Christmas. So, when I told Harold that Reginald wasn’t coming to dinner that night, I swear! You’d think Superman forgot to comb his hair. Or The butler did it. It’s a Menacing day, Anyway. Said Santa.
Tut, tut! And whatnot. (Reginald was having none of it!) “Eat your friggin’ eggs, Harold! And toss me that Extra biscuit!”
we pause to pray. the entire world holy. like sex with our socks on
we wholly pause. a
wooly habit (the nun
was itchy, i itch! the nun
said itchily). holy. the whole room, a bedroom, their studio, a micro-apart ment, pawsed. we’ll pause when we feel like it, we all said. then our home took off, the pads of its paws pounding the pavement for several par secs. the red socks, a set, had bed sects with the human individual who’d been most deli berately chosen to del iver the pizza. that deliv erer certainly is a liver! a life-filtered lifter of lots of pizza. pizza that, when delivered, gets tips with no bills, mostly by tops, gets topped as a tip, the pizza deliverer, who, fresh from the doc tor, was just diagnosed with cirrhosis of (guess what?) the liver. what a life that deliverer had had, a has-been not ex pected to last much long er. longingly, the room, living the livelong life of a micro-apartment, thirst ily pauses at a dog bowl that
is only somewhat moist. the bowl without water has con tents that soon get slathered on dog-tongue, get tongued by a studio whose inhabitant is primate, no longer 54. that makes 55 says the googly- eyed go-go dancer who’ll soon get paid to dance on the laps of pricks; on the pricks in some laps. he also slam-dances a conga in tonga with some regular ity. a tall narrow drum that is splayed on the floor is slapped with some hands. this is how the go-go dances. with his hands he did dance. and he does, only now and then donning a brief pair of aquamarine-col ored underpants. boy, does he dance as the studio bounces both this way and that. and other ways, too. for it has found you (who might just be me), who, of him, is quite fond. but let’s make this more of a mystery, shall we, for the sake of pretend anonymity? our home that now so swiftly pedals its way toward something
that no one is sure of might
once have been a tiny
apartment. and what might a small apartment want, what might goad one in any particular direction? picture frames and perhaps a refrigerator. but when the coffin-sized home is the pad of yours truly? once it arrives at wherever it’s going, it throws up a top-tipped dancer from tonga it had swallowed with only a couple of chomps, ‘chomp-chomp’ and the dancer was gone until he was vomited from home. he was gone, he was home, he is home when he’s gone, he was spewed from our home and we look at that once- swallowed dancer from tonga for days (while we’re dancing the conga, of course). but that poor, wretched liver that wretched deliverer of pizza, now finds himself lost and quite homeless yet tipped to extremes and then topped ex tremely by the tips of the pricks of some lovers of pizza. the dancer, he felt that he could not have feelings, the pizza deliverer felt unfelt. which was all quite suspicious considering the evening’s odd sequence of sick
events. and the sycophants were witness, they felt this guy’s radical metamorphosis, from considerate courier of circular meals to motional gogo, dancer of conga, to tippled taker of tops for tips by such pricks, to becoming a twice-chomped meal for a home until, finally, resuscitation by regurgitation, getting a life that had mostly been taken but this time without life’s most significant sensation, that characteristic which we call feelings were now missing. and spectacularly, for he had been eaten, you see, by the home of yours truly. and, oh, what a mini scule house this one is. gestation’s a bitch, it could be said, is this story’s amoral moral. but, really, who’d say it? and why and to whom? why, the answer’s yours truly, by all means, of course! who’ll, so as to have this historical house- spinning one-storied yarn best savored, will save the rest of it for later, if you catch my drift. do you know what i mean?
