Nine Days

Nine days didn't open me like a flower, they opened me like an atomic bomb, your hands ripping through the pages of my soul's diary unintentionally and without direction. It isn't fair to think this way, but at least I don't put you on a pedestal.

I don't expect anything from you at all.

Loveaholic

I could get high off of you all day. Snort you off a mirror. My time with you is like a speed ball. Crack and heroin on a foil? I'm serious. I'm so wired when I'm in bed alone, big pupils, little trains of thought, but I could lay on that couch with you holding me while I laugh for twenty years and feel the supposedly wasted time slide through me like sand through a sift. Couldn't give a shit less about pills anymore, even the pills in your drawer, 'cause I'm happy if I'm high, and I'm high if I'm yours. I'm a low-maintenance woman, and you're just my brand of I-don't-give-a-damn.

Couch Surfing in my Brain*

How many licks does it take to get the center of your universe? And when the hell are you going to vacate my brain? I invited myself over for dinner. I didn't invite you to take up residence in my psyche and stay a while. Maybe you've been sleeping on the couch in there since we were thirteen and I just started being alerted of your presence again. You're raiding the fridge and shit.

I'm just saying, I'm not supposed to be thinking this much about nothing.

How many ticks does it take to get to the center of your time bomb?

Or am I imagining that blinking monitor on your chest?

I imagine a lot of things these days, boy.

You had better fucking set me straight before you get evicted.




*alternate title: Mr. Owl, How Many Licks Does It Take to Get to the Center of Mr. Jones?

I Turned a Dream I Had About You Into a Little Song Instead of Into a Reality

So we laughed a little laugh
And we drank a little wine
And I sure did have a good time
And I got a little tipsy
And you carried me to bed
And I couldn't stop singing in my head

I was singing...
Oooh, I never thought you'd be
The one to break my heart
And who would've known
Every time I see your face
That pieces of me start coming apart?

Sunday Dinner

I marinated my heart in the fucks I didn’t give and then fed it to you, which I now morosely regret.

I Asked You

I asked you to treat me like I was delicate, and you said, “Wish not granted.” Your reputation precedes you, an ice sculpture, beautiful in every physical way and desirable to your core, but it doesn’t seem the core is any different than the surface.

It’s frozen.

You follow the traditions of all the dynasties that came before you. They were human men, just like you, and they were fallible, just like you, and they were careless, just like you.

When I was a little girl, my mom told me I was a princess. And I believed her.

But you don’t.

I asked you to be careful with me, and you said with a cold breath, “But I’m selfish.” And when you look in the mirror, somehow you see justice, but when I look at you, I break a little every time.

You, the Addict

I.

We met at a coffee shop. We caught each others' eye and smiled. We exchanged first name for first name.

This should have been an easy story to tell.

II.

You loved me and left me, loved me and left me, weaving in and out of my life like a sports car in medium-to-congested traffic. Sometimes you would leave my apartment and I would realize that my shirt was on backwards. You did things to me that I didn’t understand. You took my snowglobe world and shook it to see the pretty colors but you didn’t realize that I bled every time.

III.

You became my friend and I became your friend. I think it was when you started smoking heroin around me that I realized that I could officially call you “friend,” because you don’t do that in front of someone you’re trying to impress. You weren’t trying to impress me and all I wanted to do was impress you, I the tortured genius artist with the big boobs wanted to impress you, the junky.

Go figure. What a waste.

I would watch you light a flame under the foil and suck the fumes rising from the penny-colored paths through a rolled-up receipt. I would try to catch your eye but you wouldn’t want to look at me. This became customary and I fell in love with you despite it, because of it even. I wanted to save you from everything, including yourself.

IV.

One autumn came, one winter, one spring, one summer, and another autumn, another winter. They all left. One year and one half after the day that you waltzed into my life and began to cut the corners off of it with Little Fiskars, I began to waltz around, floating, with a dreamy glass covering the forest floor of my eyes. I was finally able to claim you, call you mine. You said the words “I think I love you” and I took even your ambiguity to be the very words of God. I clasped your promises, few and far between and small that they were, in my frighteningly cold hands, and I prayed that these promises would grow to become a life. Because I wanted a life with you. Me, the young writer with so much promise, me, I wanted a life with the addict.

I thought a lot of you back then and I guess I still do, even lying here on this floor watching you kneel over me screaming, “Oh my god oh my god oh my god,” as you shakily try to dial 911.

