I ain't afraid to roll in the bottom of things...

sorry tim.

I’ve always had a predication for the company of emotionally unavailable men.

The half wits, fuck wits, dim wits, dumb wits, the poor man’s Kerouac, those pansies all cooped up in their own captivity, the morally bankrupt barfly, repeat offenders and all the others that I did when I was bored and stupid and willing enough to spread my legs for.

But, please don’t be misunderstood. I might be somewhat of a sure thing, but I ain't no trick so, on occasion, I'd make them earn it.
I had one speak to me in Keats the day Derek left and I needed a justification for taking on a bed partner.
Another, I insisted he kiss the security guard at Rite-Aid when we were buying condoms. The crazy motherfucker did it all right. And I remember cackling like I was listening in on a drunken discussion about lost love that was right on schedule in some cross town bar.

I bailed on him and went over to Will’s to get high instead.

And another. He was some hot-blooded lay with shitty taste in movies. His name escapes me. I don’t think I ever really knew it. Either way, I let him go down on me for a good long time, so perhaps the recollection of his name seems like a good trade off for now.
Sure. I’ve had them all. And there may have been three or four sweethearts in there somewhere, only I can’t really remember their names either.

This is from a past life.

So, as I was saying, I love men. I have all of their records.

Yet, I’m here on the floor alone.
The beer ran out hours ago. But the vinyl is, indeed, agreeably still sweet and warm, human.
It makes for Keith Moon’s resonance undoubtedly much more spectacular.
I tend to choose vinyl these days.

Nevertheless, I can’t get this one out of my head. I see his high heart and broken soul standing tall and proud in this here record player to my left. Looks like there is just another analog girl living in a digital world dancing around in her old party dresses, going crazy in her room again.
Likewise, there are three provisional little things I’ve recently learned about this little life of mine:

Number one: a morning of awkwardness is far better than a night of loneliness.
Number two: if you have to ask for it, you’re probably too old to have it.
Number three: I probably won’t go down in history, but I might go down on your brother.

And so here we are. Surrounded by those records that keep getting on and cans of Budweiser that keep running out - otherwise known as the very edge of the world and I never really liked heights.
Still, we are all so desperate to feel. Desperate to feel something and just “not get bored”. So desperate and bored of our own stupid boredom that we keep falling into each other and eventually fucking each other to the end of our days.

Best to ignore the shit and keep dancing.

obituary.

never liked the word.

for max, as spoken in a late night exchange with an old friend.

darling dani.
charming actress, storyteller, constant companion, sympathetic disdainer,
steadfast supporter of ghetto gold, dwelling enthusiast, smoking gun, loose cannon.
all around loon.

remembered for setting the world on fire
and for creating chaos and uproar wherever she went
all but while escaping the clutches of her terrifying foregoing lovers.
made friends with everybody and anybody.

divorced as many times as she married.

the devil’s in the details of her untimely death.
although she endured far too much tie-dye and accuracy for one person to handle,
it was the exceeding amount of dial tones in which ultimately took her.

she leaves behind only good wishes.

Wild Wolves Caught in Curious Crosswinds.

“I fear that these poor lost dogs may be the shadow of a future journey if we don’t watch out.”
Richard Brautigan, “The View from the Dog Tower” 1963.


I sat across from her at some stateline diner near Jamestown New York by way of Ithaca while traveling to Cleveland sometime in March a few years back. We were exhausted from our rumored higher education and the snowfall had gotten worse.
Our waitress had a glass eye and a wobbled waist as though she had been there far too long after closing time if you catch my drift.
We ordered a black and white milkshake and a couple of coffees.
We hadn’t really spoke too much on the drive as we had intended or rather, anticipated to make the trek go by faster as conversation tends to do when you are in a car traveling a long distance.
We listened to whatever music we were listening to at that time, undoubtedly some hippie shit or it could have been the Pixies but I can’t remember because it’s not worth considering to recall right now.
I just kept thinking about this dream I had earlier that morning.
It was still in my head from the time we left Ithaca, which was several hours ago, but then again, this isn’t unusual.
It involved a wolf.

I saw my life as a wolf dashing along the road
and I questioned the woman of that approximate place in that road we just passed.

Some regard the wolf as immortal, they said.
Now you know this has only knowingly occurred in one case and that
wolves die regularly of various causes –

bears kill them, men hunt them,
they get epilepsy,
they get a salmon bone crosswise in their throat,

they run themselves to death no one knows why –
but perhaps you never heard
of their ear trouble.

They have good ears,
they can hear a cloud pass overhead.
And sometimes it happens
that a windblown seed will bury itself in the aural canal
displacing equilibrium.
They go mad trying to stand upright,

nothing to connect to.
They die of anger.
Only one we know learned to go along with it.

He took small steps at first.
Using the gentle wind of New Mexico.
The woman at the bar couldn’t remember what they called him.

Things are as hard as you make them.

Mortal Accuracies.

Chaos overshadows us.
Unsheltered sorrow shuts upon us.
We are strangled by bitter light and unnecessary flashes.
Our bones shake like sticks.
We snap
occasionally bend.
We grope.
We find our lost remote.
We give up and go dry.
We say hello and how do you do.
Our tongues turn black and say things we don’t want it to.
All day is endless.
Nights endless.
Our skin crawls, it cracks, it gets old.
Our room teases us like a kitten, then grows tired of us and the people we bring into it.
Our hope is a noose.
We take our flesh in our teeth.
We are strained and fall.
We are hung in a void.
We are shattered on the ocean.
We are smeared in the darkness.
We are slit and drained out.
Little things drink us.
We drink little things and we
drink because little things drive us to drink.
We lie unburied.
We are dust.
We know nothing,
We cannot answer questions.
We will speak no more.
BUT WE WILL NOT STOP.
We carve pumpkins and chew chicklets.
We have been instructed to call this His love.