this one’s easy, or should be, i’m a familiar. like, hang on, i know this one. the tulsa dispenser doesn’t automatically send a padgett or a brain ard through the wilds of kansas and ohio into new york city, but when it does, i feel you ron, i feel you joe, as back to your respective families you go come christmas or hopefully not the 4th of july. but unless you’re hooking bass on a boat somewhere mid-tenkiller, arkansas is prettier. or at least the river valley ’tween the ozarks and the ouachitas. so maybe we’re even, a quad rant for a quadrant, let’s say? even as the derricks send a storm of dirt out into an early dusk that’s some how arid and oily at the same time—it’s not a haven for teen agers. hey, you poets of ponca city, let’s put the world on hold, just for a little bit longer, what say you? first we’ll head to tulsa, five years pre mature, meet ted at the uni versity. or that was the plan, wasn’t it? hey guys, come on down to fort smith, won’t ya? is just what i said half a decade before being born. i’m just standing here stuck in a big pile of manure waiting for youth to catch up with me. but nobody heard me. when tulsa finally arrived it was through the windshield of papaw’s second- hand cherokee pick-up (which was white but for a maroon stripe, or vice
versa, i cannot
be certain). but when i emerged from that jeep it was too late. sadness so perm eated the trek on I-40 from alma and across the border, and on and on until well after we took that right turn up through muskogee, that i blew out my very own trail of tears. because at that age i was nothing but an angsty greenhorn with nothing better to do but brood over my own stupid self. yet i claim to be a late bloomer? well, i turned thirty in the poetry section of the library of none other than the massachusetts institute of technology, where i caught up with ron, joe, ted, and all of the rest of the gang. stepping every weekday through the hallowed halls of engineers, this here all grown up queer. so, yes, ever so slightly i grew into my boots, got myself educated. it didn’t take much else than that, and maybe a half a dozen or so group hugs by the best linebackers and quarterbacks in the word business. you get squeezed by a poet and, well, something irreversibly changes, at least in me. though it’s no joke that the biggest chunk of me is still that podunk kiddo. this i say to you sixty years after i was born five years premature. and those, my friends, are just a few of my made to order mem ories of being a good neighbor. so, as for me and my bookshelf full of pals from oklahoma and the ones from the universe with which they hung, where else to go with it but on such an endless repeat (and i do not mean hung from judge isaac’s barrows, nope, that will not be, for this story’s entirely too sweet.) once again, loop it back and repeat.
‘but bring truckloads of ice,’ he tells me. and i am thinking that we are so hot already that once we meet the sultan we might just explode. he has other things in mind. like drinking muscat in muscat whilst steaming from midnight sauna to,,,where would we go after that? ‘just make sure you sneak in the wine,’ he whispers into my neck with such a hot sound the word ‘wine’ wriggles into my inner ear and then my brain’s on fire, ready to be yanked into whatever tempest his blistering palms slap and tug me into next.
today i am distracted by what would, under (let’s call them) normal circum stances be a minor disturb
ance, a blip, something quite easily fixed. an obstacle the obliteration of such is like flipping a magical switch and
KABOOM! it is gone. a flick that removes all too much life when the general circumstances—as they were, as they might have been—have
sunk. and that’s when somebody says that they’ve (with a whew!?) finally hit rock-bottom, it is as if they drove their own self there with some sort of
gotta get there deliberation, with intent, so as to, what, rise above it? nope, no way, i say. when one has been dealt a particular hand, when i have....
when i was dealt a particular hand, i found myself in a circumstance so abnormal, so unfamiliar...when i look around and there is no one—NO ONE—
to get me out of it, and, my means (mental, physical, most often financial, or whatever) are not those which i have become accustomed over a life, a half-
decade of life (which finds me with, significant, a living that’s dwindling already, as in there’s not time to dawdle with one more obstacle, but)....
