Words & numbers

on a page,

writ in love

or burning rage.

Gurgling-burbling

through our brains:

happy, sad,

pleasure, pain.

Feelings slide

through pencils, pens

rhyming-chiming

now & then.

Who brings these squiggles

to our eyes?

Friends with nimble

lows & highs.

Copyright 2020

VIDEO VERSION: https://youtu.be/lSIrLsJQRV8

It’s June. Or December. Time doesn’t really matter anymore after you stop working--days and months are simplified to breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Plain granola crumbs, brown salad, cheap overcooked chicken.

I emerge outside. The weather is hot, or maybe cold. Either way, I’m pale, malnourished. During the many months of quarantine, I manage to graduate college online. Virtual graduation. I throw my fake hat up in the air and the Dean shakes my digitalized hand, squirting a glob of hand sanitizer as he moves on to the next video caller.

I don’t have a job--perhaps I won’t have one for years. I emerge outside, in the tentatively buzzing city, as someone who will need to beg for someone else’s job. On my hands and on my knees. I’ll be wearing gloves and knee pads, obviously. The guy telling me no will wear a mask, and I will pretend that I didn’t understand him. Thank you, I will say. I really needed this.

My college girlfriend breaks up with me. Frankly, it is straight out of nowhere. She is quarantined in her apartment and I am quarantined in mine and we Facetime constantly, repeating to ourselves that we are stronger than the virus. “I’ve never wanted you so badly,” I remember saying.

A long pause.

“I think,” she says, “I’m learning to live without you.”

I know that most college relationships are destined to end, but it’s supposed to be messy, drawn out; someone moving to the other side of the country, an affair, a secret-- not a clinically clean cut. I drive to her apartment at two in the morning during quarantine and she refuses to let me in. It isn’t safe. I could be infected, or maybe she is. Perhaps she is afraid that we would both get sick, unable to care for one another. Dying together, apart.

I emerge outside, and the streets are clean, not out of love, but out of fear. Nature is beautiful; the parks are exactly the same. Someone had maintained the bushes, the wild grass. Roaming about, I visit the cemetery. I feel bigger than usual, painfully aware of every step I take.

My grandmother is dead, years ago from cancer, before the pandemic. I kneel at her tombstone which is cleaner than anything else on earth and find myself afraid to touch it. Who else might have touched her grave? What horrible bacteria is stuck to the engravements of her name?

I leave after an hour, ashamed. It’s raining. Or maybe it’s snowing. I have no idea the month, the season, or the year. If I should be carrying an umbrella or wearing a parka. Only people with jobs and girlfriends and grandmothers are capable of keeping track of these things. I am unprepared for the weather. My body is naked in my unknowing. I have no control, yet in a way, nothing has control over me. It is a maddening feeling. I emerge outside, in the clean streets of the city, and search for the things that can control me.

Asked Alexa

to play opera.

Instead she plays

Sinatra.

Guessin’

she wanted

to do it

“Her Way.”

Locked up, isolating ourselves from a world brimming with animalistic hostility, we recognize the shortcomings of the society we have constructed for ourselves.

We realize the house we have built with our avarice and self-righteousness has a foundation of sand and a frame of matchsticks and scotch tape, ready to unravel with the faintest breath of the wind. A pantry besieged by panicking hens, riled up in a frenzy and pecking one another to death over scraps. Beds that are too rough and too small. A yard littered with the bones of the less fortunate, bleaching out in the sun whilst those within shower them with scorn. All the while the house creaks and groans, threatening to collapse and indiscriminately bury one and all within its rubble.

They say tragedy has a way of bringing people together, but in a nation of individualistic beasts it has driven us further apart; galvinized us in our beliefs that we live and die alone. That one can only ascend by standing on another's shoulders until we are a hysteric mass, kicking and clawing and scrambling over each other to reach the top. Unaware that the top is miles out of sight, let alone reach.

This pandemic has not shattered our society, it has shown us that our society has been shattered for time immemorial. Throughout the nation and throughout the world, the masses fall to their knees and pray things can return to normal, not realizing that deep down, this is the way things always were.

