Blue and Green

Like the wind knocked out.

I can feel my hair falling away. My skull pressing, pushing, against my brain.

To look up and look away. To exhale. To drop the match.

The world is best from a distance.

Blue and green. Spinning and breathing and living.

The world is best from a distance.

I can't help but watch the dregs and the birds. Trash in the yard and wonder; why can't that be me?

Remember when I had that car?

That nice guitar?

Remember thinking I was climbing out?

My skull pressing, pushing, against my brain.

Why do I worry about that at all?

Evening comes around.

Sleep while I can.

Beautiful world.

A Moment at the End of Summer

I was cloud bursting

at the beach, next to the girl.

My shorts still weren't dry.

A dog barks near us

and children bury their friends.

Last days of summer.

Somehow more lovely

than the dream of new July,

and we all exhale.

"That dog," the girl says,

"in a sidecar, with goggles.

And he was smiling."

Goodnight my sweet friend.

You are the life inside me.

and soon, the grey sky.

A Joke

I mean, well, what's there to feel shitty about?

There's the girl. The band. The food. The rent. Wine, warmth, love, and LOVE.

What's there to feel shitty about?

So I couldn't write. No words. No songs. 

I walked the town whenever I could. Hood up. Sunglasses on. A few water bottles of wine on me somewhere and headphones in and I watched the cars and people and in my head worded and reworded sentences and ideas and nothing. Always coming back to; Isn't it such a nice day to walk?

Stupid fucking happiness. Stupid fucking contentment. At least I had the stinging comfort of knowing it wouldn't last forever. Yes. At least there was that.

What a joke I am.

Walk. Drink. Piss at the hospital or a gas station. Don't buy anything. Hope no one speaks to you because you have headphones in but also because people are tedious and small and trash.

What a joke I am.

A Wick Between Fingertips

A wick between fingertips. The sea drifting back into itself, over farmland and remains and the storm is over. The fire is out. I sit serene.

Did I get it all out?

Did I say it all?

Think back to the era before. In that small back room. Bass guitar, dirty and screaming. Drum machines and what'd it mean? All steps to something but nothing a voice.

And then there was only me. A house empty, a glass full. Press record and a million words fall out in a thousand verses in a hundred songs. Paint flows and stories told and I am only what I make. I am only what I make and that is all I've ever wanted to be. Sing soft and play loud. Drink hard and live fast. I am only what I make and that's all I want you to see.

That's all that was left in me.

The fire. The storm.

Drown everything. Burn everything.

Make.

And months fall. Touch comes and goes. Eyes into mine. Night and morning and emptiness and a heart dashed. Hearts. Months fall and tapes pile. Friends crash against the banks and my head is more than what I make, my head, poisoned and alive and screaming at the sky.

Press record.

Jazz in the night. Piss in the alley. Kiss in the street.

We survived to meet.

Rain slows, flame slips blue.

All I've ever wanted to be. I'm not that anymore. Did I get it all out? Did I say it all? Months fall and I am silent. Motionless. Well, dried.

Dosed

Do people still say 'strung out'?

I was strung out. Coming off a rough fifteen hours of basically everything and I had made the mistake of asking for help at one point. I regretted it more than tearing apart the seven or eight paintings that were on my wall and now all over my floor in scraps. It was late August and I had lost my job and license somewhere and the night was closing in again. I was half under my bed, naked and picking at the leg of the bedframe, thinking "It's ending. It's ending," over and over. I had been horrified at one point and called a girl I had been seeing and drunkenly broken up with, loud and full of rage, a few nights back because at that moment she was the only person I felt any closeness to and she would know what to do. She came and sat with me and I cried to her in broken sentences and gasps that I was sorry I had been horrible to her and that I am not a person. She stayed with me for a while and when she knew I was safe she kissed me and left and we didn't speak much after that.