when i realize that a problem that would have been essentially solved with the snap of a finger now might take a year or two just to get around
or over. oh how to disintegrate it so that i might find myself moving forward (forward?)? well, i suppose that in most cases i will determinedly, confusedly and deliberately
make my way past that obstacle, will solve the goddamned problem and move in the direction i keep seeing as ahead, toward the better, which becomes such
a muddle to contemplate, this determining has so much time and yet no energy or mind to do anything except just do the work required to blow up whatever is keeping me from getting
there. wherever there is. and wherever that where is, in my mind it’s always to a place where all of this extra time that is required in getting rid of whatever keeps me from getting there shortens
back into the moment it takes to, say, snap a finger or wriggle my mouth or my nose, or nod my head like jeanne or samantha, or tap my feet together and whisper there’s no place like home. or look to my
right or left, or shout the name of the person in the room next to me in a little pretend cry for help. but that sounds like fiction now, something i dreamed up to bide the time it takes to get through with such
work that my entire being is a machine that is out of oil, needs a heart, is incessantly trying to drum up some courage (but from where?) and the motivation to get beyond whatever it is that is in my past. my path
to wherever it is that is familiar, that is life, so that when i wake up, there everyone is, that loving pan orama of support, each babbling head is telling me that from what i awaken is just a bad dream. just a bad dream?
life begins again, right? so much life that the dream that seemed to last forever was just an anomaly that, with distance (created by time, by real life), becomes smaller and smaller until it is not but a blip, otherwise
known as the brunt of my education, perhaps? or my final exam? it’s too soon to know? but, sure, a cocoon, so to speak, wherein i hibernate for so long that i break through refreshed and yet ravenous. oh, to be back among
the living. who would not, when one is lost....? back to the joys of the living, yes, that’s what’s for me. or will be. soon. living and learning and wacky adventure. family and friends. yes, sir! i do hope that everyone’s already here, already
gathered around me for when i awaken. because, yes, i shall be doing that soon: awakening. but was it a beautiful dream? or was it not? and were you not there? and were you? and were you? and what about
you? i can barely see as i open my eyes. you are there, but exactly who’s you? thankfully, these things will come back to me soon, in a windfall, of course. and all of these memories fuzz up the terror. so much so that i just thought i had an
adventure. but wasn’t it only a dream? i made some imagined friends on a long and fantastical journey. memories make me happy. but these ones are fading so horribly fast. they fade into a reality with which i collide. at last i’m so ready for it to arrive.
you’re a card, paper. a paper card. here’s your paper card, carl. cool. cool. i think i love you, miss facil ities request system. in voices more hum an than computer, i swear, and with en ough oomph to erect a skyscraper on a cold and chilly month of mondays, i hear an earnest emotion- laden loop of ‘the feeling. the feeling. the feeling’s not in the least. this feeling is not mutual. no, not in the least.’ thank you, miss facilities request system. with love and with gobs of smoochies, too!
what comes after a nutty nothing of a barren nov ember? what else but the dares of december, of course. ‘query ginger for the general coordinates of larry’s au courant cafe’ is what it says right here, for example. followed by ‘respond’ or, it could be ‘rampage’ ‘michelle’ ‘again and again.’ such scribbles were made assuredly by this gimpy hand before me, but the gibberish i can all but decipher sounds a lot more bonnie and clyde than, say, mojo joe. at any rate, who could possibly determine whatever it is that
with this scratchy
mess of blurred words
i might have meant? the head that’s con nected to this horse’s mouth can certainly not recall. but i do so remember how hellbent i was on a goal of staring at the ‘zeros of blue cross and blue shield.’ how could i forget? for that was my home of employment for less than two weeks that i lost by way of slam-dancing my way through the hellish de mands that were made at me so that i might snag a regular, albeit miniscule, home sweet home of my own. this after not having one in the solid for twenty-four months. this is a memory that reminds me to pick up some tums on the way out (i would have to
beg, borrow or steal some, so
this is just fantasy at the mo
ment), so that, also, i might
nab a bit of rare fresh air, rather
than stare airless at the walls of this coffin-sized home i (fairly? unfairly?) exchanged for that short job some forty-six months (or so) ago. before i’m left with nothing but gasps, i might as well close the door on this particular ditty... since a cursory glance at the rest of the notes on this time-worn page of handwritten end-of-year goals insists that i ‘pickle’ some ‘office supplies’ to the tune of nearly five thousand dollars while also apparently ‘check ing’ my ‘melons’ (which must mean—in jest, or at least i do hope—that i was to gawk at all of the zeros in my checking account?) while i ‘float glibly’ through the limbo of another ‘mundane monday.’ ‘hash tag trucking,’ or it could just be ‘talking’ – but at what or to whom? as this note was scribbled well before my roomies, whom i call gener ically (not sure as to whether i mean that much offense), conrad, calliope and their crew (by which i might as well say army) of cacophonous kiddos. whoever they are,
they are, quite definitively, cockroaches, one and all, so there literally exist any numb er of reasons to reach the begin ning of winter after such a long fall. ‘to the death, dear monsieur?’ my good pal conrad rasps (and with such a detectable emphasis on sewer, i swear!). ‘mon dieu! these scrolls of ridiculous goals will be the death of me, yet!’ i reply as i tuck myself in for the morning as bass-ackwards as one might atop a cold and disparaging december day. and as i do, i slip with some ease down into an upside down dream of doing a zero gravity two-step upon my coffin’s ceiling. that nondescript surface that seemed but unreachable moments ago as my dog-tired eyelids slide silently over my over worn peepholes. zzz. and zzzzz.
