saturday nights

having my first beer of the week
on a crowded drag
on saturday night is
a fun and good thing.

and i had a chicken
burrito. and it tasted like it should have
you know?

and i don't drink as much as i used to
(i don't even drink
as much as i used to
when i used to say i didn't drink as much
as i used to)

and i was thinking about writing this
and i was hoping it could be a good thing
and someone would read it and put
some money in an enevelope and send
it to me.
and i could put that money in a bank account
one that i will not touch
and i will make a note on the account
that if i ever withdraw money from
that particular account, that the tellers
should give me a disapproving look.
i think that would work

and then i was driving home and singing
and i had my shirt off for some reason
and i was thinking of writing more good things
you know? and i would get more money for
this account.

and then at some point when your dad will eventually come to me
and say
she is my daughter and all that...
and i could say
look at these things i have written!
look at this account! i will take care of everything!

i fell asleep on my back
and i dreamt i was giving you a haircut
and it was an okay job, i think

and i kissed you
on the street

translation (for ruthie)

translation (for ruthie)

i have several things to say to you
meant only for the invisible hairs on the back of your neck
and my own cracked lips

things that look silly on a page
like
your eyes are elegant and
somehow gypsy
wild
and
bending your neck toward
the place made for you
(reminding me subtly of the maps
our bodies make, god the cartographer)

on my chest
my mouth was flushed new

having had it gaping in the seawater
and years of rancid currents pickling my throat
my tongue before this dawn moment,
a gray thing

the daylight
bashful on your face

our bodies rattle in our clothes

atrophied and quivering
running inland
the goldenrod sinking sand

a vision of your heart, a healing thing

collapsing on the beach
the sweetest feeling swilling round the corners of my jaws
and i know you're beautiful
buried in me

do you see what i mean?
nonsense
chances are,
your neck hairs would have understood.
completely

a dead deer

A dead deer was found in front of the door of some people who lived above us. It had been dragged from the driveway and there were smears of its blood near the wood fence and through the night an open wound let drip its insides in a pool leaking slowing down the stone of the staircase. The fur had gathered around our welcome mat and others in the open air hallway of the complex. The jet streams made blinds of the sky, then a pale blue. Even, divided wedges like fruit peeled. The veins of it a mossy webbing. In the new warmth of the day our shoes made no sounds. It felt like, for some reason, for the first time, we had remembered to put our keys and change in separate pockets.

We tried to put it together in the car on the way to church and then later after our night television. We closed our eyes and probably saw much of the same thing. A car, a truck made of soft metal, like notebook paper crushed in a fist, thought better of and smoothed flat again. Four men abroad in the cab, strange braids of orange scanning them like a barcode as they drove beneath the street lamps. Careful around these corners, one said, probably whispered. A collective nod among them. Their bodies jumped with imperfections of the road. They pulled at the ends of their shirts, breathing through their nose. FM, no AM radio. The warmth and softness of the textured sound waning and returning. It was a man speaking sincerely and without words. The radio tower finding the car through low passages and bits of forest, losing them without warning. Moments of fear materialize in the car like a season. Someone coughs. Someone pushes their glasses further up and it passes, this fear, only to return again at distant road sign. One of them plays with the blood on his hands, making his thumb and fingers lobster claws, feeling it adhere and pulling them apart. It is a quiet noise.

The scenery of their psychology we dismiss. There is no who, we decide, because it could to easily be us. We won’t answer the question to what would put us at the Wal-Mart after the bars close, standing in line with a tarpaulin and dark eyes or whatever they had. We don’t like to think how close we are to it. We like to think about what they wore or what was on their breath. Which one was a smoker, his brand of cigarette. We like to think of the basin in the restroom of the diner where they had breakfast. The dim rim of red left from their hands. The soap was an inky and pale pink. Somewhere in their pores there is still a residue, still some kind of lingering foreign blood at the base of the blonde hair in the crease of a wrist. How they watched the dissolving fingerprints smeared on the laminate of the menu. A forkful behind their teeth, the boyish smile they make when concealing renegade happiness. Their jaws working slowly over bacon. A smirk is passed around the booth and left with the change and the balls of paper in a space where the booth’s back meets with the seat.

We know a few things for sure in our head. We just feel for sure there are things we can know. None of them return to houses with a second story. This coming summer they are going to finish one side of the basement. Put some carpet down there. Find a pool table or something like that. One that collects the balls in woven baskets at the pockets, plastic or fake wood. Patch the one part of the roof where rain collects on the pimpled brown shingles. Do it before those shingles in the garage go bad. They must ask themselves do shingles go bad?. They plan to know a guy who would know, who knows those kinds of things. This same guy they plan on knowing probably knows where to find a pool table too. Or a ping pong table. Well, those seem easy enough to make. They find the word tennis has an odor to it. The deliberate brightness of a sweat from boys that don’t understand it yet to prevent. And the dead deer. We had almost forgot about that.

three am monday morning im sure now were losing our mind

how big is your town

i open my fist and
show him

about this big

the brown and yellow
of my glove and the
dried whatever

it looks terrible

i know right
i know

its the same hand i use waving to the departing starry bodies
advice on a napkin they left in a bag i used for school

trust your body to the foxes

i find it years later spilt with grape juice and tobacco
outside my window
a handsome grin
vanishing into the thrushfire
a still twitching
limb in
your
jaws

Steve

The first time I went with Steve to his ex-wife's house, we took some very small important things. We snuck in through the back and I faced the colliding creeks running with June's solitary rain, the late morning light on drifts of dead leaves, the marble obelisk, a stone shiva showing no signs of age, her breasts still young in their turquoise and glancing to and quickly away, almost seeming still wet from the sculptor.

