godsend.”

this life is often just homage to repetition itself, like all those catholics standing and kneeling, over & again, rehearsed. while i’m not entirely sure what that means, i like the thought of it. repetition itself, like you & i , repeating for years, like the sun rising (or the earth sinking), the sickspin of the seasons. i’m thinking of cycles, extracirricular, of how to grasp onto permanence, how to stop meeting at the corner of yesterday and today. i fight for things. i’ll fight for you. one-two combinations & quick jabs & my left fist to their right jaw.

and something about ivy, how it grasps onto anything it can. i try to grasp onto sleep which used to slip over me so effortlessly, but these nights & days it plays hide & seek. when i drift off in some early morning hour, blearly & sissy-stomached from a day of caffeine & cigarettes & rainfall, i dream about watching satellites with you that come crashing down, and then we ride them all over this Lonely Planet. when i wake i write, but it turns out the story’s getting shorter & what i want to know is will it happen to me.

and when i look in the mirror i’m surprised at how thin i’m becoming, since i’ve decided that eating is for suckers. most of my days are filled with waiting & little else. waiting for something to happen. i talk for hours with my sister & my oldest friend, in an effort to, more than anything really, not talk to myself. when i hang up i wander around the house & i try to find someplace to sit: on the emecos in the kitchen, the velvet couch in the parlor, the green chair in the corner; at my desk, in my bed, on the pollock-for-knoll. everyplace is outofplace, and that’s how i feel in my home today, in my skin: out of place.

confessional.

“that’s true,” she said. “we should be dead. i should be sleeping in your bed. instead, i’ll crash on the floor.”

tonight.

fingers tapping on keyboards & the song of the silent.

the drowned & the saved.

i can’t help it if you are out of your beautiful mind.

sloping into the sea.

 Seven years ago we drove down to the end of the expressway, past all the marshland, to a lost city beside the sea. The city was full of ghostly types, the sort of people who, even after conversing with, you would not be surprised to find had been dead for fifty years. It would take no effort at all to disappear in a town like that. It would be so easy to be go astray, to vanish into some slick bog.

You and I, we traveled there together; we kept one another close. Despite our efforts, I managed to mislay my bones. I know that over the course of two nights and three days, I lost myself. I only wonder now if you disappeared with me.

At three a.m. we awoke and went for a walk, and it was on that peculiar Sunday morning, fog-soaked & salted, that I lost track of my veins. I left them behind as a trail so that I may find my way back, but somewhere along the journey the sea salt & silt severed it all and I was deterred from the splintered planks that were our path. It seems I’ve been wandering about in that muck ever since.

I’ve been trying to write about that night for years; for some reason, it’s the one moment I can’t capture on tape. It seems that evening floated out to sea, never to be heard from again. My bottled messages, cast so carefully, remain unanswered, laying at the bottom of the thick ocean, or perhaps rescued by faceless sailors who don’t remember anything about that night, either.

A map of the area reveals a complex system of waterways, an intricate arrangement of ventricles. There are hundreds of small cavities & chambers for nights & days to fall into & fade. I know that night is in there somewhere. Safe & protected. Standing still in time.

So please, darling, if you remember anything, anything at all about our walk in the middle of the night on the twenty-eighth of August, 2000, please remind me.

Because all I can recall is wandering around in a mop of black hair & sea salt, just mad about your love.

sie by side; limbs touching.

slowly flattening into evening: the sky is turning pink in the west & we are wavering.

see you…
…soon; the feeling of your
fingers curled gently in my palm.

and these days will become like all the others.
this city-window seat will be a widow’s watch; this cigarette will have punctuated poignant thoughts; the night will have been clear with an endless stretch of stars.

if i wait long enough, these days will be beautiful as well.

“but not twelve.”

“that’s life,” she said. “we should be dead. we should be stars and perfect tens. and that’s just three off the top of my head. once again, you’re a godsend.”

this life is often just homage to repetition itself, like all those catholics standing and kneeling, over & again, rehearsed. while i’m not entirely sure what that means, i like the thought of it. repetition itself, like you & i , repeating for years, like the sun rising (or the earth sinking), the sickspin of the seasons. i’m thinking of cycles, extracirricular, of how to grasp onto permanence, how to stop meeting at the corner of yesterday and today. i fight for things. i’ll fight for you. one-two combinations & quick jabs & my left fist to their right jaw.

and something about ivy, how it grasps onto anything it can. i try to grasp onto sleep which used to slip over me so effortlessly, but these nights & days it plays hide & seek. when i drift off in some early morning hour, blearly & sissy-stomached from a day of caffeine & cigarettes & rainfall, i dream about watching satellites with you that come crashing down, and then we ride them all over this Lonely Planet. when i wake i write, but it turns out the story’s getting shorter & what i want to know is will it happen to me.

and when i look in the mirror i’m surprised at how thin i’m becoming, since i’ve decided that eating is for suckers. most of my days are filled with waiting & little else. waiting for something to happen. i talk for hours with my sister & my oldest friend, in an effort to, more than anything really, not talk to myself. when i hang up i wander around the house & i try to find someplace to sit: on the emecos in the kitchen, the velvet couch in the parlor, the green chair in the corner; at my desk, in my bed, on the pollock-for-knoll. everyplace is outofplace, and that’s how i feel in my home today, in my skin: out of place.

confessional.

“that’s true,” she said. “we should be dead. i should be sleeping in your bed. instead, i’ll crash on the floor.”

from here to who knows where.

“Tell me things I won’t mind forgetting,” he says. “Make it useless stuff or skip it.”

I tell him that no one in America owned a tape recorder before Bing Crosby did. I tell him that Canada Dry Ginger Ale originated in Oshawa, Ontario. I tell him I know this because I just looked it up the other day. I tell him that if you started counting, and said one number every second, it would take you 33 years to get to one billion.

He suspects I make some of the facts up, but he never asks.

I pause, about to say something that matters.

Neither of us speaks until I choke it all back.

“What else?” he asks. “Do you have anything else?”

The hundred billionth crayon made by Crayola was Perriwinkle Blue. A lump of pure gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court. Donald Duck comics were banned in Finland because he doesn’t wear pants.

A barge passes, and the water in the river (which isn’t actually a river, I tell him, but a tidal flat) laps higher against the concrete partition where we are sitting. Another pause.

“If we had to swim for it, would we make it to the other side?” he asks me.

These days he speaks less & less often, so every syllable seems fixed with poignancy, and even the mundane comes out sounding meaningful.

“You might make it,” I tell him. “You move like a gazelle—me, I’m full of rusty robot movements.” We both know, though, that we’re not talking about swimming, that this is much more serious than that.