written at the end of a longwinded idea for a great party game which had something to do with the i re member poems of joe brainard: ‘take notes. write a poetic/or other wise response.’ yes, i’m looking over a motley assortment of notes again. from weeks, months and years past. an exercise that might just as easily hurt a fragile memory such as the one laid bare within the husk that holds mine, an exterior that’s beginning to awkwardly digress downward from an apex that was its purported middle ages. this digression, like my meanderings, say, during a job interview via zoom, putts and sputters as it picks up speed as things do (like snow balls) rolling down hills after such an exhausting and eternal near- infernal in cline. so, for now, i’ll catch a breath or two, rather than embrace, say, a no-longer- quite-so-early death. i’m game if you are. room-a-zooma-zoom!
i believe that most all of us have at least one thing, if not several, that we think of, for whatever odd or reasonable reasons we might, as our deepest, darkest secret(s). and of those self-styled never- tells, we most all of us probably spend the best portion of our days making sure (as best as we possibly can, that is) that nary an additional soul, so far as it is within our grasp of control, will ever know this deeply hidden stuff. my guess is, though, that most of these secrets are hardly sinister, if even in the least; in fact, they’d no doubt more rightly be dubbed our deepest, darkest embarrassments.
“if i tell you this, you must promise never to tell another soul. you must swear it!” and it turns out to be such a ridiculously silly thing. like i once kissed so and so at the prom, but we were both on dates with other people. what a doozy, right? perhaps i should not poke fun, lest you think i am being serious. another one might be i threw a rock at the kid on the monkey bars who wound up with a broken shin because of it, and that furthermore some other kid got blamed for the injurious act of schoolyard bullying. if there were a metric system for sinister, most folks’ atrocious moments would be rather miniscule on said scale. sure, everything is relative, and each secret would be in its own unique spot on the vector, such that there would be things that caused individuals such a lifetime of consternation and yet that issue or problem might live at the very low end of this scale. so paltry the cause of so much anxiety that i just want to shake it out of whomever and yell into his or her eyeballs 'JUST LIVE YOUR LIFE HAPPY!' as they have certainly spent an absurd amount of life worrying over what i would, and with ease, call a bunch of hooey; loads and loads of nothing. of course, as one might climb that vector higher and yet higher one might then start to encounter some things that even i myself might find distasteful. i mean, first, of course, there would be such iniquities as white lies. later up one might find running over a neighbors poor pug with your parents' ltd landau.
let me state right here and now that i would put a fairly stout condition of objectivity onto said scale. as this exercise is elucidating, or at least i would assume it is, one person’s heinous is yet another’s laughing matter. but onward up the scale one would surely find such things as infidelity, for example. and that would in all ways that logic might have one traveling that vector quite a distance before reaching somewhere at the apex, if not very near it, with, say, murder. are you with me so far?