I only knew my guilt. I could see it in the air. My twisting and constricting weaknesses covering me, killing me, and I thought that was actually what had happened to me and I thought I had killed myself all along. Slow and from the inside. Not some grand gesture, no, that wasn't me. Not all at once, no, I do things slow and over long periods of time, and now here I was, chewing the insides of my cheeks and thinking I was dying and I was dying. In my own way.

Rotting room. House. Unemployed, drunk, tripping face crying and in my thirties. Alone. Under my bed, and alone. Afraid to be near people. Afraid to go outside sober. Afraid to wake. Afraid to sleep, and I did neither. Then I wasn't sleeping and even if I thought I could, I'd pound a pot of coffee and get twenty minutes and wake back up I could only see ghosts in the dark. Real or not, I stopped wondering.

What a fucking joke.

I woke earlier that day in Springer, on Paul and Zeph's couch. I had been out with Zeph the night before. Played an open mic. Wandered Springer. Killed a box of wine in an hour and shot the shit in a friends apartment across town. People came and went and when we switched to whiskey more people came. A girl with a little acne and a lot of hair came to me and kissed me and when she did she put something in my mouth. I smiled and she kissed me again and said “You'll be okay.”

The only words I wanted to hear.

An hour went by and she said “follow me” and she knew I would be okay, so I did.

“Hows the molly?”

“Is that what it was?”

“You can't tell?”

I was a box of wine and a half bottle of whiskey in. I couldn't tell if I was standing.

“Open your mouth,” she said.

I did.

She stuck her fingers under my tongue and she said I'd be okay, so I'd be okay.

The molly held me safe and content until it wore off and then the acid got at me. The problem with acid is it reacts to you, sort of. Where your head is. How you feel. My mind is a fucking shipwreck and I only put myself through the grinder.

I dropped around three or four in the morning and the whiskey knocked me out around six. I was awake again at eight and too drowsy to understand I was just still tripping. I woke up on Zeph's couch, wandered the apartment for what seemed a panicked age looking for the door, found it and left. Shoes on. Start the car. Drive home.

I lived about a half hour out and it wasn't until I hit the interstate, driving behind a road crew truck with angrily flashing orange lights that I realized how fucked I was.

Keep driving?

Pull over?

How long?

Unsure of at what point in the whole mess I was I decided to keep going. Maybe it was almost over, I reasoned. Focused. Not letting the crashing orange lights fill my car, my eyes. My head.

“CRASH YOUR CAR,” my head said.

“Okay,” I thought and swerved and hit the rumble strips and yelled “What are you doing? No one will know you mean it! They'll just think you were fucked up! Don't kill yourself on drugs!”

“YOU HAVE TO,” my head said. “LOOK AT YOU. TRASH. SHE DOESN'T LOVE YOU. NO ONE REALLY COULD. WEAK. LAZY. SCARED. FUTURELESS. SELF OBSESSED. KILL YOURSELF. DO IT. YOU HAVE TO. DO IT. DO IT. NOW.”

I hit the rumble strips again and cried and I did it again and cried more and I screamed in the car.

“WEAK.”

I kept screaming. I thought I could scream it all right out of me but it stayed. Whispering and I thought I just had to make it home.

By the time I pulled into the driveway my eyes were burning and in the mirror puffed and red and it looked like I had the shit kicked out of me.

I turned the car off, breathed deep and watched the light bounce off the hood and into the air where it waved and rose and dissipated and in front of everything a nearly invisible tangle of thick strands, intangible but there, and I thought that must be all that really matters but I didn't know what that meant.

I went inside, went to my bedroom, took off all of my clothes and cried.

“WEAK. ALONE. TRASH. USELESS. WASTE. LAZY. TALENTLESS. DISAPPOINTMENT. SELFISH. DRUNK.”

I curled into a ball and sank into the mattress.

“DO IT. DO IT. DO IT. DO IT. DO IT.”

“I can't,” I said into the blanket.

“COWARD.”

“I know.”