The disease didn't change us, it exposed who we really are, deep in the dark corners of our persona that we ignore and hide and pretend never existed.

So ask yourself: is the world we left behind a world worth going back to?

Vanity wore a party dress.

Sadness wore a shroud.

Anger dressed in fire red,

speaking very loud.

Lazy showed up way too late.

Prissy sauntered in.

Has-been donned a tattered gown,

splatter-soaked in Gin.

Sweetie’s dress was sugar-white.

Bitter’s gown was stained.

Depression’s pants had rips & tears,

cut with razor blades.

Me? I wore a T-shirt,

shining like the sun.

When I crossed the doorway,

fighting had begun.

“Who are you, to dress that way?

Your shirt, it does offend!”

& so I turned & walked away,

ne’r to come again.

Copyright 2020

I can remember moments from my other life. They drift drearily into my mind, softly sliding back to me from the bowels of my subconscious. They belong to the man who died the first death, the man that birthed the man I am and murdered the man I was.

I can remember a classroom in the Abraham Lincoln wing of my college's humanities building. I can remember old wooden desks, old wooden chairs, and an old wooden professor at the front of the class. I can remember something about Rousseau. Jack Rousseau? Jacques Rousseau? "Something" Rousseau. I can remember something.

Something about poverty. Something about the the freedom of the first men, wandering about the jungles and the forests before there was property and war and death. I remember something about that. The old wooden professor said something about the "naked personality," the human being brought to nothing--stripped of its somethings. He told us--the students sitting on the old wooden chairs behind the old wooden desks--that a man can only know what he is when he becomes nothing. Alone, isolated, bereft of every other person and every other thing. That would be the condition in which men could discover their true selves. I think he said that that's what Rousseau thought. Jacques Rousseau.

I've lived like that for too long. I know what it's like to be nothing.

I sit on a step or a curb. I sleep on cement or the road. I wake up without. I live without. I sleep without. I have nothing.

I see the people that have something. They walk past me. They have things. Suits, briefcases, hats, gloves, jobs, kids, places to go. They have personalities. Some look busy, they're defined by what they have to do, what they have to accomplish. Others have children, they're defined by fatherhood or motherhood, by the love that they share with their loved ones. They're fashionable because of what they wear, cultured because of the restaurants that they eat at and the shows that they go to. Their somethings give them an identity. Their somethings make them something.

I have nothing. I am nothing. I don't have a family, so I cannot love. I don't have a job, so I cannot be busy. I don't have money, so I cannot be fashionable or cultured. I don't have a home, so I can't retreat from the world to a place that is my own. Having nothing hasn't made me something, it hasn't shown me anything. Except, perhaps, the cold reality of nothing.

The man that I used to be--you should have seen him--was something. He had a home and a family and a favorite restaurant on 22nd Street. He'd go there in a dark brown suit with a friend and have two eggs with toast and a coffee. I miss that man. I miss being something. But nothing comes from nothing, and I'll be nothing till the end of my days.

A star was lifting me up.

I was seeing a new world.

God was looking at me.

He was also helping the star.

One group doing social work,

is lifting me and giving shelter

to me at a monastery.

I am feeling blessed.

Future looked like hundred

moons going around me.

All moons were giving light.

The librarian squinted at me through the screen barrier and her dramatic cat-eye frames. It seemed as if she was looking through me rather than at me. I didn’t have a problem though. They say that anyone who smells like the bottle depot is invisible to the naked eye, but if we are looked at closely under a microscope, the beer belly would be seen before the cardboard sign asking for change.

This woman saw the beer belly too, “You know, that the McDonalds across the street is looking for some people.”

I flipped the page.

“Minimum wage is a start,” she pressed. “Maybe you could replace that old jacket of yours.” She paused. “The non-fiction section has a lot about work experience, may that will help you instead of-”

I shut the book. Fantasies aren’t for the homeless. Then again, nothing is.