but we’re not all murderers and hardcore thieves, are we? as one example that comes to my mind, most of us, when it comes to commitment with other people, i would venture to wager, are pretty loyal. wait, now that i think on that notion a bit more, i believe i just flat- out lied. or i led you on. prevarication. see, i am accumulating things i should regret, or at least consider immoral. am i right? i think that was me projecting myself onto others just a wee bit, at least once i put my brain to it a bit more. based on my own personal experience, that is, but not much else. (in fact, one could call of this assemblage of lines a ‘projection collage,’ i suppose). i do err toward the belief that most everyone in a committed relationship of any sort has had at least a somewhat substantial indiscretion, if not several, during their said commitments, their relationships. but that’s just me.
i do have my reasons for thinking so darkly. and i have come to see that i’m quite the odd person out when it comes to my own personal beliefs in such matters. but then there’s the sticky issue of logic. certainly just about anyone who ever knew me at all, and for decades, would have the luxury of getting a headache’s worth of my diatribe about this belief, based of course on my logic: that sex, commitment and love are wholly separate, and that either of these, singly, do not need any reliance upon, or have anything whatsoever to do with the the the other two. each can exist just fine singularly. and i would go on and on about this, even relaying my own personal examples of each possible scenarios. so, if two or more individuals decide they want to set off on a long-term thing, the only thing they would need in order to make it something intent upon lasting is commitment, which is some sort of contract with each other.
those days have been gone for a while now. the ones in which i would have anyone around me to begin with, much less anyone who might tolerate me going on and on about this or that. it is not necessarily that my beliefs on the subject have changed so much. it's just that i cannot be certain anymore, if ever i even was, how to put such a theory smoothly into practice. it all still makes sense to me, though. but i have much to figure
out about it all, given that i have not only lost practice debating the matter, but it seems like an eternity since i have had the luxury or opportunity to put the theory into practice. not that i would care to, necessarily. since for now, at least, such ideas are all but senseless.
and while it has become terribly trite of me to say, it appears that i have gotten sidetracked. i started off on the subject of the silliness of most of our most tucked away, hidden secrets. and, indeed, how silly most surely must be, with some rare exceptions. if, for example, fede’s deepest secret is that he didn’t plant a row of potatoes in the garden back when he was, say, ten years old, and instead only planted two rows (when it was vividly requested that he plant three. . .), and in your later years you revealed that secret to me as if it were the worst of all possible things, would that not
be silly? would i say, “wow, martha, I think you should have tried a little bit of infidelity, you know? just for the experience, for what you might learn from such a thing, perhaps for the fun of it, even.”
then martha took her last breath. although her eyes looked right up at me as if i’d said something that could possibly have killed her. i look down now at her lifeless eyes and say, “you’re really silly, martha. you are such a silly human being.” then I leave martha’s lifeless body in the bed of her wonderfully furn ished home and head out to a fancy new sushi place that is the talk of the town. because i have a date with new hottie in town named stan. and this is a plan that has been solid for a few weeks now.
her first name, as it turns out, was hazel. i know this because my three siblings and i called her grandma hazel. this, as i’m certain
i’ve mentioned to you before, was a taunt that my father put us up to, knowing she’d be very displeased. and perhaps she was. but we’d never
have known it. i’d like to believe that she rather enjoyed it as something unique, perhaps even nostalgic. and perhaps she did. oh, and the other fact: if she were
still around, my dear grandma hazel would have been 105 years old today.