The intangible strands had followed me into the bedroom, swaying, tangling, growing. The room was hot and I realized I was drenched in sweat. With all of my effort I pushed the blanket off of me and it was a shed chrysalis, used and useless. I reached for the A.C..

“Some goddamned air.”

I was drenched in sweat and my eyes burned in tears and the A.C. came on and I begged the intangible strands to let the white noise put me to sleep.

“Please please please please please...” I said and repeated and repeated and repeated.

My skin cooled and the white noise was nice but it wasn't enough. The destroyed hole in my ceiling. One of the reasons Marie had left. The cowardice to get it fixed. Another reason. The anxiety to make a phone call. Another reason.

“GARBAGE. COWARD.”

I screamed into the air and the intangible strands reacted, spreading quick to the corners of the room and then coming back together.

“DO IT. DO IT. GO TO THE KITCHEN AND GET THE KNIFE. RIGHT NOW. RIGHT IN YOUR COWARD FUCKING THROAT. DO IT. DO IT.”

I watched it happen. I saw me roll off of the bed, crash to the floor. I watched me stand, bent and jagged and open the bedroom door. I followed as I left the room and into the kitchen. Open the drawer. Take the bread knife. I watched me press the teeth of it into my skin and I felt nothing as I pulled it hard and sawed across my throat and I watched me gurgle and choke and wheeze and fall and die and I felt nothing but I thought the floor would never come clean.

Then I was still on the floor of my room. Freezing.

“COWARD. DRUNK.”

“I know,” I said and crawled under my bed.

July, My love

Kept my windows rolled down and the heat high. February was suicide and I was doing my best to avoid it. Listen to Pet Sounds a lot. Take short walks whenever the air wasn't crippling. Pretend. Pretend the summer. 

Close my eyes.

Sun on my skin.

The sound of the water near.

There were good days and I remember them. 

My hair was getting long and the goddamned humidity destroyed it. All a tangle, large and static, coated with sweat. I was laying under a tree and reading near the dog beach in Lake Henry and behind me, on the sidewalk, families walked and laughed and took pictures and soon they'd have to drive back to New York or wherever they came from and they'd think about this day, every so often, for years to come. And there I was, Unremarkably lost in the background. I had been to the Tiki Bar an hour or so before and, coupled with old Hem and the sun and the tree and the lake, was paradisically rum drunk and, thoughtlessly in that moment, in love.

Summer, July. Shamefully unemployed, but you can't fight the beauty of moments. Well, I can't. The spirit alive and singing in a workless and beautiful day, in a bottle of wine, in a good sandwich, in love. I had been working my way through "The Sun Also Rises" and I understood the criticism it received, but those critics weren't me and they weren't under a tree, rum drunk in July on the shore of Lake Henry. The book was for me and me alone. Jake Barnes, though tragically dickless, was me. It would be a couple years yet before I understood exactly how accurate it was, but we were as though brothers then. 

I checked my phone. Service came and went in Lake Henry. There were no messages, or at the least none that had come through yet. I'd lay in the day for a while and swing back up to the bar maybe as evening settled. In my bag next to me I kept a half box of wine and a notebook, rape whistle, pens, chapstick, two yo-yos, and a phone charger. I was prepared to kill time. 

I closed the summer degraded book and put it in my bag. Took a drink of the wine. Stared out at the lake, wide and filled even at that moment with a thousand summers, and got up. The sidewalk was crowded and the beach was crowded. There was something about observing it all, sliding through it all, that made me feel alive and warm and not a part of anything. Outside of it all and refreshed. Meandering through the summer crowds was a smoke break and though I was less than a ghost to them, I loved them each and all for being a part of my moment, my summer, my love.

My bag tapped light on my ass, heavy with wine, as I walked and through sunglasses I kept my look stolid but my eyes wandered to each person. To each held hand. To each person behind a camera, setting a timer. I captured them all and walked on.

The day goes on. I walk. I drink. I write a bit and as evening settles I go to the bar again and sit by a fire and drink more rum and I think to myself how beautiful the world is and I wonder how I could ever be sad and now

in February

I hold on to that thought, years dead. 

