giddy on fire

giddy’s been spending all her time near the fire lately

but that part is easy to explain

slow burning

amped up

 

her brain does it easy

the fading light of the Back Then

melted in a spoon with the thrashing nights

it blends together until his head in her lap

coming down

is bright and it burns

her back against the garage door

his blue eyes red with premature aging

slow dying

white tshirts black jeans

until he’s in flames and gone

until she’s holding smoke and writing letters that won’t be answered

 

it blends together with friday nights in the barn

band practice in the basement

clumsy love on a dirty black futon

 

it blends and burns and giddy remembers when she was she

when she was nineteen and…

giddy was giddy once

giddy was free

but always in the arms of disaster

 

Back Then

back when giddy was she despite disaster and

the sky was partly cloudy but mostly blue

back then she was sunshine and bliss

now it’s all manmade white and gray and she searches for god along the highway

she searches for water and wind but

at 9am the jets appear

leave white scars along the horizon

slash the sun and zigzag back

giddy can’t help but remember

 

puffy white cuts laid out with precision on the end table

she’d sit like ice and watch him breathe it gone

that was before the jets

she sets them alight in her mind but they don’t come careening

like the rest of them did

she longs for disaster

remembers other white scars

 

giddy sits by the fire these days to forget

to drag out every old scene

playing on loops on the ceiling at night

white faces, then red, then blue

 

giddy thinks of america

how american they were

and how like america to go up in flames

she pulls those scenes out and destroys them

 

but Back Then

back when giddy was pure light and blushing

back when he asked her

before disaster

revealed itself in stolen bills, dirty spoons

Back Then it was golden

pure stillness and fall leaves

 

giddy smells summer charcoal

winter defeat

 

giddy’s been thinking a lot about renewal

of phoenixes and other myths of survival

 

giddy sits in the arms of disaster

like always

but he doesn’t hold her back

 

 

 

 

red cheeks white shirts blue eyes

we talk about growing up as if it’s over

as if it’s not still happening now every time we remember bloodshot eyes from crying slow dying

we talk about innocence as if we ever really had it

we equate it with red cheeks white shirts blue eyes

we discover ourselves downtown in songs sung by strangers arms around each other in camaraderie understanding

hopes of not falling apart

we have to hold each other up these days but never find the time

we used to talk about the future as if it would all fix itself recover

we talked morning muffins and neighboring apartments there at each others gallery openings book releases

we talked like we would live that long

now we come together on late night drives suppressing the obvious repressing much more

once a year we try and make it feel like it used to

i cant tell if it means as much to them now wont admit that i’ll take whatever i can get

desperate for anything that resembles that fortress we built back then

though nothing stands where it used to and some of us dont stand at all never stood a chance anyway

we drive down those old ghost roads and find nothing left

foundations (of our midnight headquarters) never meant to last

giddy&disaster

“it ain’t all hugs and handshakes” was playing on repeat,

foreboding.

Crime in Stereo, there was crime in a lot of things back then.

and it didn’t help that he hid the needles in the hollow of his speakers,

filthy bedroom, filthy black futon, criminal youth.

it didn’t help that i told his mom.

back then, when it began,

we never would have believed

or could have guessed.

he was shy smiles and shaking hands,

he was crooked teeth and pure white.

happy.

and i was starstruck, enchanted,

(determined and) certain this time.

and we were free.

there were 7 of us and we were fucking free.

but then life came hunting.

then he was stolen from and stolen.

he was broken and he broke and he crumbled and i kept fighting.

how seamlessly denial passes for destiny

when youre desperate– sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, dead.

i made it to nineteen before i let it fall.

even then they had to drag me away.

but before that.

before that i was always flying.

before that we were golden.

i was seventeen and he was my savior.

before that fall, his fall, the fall of man, the end of everything,

before irreversible betrayal, there was perfection.

we never saw it coming.

i was giddy. he was disaster.

poe

there’s a moment in time when the fire starts rising and the poems through the window are shaken to life. There’s a man in my bed that I haven’t invited a song in my head that was writ just last night there are words that they speak that I haven’t delivered and orders to take on my way back to earth there’s a sun in the night that lays quiet and sulking awakened by death as we crawl through the dirt I’m a flower they’ve groomed and a cherry they’ve eaten rotten in both and spit out again there’s a chair in my room that I sometimes feel watching a woman I knew who once believed me there’s a child inside that has tasted the summer the winter is gone but it never does leave there are lights in the street that hide ugly shadows moments I peek and can tell who is there there’s a fire inside that I’ve been slowly stoking but no one to warm here now it’s only me there’s a growling below that I cant help suppressing a warning reborn that they’ll never concede there’s a  purpose somewhere that lies buried and dying a song to be sung that might shake me from dreams.