since she grew up in arkansas and spent most of her adult life in detroit she had a sort of a lazy midwestern accent, which is pretty much an oxymoron. on thanksgiving and sometimes christmas and other special family meals she often made a dish i would otherwise despise, but since it came from her it was nothing but greatness: sweet potatoes with syrup and marshmallows. is it because i am now a diabetic and that it has been over thirty years since we all sat down to one of her meals together that i cannot remember her signature desserts quite so easily as i obviously should? my dad’s absolute must have was, i believe, a banana walnut double or triple layer cake with white frosting. and i do re member those, and as i think about it more, it was truly amazing to the senses and i am pretty sure it was my favorite as well. though there were to certainly desserts too numerous to taste all of in one holiday, that is also something i re member. cornbread was a household staple, period. and of evening and/ or throughout the day there would be the occasional solo individual who just could not get enough (which would be anyone in that household after a meal had been served) who’d be eating cornbread with milk poured over it with a long spoon out of a tea glass. the mister to marie, my grandfather, would do this very shortly before he hit the hay of an evening, but rather than with regular milk, his cornbread would be swimming in buttermilk. may i take a moment to interject here, for the sake of some attention, perhaps, or a bit of pity, but no, never pity, maybe more as a hint that will never even be seen, much less acted upon by what remains of my family, that these things are so vivid to me, i am most certain, because i just made my way through my 8th thanksgiving alone, and soon will be encountering the 8th christmas i’ve had in a row (just as with the 8 thanksgivings) wherein i’ll be spending its duration without a soul other than myself in my coffin-sized apartment? i must add that, much to my elation, i received a care package from my mom and sister last year shortly after christmas which included all of the standard sweet fare from the family’s christmas, and so therefore much of what was included were sweetstuffs that filled me with such nostalgia it seems im possible to imagine today, nearly a year ago later, as many of the goodies were made with the same care by the same hands using the same recipes as those from which i indulged so greedily during my childhood and youth. now that i’m hungry for things that i’m sure i can not find in order to become sated for the rest of this evening and my stomach has become grumbly for the very same reason, i believe that’s where i’ll have to stop on this, my second short list of things about marie in under a week. which, as you can see, turned out to be just as much about me.
it seems like there are so many people for whom the concept of pain is obviously more tantalizing and alluring than the (seemingly much more logical? obvious? clear as a bell?) notion that while it inevitably shows up at times, it is something that should be avoided (duh!) at pretty much all costs. perhaps it would be well advised that when the patient reaches such a threshold, departing a life that reflexively goes out of its way not to bump into it and instead literally embraces the “pleasure” that could be had with it, therefore in a focused and driven manner, seeking it out on every horizon, running oneself directly into it until one is consumed by it; i mean, if, it’s even possible that there is such a threshold, when it is crossed one should be directed to reverse that demonic course post haste. but i know how impossible it would be to lure one back over to other side.
warmth. how many humans and whatnot i am used to be secrets i could give away as gifts. hooray for back in the day. when our hearts were con stantly broken like mustangs on the great frontier. now we’ve implanted keys, we break the code of universal hammer until all our former best friends’ toenails splinter like shot slabs of cedar. the barren lake before us ripples like onions, the dominos our great grandmothers taught us how to play are about to fall like boxed-up supersized smart teevees aligned at the entrance to a post- apocalyptic target on a black friday or a techno cratic mon day or even on a sadomasochistic tuesday—you give, i receive; then i give. and we take it. for this is the age of pandemic flip- flops. and just look who’s on top now. you could fool me forever. however, whoever you are, do, for hot hell's sake, make it, and make it quick! holy flapjacks, eartha, did they ever!