V.

When you left for the detox center on a random Tuesday evening in February, you were wearing that purple tie that I always wanted to use to pull your face closer to mine. I never had the bravery to do those kinds of things with you.

You left me a Marlboro box stuffed full of folded up foils. You said, “I’m getting sober. I’m getting clean. I’m trying to be a better man. Will you dispose of these for me? I don’t trust myself to do it.” And then you drove away.

VI.

It’s been a while since you left for the detox center on a random Tuesday evening in February. There is a thick silence between you and me. There is something unrequited. And that’s why I’m here.

I’m laying on the floor surrounded by crumpled up foils, their copper trails singed to a black the consistency of tar. My room holds the acrid stench of drugs that kill, and they’re killing me. I smoked nine foils in three hours. It’s a lot more than you used to smoke, and you had been building up a tolerance for years.

I’m laying on the floor with my heart not really beating, just murmuring, just whispering, just telling me that everything will be okay in a few minutes through my blood that is sluggishly moving along. I’m lying on the floor with my lungs not really breathing, my chest movement undetectable. I called you when I was halfway done with all this just to see the look on your face. You’re kneeling over me screaming “Oh my god oh my god oh my god,” as you shakily try to dial 911.

I say, “I’m trying to tell you a story.”

I say, “I’m trying to tell you our story.”

I say, “I’m trying to remember the important parts.”

You’re kneeling over me screaming, “Oh my god oh my god oh my god!”

You’re kneeling over me screaming, “Don’t die on me don’t die on me don’t fucking die on me! I love you!”

And I smile to myself. That’s all I wanted to hear.

To Each Their Own Path

When I was thirteen, I started to read this really spiritual magazine that talked a lot about meditation. It talked about sitting in a quiet place, preferably outside, with your legs crossed Indian-style, your back relaxed but straight, your palms slightly open to the sky to receive your blessing. It talked about opening your chakras from the base up until your crown chakra opened in a flash and you were suddenly communing with your higher self. It talked about healing and finding your purpose through right meditation.

I remember my mom finding my stacks of these magazines with articles that had names like "The Passing Age of Pisces"" and "Understanding the God Within."

The stack was under my bed. My mom was a fundamentalist Protestant with no tolerance for the devil's work being allowed in her house, so she threw the magazines into a dumpster behind the grocery store and told me she'd ground my ass for a year if she ever found that witchcraft in my room again.

My favorite article from all of those magazines had been called "The Art in Loving Your Neighbor."

My second favorite, "To Each Their Own Path."

The Blind Lead the Blind

The blind lead the blind

Closed eyes, open mouths

But our bodies are covered in Braille

Read me in the dark

Take it off, leave your mark

But we both know we’ll fail

We both know we’ll fail

Cheshire Cat

He came to me in broad daylight, his Cheshire Cat grin not heeded as a warning. I thought, “You have a remarkable smile.” He thought, “Just wait until I disappear.” He was gentle, cordial, mannerly though not in a Confederate sort of way, and I should have known that his sweet nature must give way to a thorny maze of BULLSHIT, because he was a LUTHERAN and a LIBERTARIAN and no one should be allowed to be both.

            If I’m being truthful, I wouldn’t have ever actually guessed that beneath the conventionally beautiful and widely admired shell, there was a BIG FUCKING EMPTINESS that one could feasibly compare to the space under the floorboards in the home of a sociopathic serial killer before his first murder.

            Because he wouldn’t hurt a fly.

            Or was he just waiting for the chance?

The End Is Coming

Wake up. Squint into that grey, 6.30 kind of light. Hit the snooze button once, twice, three times, but never fall back asleep. Chide yourself for this useless laziness. Propel yourself out of bed. The nausea will immediately hit you.

It's day you-lost-track of your misery, and you're in survival mode. Here we go.

Get in the shower. Deliriously squeeze way too much shampoo into your hand. Lather, rinse, don't repeat. Does anyone actually repeat? You don't have any time to do anything with your hair. Grab your shit, hold it together, power walk out the door to your car. Get in the car. Grip the steering wheel. Try to get a grip on that lump in your throat.

Walk into work. Smile and wave. You faker. You hypocrite. Sit at your desk. Don't look at the pictures that decorate your cubicle. Let the florescent light steal your sunshine and trap your little complaints in a box below the floorboards. Forget who you are. Stare at the cold blue screen.