If you do a good job here, if I hear you're working out, he said in the truck, there's no reason we can't put you on a gun soon. He rubbed the thigh of his jeans and there was dog hair on the fleece pullover between us in the cab of the truck. He sniffed, audible over the engine. His glasses slipped, only slightly. Antifreeze, he said.

The door was open in the back like he said it would be and he gave me a cardboard box, directed me to a thinly jointed storage shelf. It was loaded top heavy, with rows of videocassettes and slides. The old black metal, the skeletal beams were chipped and bent. It quivered each time I took something from it.

I heard Steve upstairs, his footsteps over my head. I saw him sitting on the couch, the length and girth of himself fully expanded. His head was tossed backwards, his eyes half open towards the cream of the ceiling. I had worked for him for only a few weeks then. I knew him barely at all. We left through the front door and he had no key to lock it from the outside. Underneath the carport, I hefted the box into the truck's bed and fixed it so it sat snug in a collection of crooked orange nails, empty cigarette boxes, the usable metal we pulled off from houses. He walked up behind me and our bodies met awkwardly. I stepped into the softness of his middle. He dropped a pair of very small, dirty sneakers into the box. Those are mine too, he said. He clapped my shoulder apaternally and we drove away.

I know, he said loudly. Even to me its weird.

We turned on to a gravel road, the way we had not come, and our bodies shook, it felt, from inside out.

Carl

Carl and Missy lay in bed for three days after they lost the baby. They bought pills on credit from her ex-husband, a recently former head engineer at the Ramada Inn, before that, a retired meth cook. He worked with us too. She mostly sniveled in the crease of his chest where, at the premature age of twenty four, the musculature has slackened from the two years he spent stacking railroad ties, the past six months he spent roofing with us, the seven years of pills and liquor and nursing black eyes and bruised ribs and bottles hid beneath Missy's sweatshirt. The dogfights they would sometimes host in the square of grass they rented in Maryville. She pulled her lips over her teeth and her chin bucked against his sternum in strange spasms of movement like twitching in sleep. Sucking in breath, her lips rippled over her jaws in brutish melancholy. Carl felt the black of his eyes spread to the ends of his face, and he let the pills ripen in his legs, the blooming chemical blue and red ballooning inside all the dry and cracked granite of his organs. He closed his eyes and let Missy cry alone and left both of his hands underneath his old t-shirt on the now empty body of his girlfriend. When he came to retching outside, he put his head down on the trailer's concrete steps. He dreamt he had a million dollars.

Lonesome Things

Your sister has broken up with her first boyfriend and you are pouring concrete to pay for your half of the cramped apartment. She waits tables at a cafe close by and falls asleep every night in front of the television, the title menu of the same DVD blinking vapidly. Filling your thermos then flicking off the set, your sister squints through pudgy cried eyes and wakes at the absence of the maudlin soundtrack which led her to sleep, she thinks, just minutes before. Outside the window you see an ambulance driver sit on the curb with his head in his hands. Sunlight fills the empty spaces of the room. This feeling is a lonesome thing.

On New Year's Eve you drink three beers, smoke two cigarettes and call it a night. You also finish a novel you have been meaning to read for awhile now. You fall asleep with the distinct feeling a palpable lonesomeness has separated your skin from blood.

In the wake of a startling dream, you try out a new coffeehouse. You are given no saucer with your cup and though you can see your usual place across the street, you don't permit yourself to leave. Lonesomeness has hid weights in the pockets of your jeans and gathering strength to rise, you leave a bigger tip than necessary. Stepping into the day, you catch the eye of the man who owns the coffeehouse across the street. Lonesomeness is your specter as you pretend you don't see him and almost turn into oncoming traffic.

The evening holds a promising Valentine's Day date. You take the bus downtown and meet a friend for lunch at a franchised sandwich shop. You both hold the mayonnaise and ask for cups for water. The winter day is bright and you have lost weight. The good kind. Your friend comments on it and you encourage his new beard. The buses have stopped running for the day and the prospect of walking back to your apartment to ready yourself for the evening is almost unbearable. You work it in such a way as to go with your friend as he goes about his afternoon business. He stops at a woman's house. Through several clues (never mind specifically how) you realize he is having an affair with this woman. You call a cab and while wondering how you are going to pay for it and the looming date, you understand being lonesome exactly in that moment, maybe for the first time.

Walking to work you see two chefs, tall white hats and aprons and everything, smoking in the alley behind the restaurant you proposed to your wife in. One of them calls to you and it becomes clear they were having a disagreement and need you to settle it. You hold up your briefcase and walk away. This is surely how a lonesome person would act.

Your mother has left three messages telling you how much she loves you. There are a few more you haven't the stomach to listen to, much less return. Somehow, you've been waking up in the space between your bed and wall and you can't bring yourself to push the frame a few inches thus taking care of the problem. The phone rings in the morning as you stand looking at the situation in your underwear. Surely it is your mother and she has just come home from church. You begin to shed tears and some get caught in the hairs on your chest. For some reason, this is the moment of your life and you're happy when it passes for it was quite a lonesome thing.

This semester has been far too busy for me to keep up with this blog. I have a job which doesn't allow me to assume the identity of a quiet University file clerk, secretly blogging massive amounts, but I will post some of the writings I have done. These are largely fictional. I hope to turn some of the coming entries into song reviews or something of the like.