she loved liberace and had a lazy but genuine-sounding laugh that she’d use a lot, especially when she’d mention his name, for which her descriptives would fluctuate between several tried and true blips like tinkling the ivories to twinkle-toes, but in the end it always appeared to me that she had had a life-long devotion to the pianist and i could picture them as the best of friends. also, although i don’t think she ever met him, she took many excursions to las vegas in her later years, particularly with her sister, my great aunt wilma. marie’s husband had worked most all of his life in detroit at uniroyal, a tire company which had a teevee advert that ran regularly through the 1970s that featured a woman and two men who’d proclaim at the top of the ad: hi, i’m uni; i’m roy; and i’m al. when he retired from uniroyal in the mid-70’s, she and he, trekked back to arkansas and built a house just outside of the city
in which i lived, which was very
near the vicinity of where the two had grown up, met and married, before moving to detroit during the depression era migration for its thriving
automobile industry. my father,
with whom she was pretty close in
his later years, claimed that by the
time they arrived back in arkansas,
or at least before my grandpa passed away, that they were millionaires, which seemed so wild to me given that she’d always been a stay at home mother of four and her husband but a long-term employee of a retail tire company. but it made me happy that she and her sister would go on these excursions to las vegas and be downright giddy in preparation for these trips. she could also be fairly cold, which made sense considering the life she had been given. she seemed less than impressed with children, for example (sure, she put forth an effort once i arrived, but i could tell that her mind would inevitably turn to worrying about what me and/or my little brothers and sister were going to destroy or how we’d manage to mess up her routine or the meticulous order of her home this time), so the days we’d spend there could be a bit of a drag after a while (i had a tendency toward boredom when not spending time in my own bedroom; not that there was any privacy in the small home that the six of us and i shared in
town; i shared, in fact, but a small bedroom with my younger brothers). there was no real sense of “you are welcome here” warmth. she treated us mostly as adults, or, well, i heard her make occasional “baby talk” for her dogs or for humans who were yet infants. nevertheless, in general i always felt a certain eye-level straight-up adult one on one talk whenever we’d exchange words. and there was always that laughter. lots of sitting on the lazy porch swing after long days picking ripe goodies from their very large garden, feeding the chickens (i don’t recall ever being let into the coop, however, a uniquely designed home for the dumb birds that had a rather elitist look compared with the scads of old and stinky chicken houses that were strewn all across the arkansas countryside in whichever direction one might move; home of tyson, old chicken coops were fairly ubiquitous when i was a kid, in that same way that cattle and barns were, and the crescendo of locusts that swelled loudest around dusk every evening from mid-summer to mid-autumn, at about the same time the fireflies began to emerge from any of the surrounding thickets to visibly alight, or when the mosquitos would likeliest bite. there was even a small family of guineas, hens that arrived a year
or two after my grandparents moved
back to arkansas. well, initially there
were just two, but the chicks would follow
soon after, much to her pleasure and ours. aristocrats compared with the chickens, they did not require a coop, but utilized the more glamorous one, anyway, and did not have to be fed like the chickens did. in fact, they were foragers who generally kept the property clean of the multitude of more problem atic invasive critters such as slugs, ticks, grasshoppers, horseflies, crickets and mosquitoes, etc. the guineas were even known to chase away snakes, part icularly when it came to protecting the more lower class chickens. and since i am on the subject of class, marie did love her long luxury car, which would be traded for a new one with regularity at the ford dealership in fort smith where her brother-in- law was the top automobile salesperson at the ford dealer ship up the road in the city for
several decades. also, marie
truly loved tabloids, especially
the national enquirer and the
globe and sun, many issues of which would more often than not be found in knee-high stacks next to her private bedroom. i think she typically would end the night asleep next to her husband in their regular bed room, but of the three bedrooms in what seemed their palatial home to us kids, and our place was about a quarter the size of theirs, she had a bedroom she called hers, and no one else would dare enter that one. mostly, i think, it was just where she sewed and quilted, two things she would often do and that were much more than just hobbies. andyway,
these rags would often have liberace or
cher or burt reynolds or dolly parton
(and sometimes all four at once)
plastered in the most non-