Stare blankly into space on your smoke breaks, your lunch break. Don't think about it, whatever it is. Him, her, someone died, someone left, someone failed you. Or did you fail?

Forget your failures. Machines fail by way of design flaw.

Go home in a daze. Eat your supper in a daze. Watch TV in a daze. Read in a daze. Turn the lights out in a daze. Roll over and cry your little cry to the wall. Walls always listen.

Dream your dreams, your nightmares. Toss and turn. Sweat through the sheets. Your mind has run loose, broken its leash. You see it before you, his face, her face, their failures. Or are they your failures?

Hold tightly your failures. They will make sense, one day.

Wake up. Squint into that grey, 6.30 kind of light. Hit the snooze button once, twice, three times. Wonder when this will be over, when you will be uncrippled, unbroken, unchained.

Look in the mirror. Look yourself in the eyes. Somewhere in there is the strength to get you through this. Somewhere in there is the reason you keep getting out of bed.

Keep moving. The end is coming.

A Good Man

He was a man, just a man, but he was a good man. He paid his taxes, his cars were insured, he was a hard worker, a loving husband, a doting father. He did not smoke, he did not swear, and he attended church every Sunday without fail.

            Yes, he was just a man, but he was a good man.

            It was a beautiful summer day, this man sitting on his porch, holding hands with his wife, soaking in the sun with a lazy smile on his face. His eyes, which had been closed with contentment, suddenly flung open as he heard someone ascending the stairs to his front door. He nudged his wife when he saw the visitor, a cop in uniform, an ominous grey look on his face.

            “Good afternoon,” the intruder said.

            “Good afternoon, officer.”

            “I have some bad news, sir,” said the officer, and the man’s wife covered her mouth.

            They had thought their daughters, ages sixteen and fourteen, were together at a church lock-in the night before. In fact, they were at a party, the kind of party in a big brick house with no parents home. They had both gotten in the car, intoxicated. The car veered off the road, running into a pole, killing them both.

            He was a man, just a man, but he was a good man. He cried day and night as he planned the details for his girls’ funeral, the pink lined caskets, the music they liked. He tried to comfort his wife, his beautiful wife, but she was removed from him by her shield of grief, and would not let him touch her.

            The day after the girls’ memorial service, the good man’s wife put a gun in her mouth and blew herself away.

            He was a man, just a man, but he was a good man. Even with his firm faith, he could not find the ray of hope in the darkness of that valley. He could not get out of bed in the morning. Too many months of withering excuses, and he lost his job. Soon thereafter, his car was repossessed. Then his home went into foreclosure.

            He is a man, just a man, but he is a good man. He sits between two skyscrapers, the lowest of the low, in a grimy flannel shirt and ripped-up jeans, his beard overgrown. At night, he cries to himself, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” and during the day he asks the passerby for change, but you just wave your hand at him and think, He got himself into this situation; he can get himself out of it.

If

If someone gave me the mountains
In all their grounded confidence
In all their bullheaded majesty
If someone handed me the key to the earth
I would stand at the precipice
In the hovering cold of winter
And scream at the moon
For my sky-scraping city

If someone took me to bed
With that unstitching tenderness
With those painless pushes
With those roving eyes
I would hold myself together
I would hide under the covers
Making a fort of warmth and fear
Wishing only to rest

And if someone opened their chest
That I might see what was caged within
If they pulled back the skin
And told me what was theirs is mine
I would bring out my torch
And venture into the ventricles
But I would not, could not
Open up my own the same

But in you come crashing
Staggeringly solid, ravishingly real
You are not my savior
And you do not ask me to save you
I watched you once with weariness
Twice I turned you away
Three times I let you slip past
But now you're here, and you say you'll stay

The cloud of your eyes
The bluegreygreen of mystification
Leads me into the heart of my city
Leads me to sleep soundly beside you
Leads me to open, slowly, slowly
And you are embodied scrutiny
And you are embodied certainty
And I think I'm falling in love with you

(If someone brought me anything
If someone took me anywhere
If someone opened a door
I'd wish for you on the other side)

For Jack Kerouac

Jack, it was the liquor that took you, and it was your gaze at me from the page of a book that made me believe it would take me too. If we, the creatives, the crooks, the crazies, are to live for our art and forsake all else, will we not then die for our art as well?
It was you who made me truly believe that madness and success come together in a package, wrapped in brown paper of chaos, with a shiny red bow of addiction to decorate. It was you who told me with your photographed face, with that sideways smile on that beautiful face, that it is possible, plausible, permissible, to write a book in three weeks with no revisions, hopped up on speed and mild diner coffee.