young punx

i don’t know

but i’ve been told

you never die

if you never grow old

still still still

And she still writes to him everyday, just to see if he’s alive. And though she never sends them, he answers in her mind and that’s how she knows he’s breathing. Because if his heart ever stopped she would feel it in her chest. And she thinks about the attic and everyone else’s attic and every modern house that’s built without them. And maybe Anne Frank was lucky. Maybe Angela Chase was right. And maybe I don’t believe that Sal Paradise was real. Because Angela was me and that’s the only thing I’ll ever know existed for a fact. Maybe he never did, my leaning boy. My slanted skeleton, my blue-eyed ghost. But she still writes to him. And I guess that she isn’t me anymore. She was me. And now I am me, but I am no longer she. That part is past now. And I feel free without that corpse on my shoulder, but sometimes I do miss having that weight to carry. When you carry bones for so long you can’t help but miss them when they’re gone. And I still know what she means about the way he closes his eyes and how that could mean so much. And for it to hurt. I know what that means. And I’m grateful to know what life feels like. And I’m happy now, knowing where I’ve been and where I am but not where I’m going. I just don’t worry these days. The tides can travel without the moon.

vanilla chapstick and nicotine

it isn’t hard to find the needle in the haystack; you just have to know where to look. i can tell you. i was there, i saw it when they first pricked  perfect skin.

ticking like bombs at the dinner table, scratching forearms raw, and wrists. i felt them all trembling as we held them together. and then i felt them crumble. it’s not that easy to let go of bones, but when that’s all there is you just let them fall. eventually they crumble too, and then all that’s left is a memory and a vague recollection of a smell that’s somehow familiar, and sour.

you never forget the taste. metal and remorse, desperation and disaster. sometimes it tasted like dishonesty. vanilla chapstick and nicotine.
i saw it all. i didn’t crumble. but when i did, i built myself better. this is the stuff i’m made of.

and i feel it when it’s approaching like i feel a train carrying the north with it, hear and shake with the rumble of wheels and the knowledge that i’ll soon be swept away. carried off to forgetting and more forgotten. sometimes it’s what i need– the getaway, the remembering and the familiarity of a dark and unending void. but other times i fear it and ward it off like the curse and the blessing that it is.

other times it’s too heavy. and though we said we’d wear these heavy boots forever, i i forget that we don’t always have to march. sometimes i sit still and remember flying free. swept away in trains and orange leaves. either way, i know why i am here and where i’ve been, if not always where i might land.

sassie

holding on to furs i used to disregard, placing them safely in a box with zebras on it, made by black cracking hands i’ll never see. i hide every little hair to remember her when i can’t hear her creaking the floorboards. when her presence doesn’t prove my safety. when her absence on my parents bed reminds me of all the times i walked by saying “sorry, i can’t brush you now, baby.” and all the times i stayed. i’m keeping all her remains to keep the old house with me, and because i think her life and grandpa’s are connected. am i guilty? i’ve missed them even while they were alive, felt their leaving, wanted to make them concrete. tried to tell them through squeezing hands and long brush strokes how much i need them to stay. how sorry i am that life is short and painful and that it sucks your skin dry.
does the depth of her green eyes make up for the blankness of her face? greener, more marbled than ever. i wonder if she feels pain, but she doesn’t cry. she fades softly and calm. she’s strong just like she’s always been stubborn. hanging on long after they said she could. her and grandpa are the same that way. and often i think that they still live because my mother wouldn’t if they left. they are her mercy. and i don’t know if it would be easier if they went together or if she suffered one tremendous devastation after another.
i just hope it doesn’t hurt, i hope she knows we didn’t want it this way. so much love my eyes can’t hold it.