glamorous angles on their cover pages. otherwise, her home was always meticulously in order, well vacuumed, the fireplace roaring during the colder seasons. her husband died of a heartattack after chopping wood one fall morning, and he had never spent one night in a hospital; he sat for a bit, uncharacteristically, on the arm of their long 1970s green living room couch one late morning after he arrived back home from this very regular ritual, told her with a face that was a bit more strained than usual, she thought, that he was hurting, she went to grab some aspirin and by the time she got back to the living room he was gone, just like that. i have always thought that was a pretty awesome way to go. switching gears again, it is definitely worth noting that she was the best magician of the kitchen that i have ever known. and how i could continue for chapters and chapters on that subject alone. and i have yet to but intimate about her earlier years. it’s clear i could write about her in this way for at least a month, and so easily. so how could i begin to tie this growing list all up in a bow, and allow you all to carry on with your days (or your nights) without turning this into a long and annotated biography? i supposed i have been a bit of a trickster once again. i’ve started a piece i thought might be easy, relevant, historical, an aid to memory, and a montage, only to come to realize by now that there’s enough to detail that i could go on and on about this mysterious matriarch named marie ad infinitum. in fact, a month of this would not even begin to scratch the surface of getting at her person. even though i feel as if i know so little about her, my paternal grandmother. that clearly cannot stop me from relaying what i believe that i do, and from furthermore expressing my curiosity and my hypotheses regarding those things i do not know, have no business knowing, really. but these mundane facts as i recall them turn out to be just as interesting, at least to me, to that stuff that i might further imagine her long history to be made up of. one thing is certain: i did not begin to exercise my curiosity nearly enough while she was still here with us. and my assumption that i was not really on her radar might be fictional fancy. so what i have now is a bit of a meandering few lines about a real person, whose name was not really marie, by the way (just another tidbit before i close this particular chapter - it was not her first name, in any case, but her middle name, which she despised, like two of the rest of my four most immediate grandparents who also were known familiarly by their middle names; hardly a soul actually knew her first name), and whose fairly mild streak of hedonism and her desire for a world that was built, at least later in her life, for her ease and satisfaction, but only because she built that world herself, these happen to be only a couple of the things of hers that i have taken with me into my more grandparently years. so, for now, for today, i’ll end here. but now that i know that the varied and relevant tidbits about her are plenty and vast, which i find to be one of the many perks of being a so-called writer, if and as time might kindly allow, i will come back to tell you some more about this six foot tall woman named marie, whose life now seems to me to deserve much more than simply a cursory glance. so. yesterday i mentioned a word we like to use, “process,” and today, i’ll end with another word we also like to use, which i once upon a time hated (ironic, as you’ll see in a very brief moment). and that word is “project.” this project, as it is, turns out to be filled with an assortment of sub- projects, another word which is just a word to use, as i might and do, since i am here and now calling them such. so if you are of a mind to join me at some point down the road in doing so, let’s look at marie again, shall we? i know i will. because with the distance of time, and her loss that seems with such distance, more and more of something rather more gained or accrued than lost, it certainly seems to me to be a more than worthy and pleasurable venture. and as entertaining as it might be enlightening, and interesting,
though what one might occasionally
call a bit tragic. at times. and if that does not hook you, well, you are simply not hooked. i do hope to see you again around these parts
wake up. it’s 1990. it’s 2014. it’s 2017 and 2018. there are no more doors to open, we’re snug inside for the ride of our lives. scratch that. i’m stuck here alone for the ride of my life. may it not last another lifetime. you assure me that you’ve been here before, that you know something of me, and you offer me condolences and a drink. make it stiff. or better yet, i remove you from my head before my head starts believing. how to find the truth when you trust no one? it’s a pretty tawdry nightmare. take that window for example. there’s a fan sitting on the sill, seemingly stirring some air in or out but as if the electricity in here comes only in dribs and drabs. are the walls caving in? i take a sip of my diabetic soda and try to imagine they are not. or that the room is breathing, like i hope i am. am i? this thing called trapped inside a coffin may last as long as the life of a vampire, i imagine, but that is no worthwhile imagination. put your imagination to real work in such circumstances.
is there really such a thing as being this alone? i ask this of my best friend the big cockroach before slamming an un-shoed foot into it. get your intimacy wherever you can because pressing no flesh (i’ve found) brings the depths of death. which distends the hot breath of this dystopic coffin to the point of holding its lonely innards into a stasis. i validate such a life and the prison that contains it by breathing with it. this house with no mouth is not appreciative of such mocking. i flatten the air into a square the size of the small space in which i live, folding it into tiny rectangles that meta phorically mock each cubic unit of whatever air fits in here, elongating time into a limbo of long pauses with no gasps. i am hoping that you can ask me before all of this is gone how long it took and how did i possibly endure it. how such slim swirls of hope somehow cohabit this place is the most confounding of all of these, my mysteries.