It was you who made me say I wanted to go into the mountains alone with no one and nothing to aid or protect me, and come face to face with God.

Jack it was you that urged me to take to the bottle, to fill up on whiskey before spilling my blood on the paper. It was you that whispered in my ear, "You can be great, you can be inspired, you can be a legend, if only you torture the passion out of you."

From you I learned never to rest in one place for too long. From you I learned to have no ties to my fellow humans. From you I learned that intoxication and belligerence lead to the highest art forms.

It is you I have been battling with, Jack, your beautiful mess I have run from, your artful insanity that has taken me to the edge.

I see your corpse at the bottom and wonder, Shall I jump?

What does it take to be a master of your craft?

It was the liquor that took you, and it may still take me. I live for this art; will I not die for it as well?

If You Must Know

If you are reading this, I’m going to assume that you are a human being. If you are a human being, then I know something about you that you may not even want to admit to yourself in the light of day. I know that you have wondered what it feels like to die.

This is the kind of trait that separates you from the other animals. Even the smart ones. Dolphins. Other primates. Your dog that you swear should be considered for personhood. You know that you are going to die. This is what gives you power. This is what gives you fear. This is what gives you drive and passion.

It will all be over soon enough.          

So you’re wondering, What does it feel like to walk through the valley of the shadow, and from what source does the light at the end of the tunnel shine? Where is God and why is he waiting? Will I be judged, will I see the beloved deceased, and will I kiss the ground or burn in a pit of sulfur?

It’s easy for me to answer these questions for you.

If you must know, dying is like the best kind of sex: Simple and pure, and without pretense. It starts slow, just a tingle in your flesh, working into your extremities, bringing light to the darkness in your cold fingertips, in the cavernous back of your throat, in the emptiness of your mind. At first, when you’re dying, you don’t know what’s going on. You feel…numb, not drugged, not thrown for a loop, but pleasantly anesthetized. You feel care for nothing, hope for nothing, desire for nothing.

            When you begin to die, for the first time in your life, you will know what it is to want for nothing.

            After the tingle begins the sting. Your soul is leaving your body. This can be painful. Everything in your flesh is objecting

            (the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak)

            and probably everyone in the room is objecting too. This doesn’t make it easy for your soul to take the flight that it was created to take.

            (We are all just born to die.)

            My personal situation was a common one. I was old and weak and good for nothing, dying of cancer in a hospital bed. My children were there, my grandchildren were there, my doctor was there, my nurses were there. They were all there when the machines roared to life in a flourish of beeps and whirs of catastrophe and impending doom, and all the while I heard the noises through the block of a coma and I was still completely and utterly at peace.

            If you must know, dying is like walking out of a really great yoga class or church service: Refreshing, but a bit of a slap in the face. You were so warm in there, and goddamnit it’s so cold out here, but the thing is that in that room nothing that you were feeling was real and out here everything is.

            If you must know, dying is like leaving a movie theater right when the movie is getting good: Never a feeling of resolution, always a perfect memory, in no way regret.

            When I died, and I felt my soul leave my body, I all of a sudden realized what I believe I had known all my life. C.S. Lewis was wrong about a lot of things but he was right about this: You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

            It’s not an easy thing to understand, when all you know is flesh, when all you know is hunger and thirst, when all you know is air and sunlight, when all you know is grime and sweat, when all you know is sex and desire. But when you die, you will understand. Your soul is everything, and none of this ever mattered.

            When I died, I walked away from the hospital in the best shape I had ever been in, and that was with no shape at all. I was without form and without weight and without breath or heartbeat, but I could feel everything like it was new, like I had just been born into the world and was seeing it with the shaded eyes of a newborn, feeling it with the twitching hands of a child. I walked out of the hospital, out the window, out through the street

            (with no need for a crosswalk)

            and up, up, up into the hills. I was wearing brown shoes and the clothes of my younger days when everything felt novel and fresh. There was a dusting of snow and my feet sunk and made prints in the mud on the hillside.