Though there were moments of beauty, it felt as if something fell off a bookshelf inside me that I didn’t know how to put back in place. I tried to lift it, holding the spine with my dirt-encrusted hands, but the weathered pages tore off willingly and floated away like those pressing memories that can’t seem to be contained.

Who knew that remembering them only left paper cuts behind.

________________

Back then, I drew with pens.

They were the gel ones that would dispel of ink like a waterfall onto the page, and would sometimes seep through if the paper couldn’t handle its weight. My chubby fingers would hold these pens professionally, like Father at work, and I would calculate important values to add to the company’s profit just like he did. When he would come home, I would proudly show him our gross income, and he would respond with, “Wow, kid! That is a cool stick man!” My heart would swell inside my chest, and I would run to my room full of stuffed toys and tell every one of them that Father approved of the profit margin. They would clap and clap, and I felt like I had just been promoted to CEO right there.

My father was a man made of concrete and tar. He would sit in his office, and watch buildings being made with the money that he financed explode out of the soil. All the people knew him as the man of the market, well-known for his intelligence and crudeness with money. What he said was absolute, and no one could find faults in his work.

He would address everyone with a solid, crushing handshake, almost as hard as the stone centerpieces lining the shelves of his office. Father always knew who everyone was, and never kept a phonebook or contacts list. He would manually type up their numbers every time, and use their full name in conversation. His journals seemed as if someone printed out final drafts, rather than rough sketches.

But after a while, I would open his journals, and find puddles of black in between the lines. I saw pauses and scribbles etched out in the chaotic form in between the dollar signs and bold “bankrupt’s”. I saw circles, going round and round around figures with a strange subtraction sign in front of them. I saw the coffee-stained yellow pages drying and tearing right off.

Then, I saw pencils over my Father’s ear, rather than pens in his shirt pocket.

But my Father and I loved pencils because they didn’t leave mistakes to be seen. I would draw houses, and make measurements with these pencils. I enjoyed the ash of graphite splayed across the blank page. Father and I refused to use the black because it reminded us of our foolish past of pen. We found it unnerving that pen could never disappear, needing a layer of white-out to cover it. The page would then be littered with rectangular blotches of white, like bandaids over past mistakes. Whiteout made the past stand out, rather than disappear.

Father’s favorite was the erasers, “You can make the biggest mistake ever, and the eraser will swiftly make your mistakes disappear. A kind of reinvention, one might say.” Then he would go on and say the same thing that I have heard since birth. “One day, you will look out the window, and see the top of my building reaching for the stars. One day, when you are old enough, you will walk along avenues in the dark, and see a building with glass doors and gold inside. I yearn for the day that you will be with your friends in the city, and be able to say, ‘My father made that happen’.”

I always believed every word he told me, but I began to look at his plans, closer. I saw giant drawings of skyscrapers and measurements on our fridge door, but there was always a shadow behind the lines, of an eraser at work. I saw dollar signs scattered over the materials, but a small tear in the paper where the eraser had run numerous times. I saw his dream soon to be accomplished, but failure right behind it.

That was when my father came home with nothing but the dull smell of aftershave.

I would look out the window, and see his flat briefcase, and faded leather-bound journals, and my heart watched, forgetting about all the pens and pencils he used to bring home. My soul angered at the hostile emptiness I felt seeing our driveway without a slick car in front of it. He would then indifferently open the door, every day, and run into the attic, closed off from the rest of the family. He couldn’t embrace me anymore, so the greyscale of the streets did instead.

I stopped drawing for a long time after that. My heart yearned to touch a pen again, to calculate profit margins and measurements of the building soon to be made. But my grief mirrored my fathers, and settled into our DNA, and remained a part of us.

Every time I would pass under the attic during my visits, I could smell the must and mold of my father’s dreams. They were up there in the attic rotting with him, aching to be dusted off and used again. They sang like sopranos in a house of deafening silence. The melodies were so intense that I had no choice but to go up there and see them for myself.

That was the day I learned that my father a man made of clay and water.

