Last night I went to the bathroom three times. —John Ashbery
Like how Covid brought out my diabetes, earth can be a drain in the middle of the night, the ache of being alone for years weighing heavy on my chest like the rock I tied into my t-shirt before diving to the bottom of the deep creek so I could eith er get a merit badge for swim ming or drown.
Someone hollers “Hot body, lost in space, what the hell are you gonna do there, sister-girl?!!” in the general direc tion of a family of three or four or five. The screaming lady pauses afterwards, staring a bit over the heads of the family up toward the sky, then she’s off as quickly as she appeared and is soon out of sight. The family starts a bit at the loud query seemingly addressed to them, or to the twilight- soaked sky that’s just above their precious heads. If one were to
witness, as some
did, they, too, would
have assumed that the
screaming woman
was addressing the
family members. The slightest of them all, who might be a little girl of five or six stops the quickest in her tracks and be gins to look more and more alarmed, even after the yell ing lady is long gone; she is com ing undone, has a stark look of alarm covering her entire visage that inevitably transitions into a transparent pout, which soon has a quivering lip that predicts a stream of crocodile tears that come only moments after. It
turns out the little girl with the heart
of gold is overwhelmed
with worry and grief and is trying desperately to devise a plan to res cue whomever it is (and she has some ideas about who the unfortunate soul is) lost in space. The father of the crew – I shall call him that – aligns in rapturous thought with those (thoughts) of his teenaged twin boys for all three of them,
shaken, lost focus directly after the first two words of the diatribe that had been screamed at or over the general direction of their identical haircuts, “hot body,” which has them each em bark upon separate and quite personal trips (oh, they’re not going any where physically, the entire family stands stock still for what seems like an eternity after the loud words are so hurled) – which is to say that a certain electrical zing begins to per meate their mid- sections (or directly
of light brown as the order of pies sat in the rather uniquely sloped oven that the parlor’s owner had had shipped special some de cade and a half previous all the way from Sicily. But what if it is true, as well, that Mom has taken the earlier screamed wordsa
bit more to heart? What
if she is heard to utter,
with a voice that sounds at
first shaken, a bit weak, that crescendos up toward the decibel level of the words upon which this story began, that rises into a scream that forever alters the history of the family that had been so casually strolling the familiar blocks of sidewalk just minutes ago? She starts with a snapped “Damn right!” expressed in an unsure vibrato, but then comes, “What. In. The. Hell. Am. I. Doing. Here.” It is deliberate,
her confidence
rising as she admits
in verbal assault at the universe, “Lost as I am, lost as I have been for SO MANY YEARS!!” And then she turns a quick one-eighty, walks her self ‘home,’ (Dad and the boys, with pizza on the brain, give her a brief look that might be a combination of disgust and surprise, and then begin to amble their way without her to the pizzeria) walks in, pulls a few
things from drawers and
cabinets and closets and tosses them into bag that
isn’t quite large enough to
be called suitcase, walks the
bag out to the beige-colored sedan that is parked in the carport, hops into it after tossing the bag in the back seat, keys the ignition, and reverses the car out of the driveway, kicking up a bit of gravel along the way, backs into the highway in front of the house in which she’s some how existed for nearly twenty years, (aptly called Main Street), and speeds off into the distance, never to be seen or heard from again by what will become a more out-of-sorts, disturbed and depressed family of now only two or three or four.
a poem about memory, and about two green pens, and miracles, and grief, and defying Plato, and energy and disposition
i have 2 green energel pens, pens with a name that sounds like, if they were beverages, you’d find them, nat urally, in the ever-expanding energy drink sec tion, which is, to my senses (and I’d say to just plain
common sense),
filled with bottle
after bottle and
can after can of distasteful swill. anyway, the thing is i swear a few weeks ago i threw one of these two green energel pens with green ink into the trash because it had begun to refuse to make any marks, as pens are wont to do once the ink runs out, or if it’s shoddy ink, or a poorly architectured pen, perhaps. but here i am with two green
pens, one in
hand, through
which the ink is flowing, smooth and crystal clear, and nary a
notepad as
far as my
eyes can see. nothing on
which to
write. no surface, be it frogged or frogless, and in fact, no lazy animals one might find enjoying the surface, no
flora or fauna
lying just below a surface, no birds dipping down with a splash upon a sur
face, just that crystal clear nothing that flows, not too fast nor too slow, smooth as can be.