            So many of the changes that you see were not caused by the things of this world.

            I reached out my arms to the light, climbing the hill without feeling any signs of windedness, of wear and tear, of the smoke in my black lungs coming back to haunt me because I simply had no lungs, I had nothing at all. All I had were my arms that I reached out to the light, and the light drenched the hillside in gold and cast glitter on the snow, and I knew that this was the happiest moment I had ever experienced, just the effervescence of my soul

            (of all that I was and am still)

            and the ephemeral moment, the sun that would set and then rise again, the hill that would crumble one day after many souls had walked it, the world that I was leaving behind.

            If you must know, dying is like the change of seasons: It feels like you’ve done this before, yet something in the air is always new.

            When I reached the light that I thought was the sun, my eyes were blinded and my skin set aflame, and I had no thoughts, no memories, no hopes. There was no past, no future. There was only a moment, a long, long moment, where I didn’t know who I was, or where I was, but none of that mattered because there was no who or where but only here and now.

            On the other side of the light was beauty eternal, but if you must know, John Lennon was right and there is no heaven above you.

            If you’re reading this, you want to know, What is it like to be no more?

            When you get to the other side, I don’t know what you will see. But what I saw was a bus station in a grand, steamy sort of fog, and sitting on the bench at this bus station was a person, and this person was young and well dressed and just a dead soul just like me. I approached this person, and they said to me with the calmest demeanors, the kind of face that could weather a monsoon and not flinch, Are you a seeker of truth?

            I answered honestly and said that I had tried. All my life I had tried, and don’t we all, don’t you all, doesn’t everyone try for something? All my life I tried to understand the truth, search for the truth, speak the truth. I church-shopped and read too many books, pouring over the holy texts like I had been consecrated for it from birth, asking god where he was or where she was or where it was, and to whom am I speaking when I address this god?

            I answered honestly and said that I had tried.

            The traveler pointed to the other side of the bench, and there I saw what I had not seen before and what I did not then understand. It was a ball, a dense and tarry black, and it was floating in midair. Do you know what that is? the traveler asked me. And I shook my head, for I knew nothing.

            If you must know, dying is like going back to college as a senior citizen: You can’t see why not, but you can’t see why.

            That is the universe, the traveler said. That is the universe from whence you came. That is the universe that contains all of the murder, all of the rape, all of the fires and volcanoes and hurricanes, all of the hatred and domination and control, all of the abuse and wickedness and trials, all of the darkness and war and violence, all of the corruption and greed and malice, all of the lust and avarice and carelessness, everything that you have ever known and have known that you must hate. But. That is the universe that contains all of the love, all of the compassion, all of the generosity and kindness and gentleness, all of the joy and inner peace and harmony, all of the light and beauty and freedom, all of the art and creativity and inspiration, all of the passion and hope and friendship. That is the universe, the whole universe, in which everything seemed so big to you. And here it floats, in the midst of this.

            What is this? I asked.

            This is the Void, said the traveler.

            This is God.

            This is Jesus, Allah, Yahweh, Brahma, Krishna, Buddha, the Great Spirit, the All, the One, the Divine.

            This is Love.

            If you must know, dying is like waking up from a nightmare: There is abounding gratefulness, but you can’t stop dwelling on what just happened.

            I looked around at the fog, at the dusty grey that shrouded it all, and I looked down at myself, myself in my clothes, myself with my young soul-body, myself so filled and yet so empty, and then I felt it.

            I felt the love.

            Have you ever fallen in love? Have you ever had that feeling of total contentment while looking into someone’s eyes, like you would change nothing about them, nothing about this moment, like everything in the world is right, so long as they are there?

            If you must know, dying is a lot like that.

            I asked the traveler why it was that some people claimed they had seen heaven when they died, and came back to earth to tell the tale, the victims of a heart attack but the lucky ones revived by a shock to the chest. And the traveler said, In life on earth and all the lives after it, people only see what they are ready to see. You were ready to see the truth.

            The traveler said to me once, Never forget that all the pain in the world will never compare to the love that holds the universe.

            That is all I wanted to tell you.

            On the other side, there is a great adventure, and at all times, on all sides, throughout your journey, you will be enveloped by the greatest love of all.

            If you must know, dying is like a beautiful life: You never want it to end.

            And it won’t.

            Don’t worry.

            There is peace here.