Peeking into the room, I saw a mound of clay moving up and down in motion in between my father’s hands. They were smooth and flowing as his thumb pressed in and pushed masses towards the top. They were firm when he dug his nail into the structure and pulled out a defining line. They were unsure, as the shaking of his palm distorted some of the sides. His strange hands went on and on, and it was as if all the movements when they were together had no conclusion.

In the shape, I could see the building of his dreams. I could see the mistakes he’s made, that he covered up by watering the entire thing down and rebuilding it from the top. I could see him smoothing the cracks by rubbing them down as if he wanted to cover up is initial flaws, by drowning them over with the movements of his present.

My father longed to bury the past by reinventing his future. He threw away concrete and tar for the green embrace of mud.

My father never ended up financing the actual building, but the desire to was in the voices screaming out of the windows of his clay masterpieces. He would make tall towers, and said that my dolls could live and play inside. My dolls would explore his house and come out of his clay doors and whisper to me about all of the different rooms inside of the space, how each floor was full of offices with bustling people.

For a moment I believed it was true.

But then I looked around the attic and saw the cobwebs between the planks. I saw the flimsy stars, littered with cigar ash, and memorabilia. I saw the dusty trunk full of real plans and his past life. My soul leaned towards it and pulled my body right behind. I took my sweaty hand and slid it across to remove a streak of dust. The latch was rusty and broke in my hands when I tried to unlock it. It creaked as I opened the lid, and I realized it was the soprano voices that I heard so many times downstairs, while my father was locked up here.

My father’s yellow pages of dreams were messily scattered inside the box. I saw, the absolute of the pen, the security of the pencil and the haunting of the eraser’s ghost. The hope was still there among the rubble, and if my father wanted to, he could return to his former self. My imagination ran wild and intensely, as I ached for this thought. The desire rattled in its cage, and my father had the power to unlock it and set it free.

But I know better though, don’t I? The past has a clarity that I can no longer see in the present. My father’s dream is more dead than alive, more empty than fulfilled, more illusion than reality, yet my longing is as absolute as the pens I drew with not long ago.

_______________

After all these years of dried-out sharpies and foul cardboard from the meat shop, the pristine pages of my past are too far away to be of any comfort anymore.

I pop open a beer. I drink. I forget. I remember. I cry. I sleep. I wish. I starve. I drink.

All that is left is paper cuts.

This time, I drowned in the blood.

#fiction #monthXII

Looking back, it may be that pissing all over the judge’s desk was a bit too far. Not that I regret it, much.

It’s like my daddy used to say, he had it coming to him. Anyway, that’s one guy that will never forget my name, I’m seeing to that.

The third time I found myself standing in his courtroom I knew the score. There was no way he was going to believe a word I said, sitting up there on his pedestal like some kind of king. They showed the video again: The man smashes the pane window. The man jumps inside. The man runs off with arms full of merchandise. They called me up to the witness stand. Again. I told them I didn’t do it. Again. And then I looked over and the judge was half asleep, not even looking at me. Again.

He woke up pretty quick when he felt my hot piss splattering on his fancy robe!

They locked me up. Time served, plus six months, plus a new assault charge for my little fountain of protest.

By then I had already lost my job. A month in, my wife sent me papers. Mom died a couple months before my release date. My brother sold the house.

Four days I’ve been walking around. I haven’t eaten yet. Water hasn’t been a problem, with all this rain, but sleep hasn’t come easy. And this gas can is getting heavy.

I did not rob that store. I wonder how many other innocent men that judge has discarded and forgotten. He won’t be forgetting me.

I walk up to the house. Some kind of gray. What is it with rich people wanting to look just like all their neighbors? I stand at his front door. I know he’s home, I’ve been watching. I lift the gasoline above my head and pour the entire three gallons over my body. It smells terrible and my eyes are stinging. I ring the doorbell and unzip my pants. He answers the door. The smell registers, he looks alarmed. I let it go, piss all over his front door. He shuts it in my face. No doubt he is calling the police, but it’s way too late for that, now. There he is. Looking out the window, phone in his hand. I light the match and smile up at him. Goodbye.