shoegazers

set in a painting, swept in brilliance and ready to peel, they fade softly in a moonlit apartment. warm blankets of dust and light fall on his shoulders while he writes–finding his meaning under piles of the past, searching and scratching and scrubbing it down.
she watches, moved but not moving. she wonders what the next three months will mean, and who will occupy his table when they have turned to ghosts. she communicates with fingers and eyes that he doesn’t quite catch, even when he tries.
even when he cries, he loves her, wants to make it last in final days and across breakdowns and continents. he  eats his dinner on a couch they’ve shared before. a record spins familiar. it’s possible that he feels her uncertainty but some things, like heavy weights we can’t explain, go unmentioned on nights like these. with the songs of our youth and piles of the past to crawl through, with dinner to eat, with fingers to study.
there’s another one that’s wandering somehow in headphones and soft skin and the smell of new shampoo. she admires his taste but is weary of his self-awareness.
she’s weary of most things these nights, and thinks of europe and things more certain like the stories we wrote in our innocence. i try to remind her of the things we have gathered, i show her images of triumphs, and florida boys we’ve married in our minds, we talk of how we used to  talk and how unbreakable we were, right after we broke. but it’s not easy to rid our bones of it all. heroin heatwaves and hospital beds. of the pictures that have stained our skin as they melted away.
across city lines we hold onto each other as we shake it off. we teach ourselves back to life with songs that crash and boil in our blood, and we stitch one another back together in unheard laughter. there are new landscapes to hold us.
we can’t stop the ocean of sun that drains the colors from the living room, but maybe that preservation is not as important as we once believed. she holds him as she falls asleep aware of their slow disappearance. but she isn’t afraid of vacant walls; she looks for herself in empty spaces.

being where we aren’t

tell the story of somewhere else
of someone my age, younger
think of holes in shoes and supper bombs
think of bathing in rivers
not to feel liberated
to get clean
forget your mother pulling sheets up to your chin
it’s hard, i know
but think of someone else
pulling a shroud up to his chin
her son, their name
lost in supper bombs
and holes in heads
tell the story of some other town
grass on roofs
snipers on roofs
orphans with searching eyes
growing up missing
think of things you’ve never seen
think palm trees on fire
think blood circling sewers
think holes in buildings
morning bombs
just for now forget homework
tell anyone who asks that you got lost
somewhere else
tell them to think dead silence for survival
think daughters as payment
forget home
think homeless
think bittersweet train ride
goodbye forever
safe now but orphaned
think shit scared
think faucet eyes unending
think other
tell them the story of not now
of salmon like blankets
of indians and trees
tell of time before melting
forget summer as peaches
think painful
think sweatshop for shoes
think fever and fall over tired
tell the story of someone my age, younger
think of life as surviving
pay with body for food
think no brothers and sisters
forget baseball and snick
think slavery for scarves
think cardboard for beds
tell the story of somewhere else
don’t shine it
don’t cheat
tell it bare boned and raw
tell it yelled out and fierce
tell the story of somewhere else
tell it like it’s here

chronophobia

every room i’m in crumbles when i close my eyes
every memory sits on dusty shelves while the sky turns to fire
i watch oceans boil from car windows
imagining the trees falling like blocks
just days before i know they will
it isn’t fair to spend all my time in fear of clocks
wondering
waiting for the suspension of being
that initial crash when we realize we’re done for
have i rationed out my love enough for these final days
how can i tell my mother that this is the end
she tried so hard to keep us safe
will a newborn understand how sorry i am when i weep for words she’ll never speak
i cannot waste what little time there is
but i can’t ignore the ticking
we’ve confused with alarm clocks
we shuffle off without thinking
shuffle back and sleep off what we think is the daily grind
but every little boy breaks my heart when he smiles
every animal cries out my guilt
there’s no way to apologize to the land we’ve slaughtered
not that we’re trying
not that we care
but every wall i see is cracking and burning
and every train veers into the river
i can’t help but smell the burning of oil, of bodies in streets and blood circling sewers
where can we run when we’ve mined out all the caves
there are no more safe mountains
no valleys to sympathize with us
there will be no more birds to carry us
or fish to gently swallow us whole
but as the rain melts flesh from bones
the black rivers will surely be happy
to take us under
i see us drowning
i see no salvation
on this earth

fade-in

there was often a song
you,disappearing
there was always an absence
don’t take it back
i couldn’t stop the ocean
you,as an iceberg
there is always a place
me,appearing
you,always
you,returning
we were right to collapse