[an hour later] that’s how the ink is currently flowing from my green pen, just as smooth and even as the curlicues of my grip can swivel and circle in the air just above the paper, where the thoughts that run apace inside my head may all be juxtaposed, one abutt ing the other, being of a mood, as i am, when, for whatever reason, typing seems inappropriate or the incorrect way to go about things today (this can sometimes be the case; in fact, at least for me, even though i’m generally quite versatile when it comes to the meth od by which i stream words in hopes of making something once might call art, or else an accumu lation of words – for example some days i might record lines, other days i might dictate them into my phone, into my little handheld super-computer, as i think of them these days, only recently have these things become so advanced that they can at times be worthwhile, one of the many options we have to construct these conglomerates of words, and so, being “old school,” as it might be said, meaning, simply, old, it’s a pretty exciting thing for me to use my tip- top pens, like this green pen which, hastily, and a bit too sloppily, is now scribbling this first draft
with my help. so what turned out to be at first a mild dilemma has become in stead something of an unexpected blessing, since from now on, whenever i come across these lines, or even see the title scrolling down through all of the little pack ages i create in order, among other things, to rattle my memory a little bit, i will – indeed – remember; this silly moment will forever be a part of the history of me which i can recall, wax no stalgic, learn
from, even if how and why i might write something that is per haps a bit too lengthy about a day when i dis covered that i had two of my favorite green pens when i be lieved i on ly had but one. i could men tion that one way that i tend not to be able to build a poem, and am envious of those who can, or at least it’s not very often that i can, is by building a poem to near completion within the simple confines of one’s own memory, hav ing the words arrive in your head in such a way that the struc ture, the words, all is remembered and built strictly in one’s mind – no can do. i mean, i’m the guy who writes primarily because he cannot under normal circ umstances remem ber; writing creates a rememberable his tory of me, which i appreciate so much that i do it, like this, most every day. such
ego! helping me to
write these various and often eccentric or so mixed up jum
bles of myself that, once assembled, are new stories unto them selves, which
are still, above
anything else,
a tiny record of
my existence, one to which i can refer,
while still
here at it,
and one which gives me a bit of joy and enlighten ment. i am not
an expert on what
happens to them
outside of that, i
leave that to you.
and so these piles
of words then,
at any later date, might for me elicit
memories of literal
times i have experi
enced. and this
archiving has be
come imperative
or at least important
to me. without them i would seemingly
have so little to work
with, to be my best, a
good human, which is an aspiration, at least for me. they each create little sounding boards from the past from which ideas might come return, with which to brainstorm. there’s the constructed piece, archived, which forever lives with an old me, toward which i can, from some dis tance yonder, looking back, and with which, i can engage, and we can assess whether or not we are doing okay, or whether we’re regress ing or backsliding, mov ing into dangerous or treacherous territory. so, as i was saying, there are many reasons to create these sounding
boards, to build this
archive filled with the
versions of me that have come before the ones that i am now, and yet today, i hold in my right-handed grip my favorite pen, with green ink, and, with one hand holding down the tiny notebook upon which,
gripped in the
other hand, this pen is smoothly issuing forth, and
at quite a speed, what you or i now read in
and project
toward some
possible future.