July. My love.

Waiting for the Pizza

There comes a moment in ash when you have to decide if the fire is out. If the trees may catch again, if you can start sweeping this mess, if you can reclaim. If the world is still there and if you belong or want to belong in it. 

I ordered a pizza and poured another glass of wine and watched television with Elle. I thought I was catching a stomach bug and I had spent half of my day off working and not writing and not painting and not quite awake. I laid my head on her chest and she kissed the top of it and I thought of all the things I wanted to do and of all the same things I wouldn't do. I was tired and worn from the job and afraid of each new morning and I was already regretting the fucking garbage I was about to eat but was too hungry and tired to get to the store to buy something I actually needed. 

I did miss the chaos. The destruction. I thought about it often. I thought I belonged there. In the mess. It was me and I was it. 

Elles heartbeat sometimes was irregular but now I could feel and hear it inside of her and it kept time and casually rolled on and on and I thought "Me too." 

"How d'you feel?" she asked.

"Hungry. Agitated."

"I'm sorry, love." She ran her fingers through my short and ever thinning hair and I thought it seemed as though my entire being fought the idea that I could let myself be happy. "Yeah, that sounds like me," I thought.

Cartoon on the television and I kept thinking about a story I had been working on a year before but had apparently dropped after two hundred odd pages. The characters were driving, last I left them, and they never came back and sometimes that happens to people. I thought maybe I had finished it and that was okay with me. 

I thought I might shit myself. 

Hoped the pizza would help that. Doubted it.

Elle laughed at the television and when she did, her arm tightened around me and I wondered again if I could just let myself be. Happy, content, whatever.

I would never be successful. I would never be wealthy. I would never be respected as some sort of creator, or person, and that was all fine. 

I would never be truly, actually, blindly happy or connected, or a part of it all and that used to worry me, when I was younger, but now not at all and that made me worry. I had become detached. I had become a face to the people around me and nothing more. I saw shapes of people and heard their murmurs and watched their patterns and I stood in the center of it all and I was not them. I was no one and nothing and that, that was fine.

I am not a bird, fish, tree, or human.

I orbit and observe and gather their charitable smiles and laughs and stories and treasure their distance and dreams and complete inability to see it all for what it is.

I stand on the sidelines and watch and I have no desire.

The doorbell rings and I get up and get the pizza. Tip the guy a couple of bucks and set the food down and Elle gets plates and paper towels and we eat and watch television and with a large red X I'll soon be able to cross this day off and then on to the next.

I eat too much food and my stomach hurts. 

Elle runs her fingers slow and soft over it. 

I am afraid of each new morning and that stopped mattering a long time ago.

A Moment in Morning

I was asleep for a year and when I woke I had fallen into a new existence. The day ahead, the house around, the girl next to. My hands were caked in paint and callused from the guitar strings. My throat was dried from singing and drinking and in the dark of the bare bedroom, in the company of her, I inhaled and this was the May morning, this cold and dark Friday in January, this. The breath came easy and welcomed. The day, though I'd bitch, was worth finishing. I had known it was coming, and sometimes I must have almost forgotten that. 

Crawl out of bed in the blue dawn and glance back at the hint of shoulder under the comforter, note the cups marked with the residue of chianti on the dresser and the soft carpet under my feet. Piss in the "en suite". Pull open the bedroom door to the house I didn't deserve, but had somehow acquired, to the day I didn't deserve, but had somehow found myself rutted in. It was as stuck with me as I was with it. Into the kitchen where the coffee had brewed a half hour before. 

Coffee. Put together a breakfast and while the bacon and eggs cooked, I would shower.

Standing in the shower and trying to remember how I got here.

I remember the descent. The crash. Bottom. Then nothing.   

Now I wake. Now I shamble through my large and empty house. Now I kiss the girl goodbye and now I know. Yes.

Now I know it will get better.

It had to, and it did.