The Rehearsal

for Katherine and Meredith.

The last time I saw D. was a thick black night in September.
Autumn had just begun,

my knees were cold inside my clothes.
A chill fragment of moon rose.
He stood in my living room and spoke

without looking at me. Not enough spin on it,
he said of our three years of love.
Inside my chest I felt my heart snap into two pieces

which floated apart. By now I was so cold
it was like burning. I put my hand out
to touch his. He moved back.

I don’t want to be sexual with you, he said. Everything gets crazy.
But now he was looking at me.
Yes, I said as I began to remove my clothes.

Everything gets crazy. When nude
I turned my back because he likes the back.
He moved onto me.

Everything I know about love and its necessities
I learned in that one moment
when I found myself

thrusting my big burning blue backside like a baboon
at a man who no longer cherished me.
There was no area of my mind

not appalled by this action, no part of my body
that could have done otherwise.
But to talk of body and mind begs the question of
soul and its existence.

Soul is what I kept watch on all that night.
He stayed with me.
We lay on top of the covers as if it weren’t really a night of sleep and
time,

caressing and singing to one another in our made-up language
like the children we used to be.
That was the night that centered Heaven and Hell.

We tried to fuck
but he remained limp, although happy. I came
again and again, each time accumulating lucidity,

until at last I was floating high up near the ceiling looking down
on the two souls clasped there on the bed
with their mortal boundaries

visible around them like lines on a map.
I saw the lines harden.
He left in the morning.

The Boy with the Golden Arm (in progress)

for Judah.


Beware of phone calls that come in the middle of the night.

It was far too dark to drive out to Judah’s farm that night, but the urgency in her voice brought me through the snaking roads of old Route 13 during those first glimpses of summer. I remember there was an electrical storm on the rise somewhere around Horseheads, New York.
So, this urgency that I am talking about would come one night when an old friend called and with a hush of her voice so softly said, “If you want to see Judah again before…you should come soon”. It is the very phone call I’d been dreading for years and by now, my heart was beating as fast as a sparrow’s.
I already couldn’t sleep because I’d been sobering up and the nightmares that come along with this process occupied a rather large corner inside my brain for almost a week now. I remember I couldn’t tell whether or not it was, in fact, one of these nightmares or a hallucination of sorts – another side effect I believe to be part of the process of drying out.
Since all these terribly dim thoughts were keeping me up at night and with the inclination to get into my car at quite an unreasonable hour, when it was too dark to drive out to upstate New York, I suddenly remembered that Judah meant more to me than most people ever will.

* * *

I could never remember his lady friend’s name. I suppose it is because I’ve never actually said her name out loud or spoke of her. Never could. But then again, she never noticed. This skinny little girl who brought all that junk to my darling asks the same questions. Questions like, “Do you know what time it is?” or “Wait, how do you know Judah again?” – all in her stupid slow heroin-logged voice. And she wasn’t too quick to pick up on my chronic roll of the eyes because she kept talking and asking those same fucking questions. The questions that I’d eventually have to pound out of my head like a drum, along with all of the things that Judah and I spoke about that night of the electrical storm.

* * *

Judah is making lunch for us and his lady friend is going into town for the night. Judah called all meals lunch.
“Dammit!” He shouted. “I forgot the ice cream!”
“It’s okay, I don’t really need any” I said.
“Of course nobody ever really needs ice cream…It’s just nice to have some in store for my July company” he says under his breath.
We were half way through a rather silent lunch until an almost silent tone, he muttered, “I remember you used to really like ice cream.”
I laughed and ashed my cigarette.
“Pistachio!” He exclaimed as he clamored along with the plates and the coffee pot.
“See…I remember”.
“That’s all you used to eat when you were on all that speed”.
“Remember all those bottles of wine you used to have to drink to go to sleep?”

“Yes” I said.
I remember I just sat there strumming my cigarette along the bottom of the cemetery ground of Camel lights in that old ashtray I brought back for him from Mexico.
There was something in me that was just so fearful of him. His addiction, his arm, which was bandaged up, his face that seemed so vacant. He looked like a hangman fumbling with a noose with every little chore he tried to do around that old farmhouse. Yet, the words that came out of his mouth off a little ease. Obviously, it was the phone call.
Still, there was this looming doom that seemed to have just reached the surface.

The place was a mess.

“Remember you used to just wear panties when you wrote? You would just sit there at that computer bare-breasted and all”
I laugh again and tell him I still do.

* * *
“At least I’m not drinking anymore” he says after a long while of silence.
“Don’t you think heroin might be a little bit more severe than alcohol, Dahlink?”
“Depends” he said as we sat there folding his laundry.

We always called each other dahlink. And if I can remember correctly, it was from Norman Mailer’s The White Negro, a novel that we both used to really like and quoted often.

And we’d tip toe around on blow and bourbon, disappear in my room on Plain Street until someone found us.
That’s how we got through the winters.

I remember the one night we almost fucked. I called him a pussy and he called me a prude. And we just laughed and touched each other for a long time.
I remember after that night, I always thought about making love to him. I would think how much it would’ve meant and how all the sex that I would have that came after would never come close to the meaning and understanding of our one night of love. It would have been a sweet sweet something that would eventually bring into a focus a picture of a sweet nothing- where that saying might have really started to make sense, accordingly, making it a little easier for me to walk away from the half-assed lovers that I just so happen to fall into bed with. And Judah, in one night, could have curved my vulnerability, but Judah always liked to talk vulnerability. In fact, he preferred me this way.

I told him about my ways of getting over a lover.
He wanted to hear about him, but I couldn’t tell him how everything happened.
“It's all for copy” he said.

He would be dead in less than a week.