again, with
my left hand
i hold the small notebook that is being written upon, and in my
right i have a green pen, whether or not it was
the one i thought i threw
away, i have no idea, and so,
after getting this far into what
has become a rather tall structure, i
might feel it necessary to go about switch
ing pens, to see how the identical pen might
act when gripped and swung to and fro,
over and about the small notebook, what
its tip might offer the paper that is now be ing filled, page after page, by the pen
which i am presently holding so as to build. and so i switch. could it be the one i thought i tossed into the trash which barely left a stain, which left almost nothing but a few scratches and green sputters upon the paper,
when last i had it in this grip? let us see if it is. and. lo and behold. the identical green pen has what appears to be the same capacity
as the one with which i wrote
before it. there is no sputtering, no stuttering, the lines of ink are as solid and smooth and are written with the same ease before. could this be the pen that i had meant to trash? was i so wrong in believing that the life of it had all but left? that it was, for me, of no more use? or might this pen, or the one that came before it, somehow miraculously, or by some odd act of serendipity (i have no visitors, i haven’t bought a writing utensil in many months, could it have arrived but by some magic?) is now in my hand writing the end of this long piece about many things that are centered around the two green pens that i now have that each work perfectly? plato was wrong when he said that for every thing there was an i deal template. what i have here are the absolute ideal plato nic templates to the perfect pen for my hands, and they are
identically perfect
with which to build these structures, particularly if they are tall and wordy like this one. am i saying that clear ly plato was wrong? and furthermore, would either of these green pens be the ideal tem plate of pen, if we were to ask plato? may i venture to say probably not? so haven’t we just learned to defy one of the greatest philo sophical (and otherwise) minds ever known to have lived on this beautiful plan et, just with a simple, some what tedious stack of lines about, among
...but somebody gotta eat somebody, else a belly go empty. —Glenn Ingersoll
life is a perverted swarm of heat-seeking missiles that soar about the globe, each in fits and starts,
searching for something
relatable but yet more feeble or prone to be
caught off guard.
which is to say that
they prey on those of us whose energy or life force can be most easily and efficiently sucked dry in a sin
gular slurp. in other words, on this planet, you’re either a crumpled dud or one sauntering aimlessly without even bothering to look where you’re going or you’re absolutely soaring. which is to further say that all of the world’s perversion comes down to us few lucky soarers. and who can blame us, really? wouldn’t you rather be an erection, swooping and swerving around in the ever-vanishing atmosphere, alert and on the prowl for your next life-renewing victim, than some enfeebled worm,
a slug that is
stuck upon the
crust of this
godforsaken
earth just
twitching and writhing its way toward inevitable oblivion? i thought so.
Someone was at the door, banging. It didn’t even start with a knock knock knock. Sitting quietly on the couch, it sounded to us like the door was a goner.
The banging never stopped. We never even called the police. What else happened? A table exploded. A drunken, bloodied glass of water was flung toward a voodoo doll and failed to miss. That was amazing. The cops were called then; oh, the irony, and the mathematics.
The BANG-BANG-BANG-BANGING certainly did not stop. It would
never end. We grew more and more uncomfortable on the plush sofa. Did the door survive; remain in tact? Or did it finally come unhinged? Oh, can you not just tell me when the banging will ever end?
What panache! He’s such a trend setter! Once, oh, once, oh, once or twice (or maybe even more – wouldn’t you just adore?) Was it on 57th? I’ll get back there someday (I hope, can only hope). Those incessant la-la-la-la-locks! What style, what motor memory! What style, oh my, I’d fly back in a minute just to put you in this empty pocket. Zip!
Trillions of reasons to love the heathen. —Frank McGuinness
(living proof:
I’ve hung a portrait, a copy of one of the dozens of photos you’ve sent, inside a black wooden frame, on the wall next to my bed about three feet above where my right arm generally lies for most of the night as I sleep, sometimes jerking or twitching a bit, no doubt, but I suppose mostly it lies stock still, crooked at an open angle, almost akimbo in relation to the rest of me—)
During the day, or in the middle of night when my room is lit, each dimple seems to reflect it back, the light, each color of the spectrum, in fact, directly at me, whether I’m sitting in bed, at my desk, cooking a bit of break fast, or washing the last of the dishes. But at night, your pre sence, your mercury pools, are eyes that don’t dim, but glow in the dark, are the source of beams that aim directly at me from contours that seem simultaneously severe and re laxed (chill as a basset hound collapsed into a heap, one eye half-open, on a cool porch on an August morning), as I lie in my broken- down bed. And, as well, the gleaming line atop your bottom lip— your lips, punctuated at each end by dimply exclamations— and it’s as dark as this room gets, but I can still see the backs of my hands, the tip of my nose, thanks to you, askance on the wall, as always, tucked into a frame that can barely fit your silhouette that glows like a lighthouse at the end of a long, misty peninsula, demanding the mind’s eye, at whatever time you please, day or night.
the scrawny birds in the twiggy nest seem to have no sense of balance, each is near constantly bashing up against the coarse nest. not to be stopped, once one succumbs to a collision, falls in a heap among the perilous architec ture, the wobbly little bird is back up in a second, head up, mouth agape, thrust toward the sky, with such unscathed and indelible trust.