unlearning my education

They taught me to use active verbs and be a passive listener. They taught me to memorize without question, to speak only when spoken to, to cross my legs, curtsy, and say God Bless You. I learned “i before e” and how to elegantly sip tea, but nothing about class tyranny or lies or the potential of anarchy. They taught me to fear Bosnia before I knew where Bosnia was. Their lowered eyes taught me to cite my ancestors from Italy before Iran. Even before the threat of apocalypse they taught me to be ashamed, to trust all the wrong people and pray for all the wrong reasons. They taught me to look forward to chicken nugget thursdays and multiplication drills and I never learned that Fridays could mean solidarity at punk shows and organic vegetables until I was heavy with American grease and useless numbers. They taught me that family meant construction paper hearts and not bruises. They taught me that “Will you go out with me? Circle Yes or No” was the hardest part of love. They taught me that it wasn’t ok to wear shorts before I started shaving my legs, that girls with bellies should change in the bathroom, that an Italian nose and Iranian eyes made me exotic but not necessarily desirable. That I would have to compensate with grades. They taught me that it was cute to join Environmental Club, to make birdhouses and plant trees, but in the real world, bosses hire female soccer players and jazz dancers. They taught me to hate, before I wanted to. They taught me to binge and purge, to bleed, to bleed, to bleed. They taught me to direct my rage inward, to find my faults and correct them through self-help books in the library, through basketball intramurals even though I was too short, through in-school counseling, through self-hate.
What they didn’t teach me saved my life. They never told me about the power of poetry. I didn’t learn about the disappearance of salmon, the devastation in Darfur, the complicity of my country, the lies in the books the lies in the books the lies in the books. I didn’t learn I didn’t have to learn their numbers. I didn’t know I could teach myself about self-help through music, through that power of poetry, those Friday nights of solidarity at punk shows and spinach pies. I didn’t know I could purge the heavy American slime, spit back the numbers, and dissent.
What they didn’t teach me I learned in higher places. Like grimy basements and abandoned barns, with stereos and duct-taped couches and all the ex-patriots of American schools. With banged-up guitars and fisher-price microphones we taught ourselves back to life. And with handwritten pages stapled together, passed from punk to disillusioned punk we taught ourselves about class tyranny and lies, about the potential of anarchy, about our own government’s complicity, about ourselves, about each other, about this nation’s hipocrisy. And we taught ourselves into revolution. We taught movement and breakage and stomping feet and melody. We taught the numbers of community, of death tolls and positivity. We preached with exposed bellies and coke-bottle glasses, with three-foot mohawks and lisps and pigtails and afros and unshaven legs, or shaved ones. We spoke through bass drums and yelled until our voices broke like the windows we dreamed of smashing. Like the windows we taught ourselves to smash. We drove the dying remains of our parent’s corollas and marched across state lines and police barricades in  the snow and sweat to unlearn the decades before us, to join hands with The Poor they tried to tell us existed only on pages of textbooks.
And with our new education we stitched ourselves back together. We sewed a tapestry of memory that the next and last generation will read about in tattered pages, handwritten and stapled together, past from clenched fist to shaking fingers as they try in turn to unlearn.

oh, election!

I have the right to choose
Between shit
And mudpie.
Between a car wreck
And drowning.
I have the right to choose
My leader
In theory.
I’ve been told that behind one door
Lies salvation,
But both doors are open
And it seems to have left.
I’m the cynic.
I’m obstructing progress.
You give me the “lesser of two evils talk”
And I walk away,
Still waiting for someone to prove me wrong.
History is bloated
With shit and mudpie.

dnc/rnc

I bought a $50 ticket to a $10 show and let the music replace the sirens for an hour or two. But where were you? I took a break from the job you never showed up to. Pay attention. It wasn’t so much to ask, was it? Pay attention–it’s what they’ve taught us from the start: a clever ploy, a decoy, a bird’s toy while they clip its wings. They distract us, they trap us in plastic, attack us with attractive actors and acid, slow us down with low-grade activism, they’ve cracked us. And now we’re silently protesting in Civic Park. We think we’ll make a difference if we don’t attack the cops. We watch each other get dragged by the neck, infected. Perplexed, we wonder if we should still stand still. We shouldn’t! We do. Another badge, another punk with a broken nose. It goes on like this forever. And still we never remember, we show up next year in Denver. We surrender, again. And all the while we’re claiming proud claims of victory, of dissent and street credibility. We buy the t-shirt. We forget. We mistake bombs for fireworks.

ugly reminders

Some things deserve to be forgotten. Like people who assume that not bragging means you have nothing to brag about. Or like embarrassing things we’ve all said under pressure. But not like that brilliant poem I thought of before falling asleep–even though by morning it was gone. (Even though by morning it had left me with a film on my brain and the roof of my mouth.)
And not the feeling of freedom that childhood offered, despite the irony. And not the faces of all those people we met who never had the privilege of that merciful illusion. Junior High we can bear to forget. But not Junior’s funeral. Or Erich’s or Al’s or Genie’s or Pranay’s or Uncle Chopsey’s. Not Jake’s or Pete’s or the poor Morey’s. But I can’t tell you why.
I can tell you why I’m so angry. But I’d like you to guess. Guess.
And if you can’t I’ll be even worse. It will all get even worse than this.
If you can’t find a reason to be angry in this then we’re already worse off than I thought.

men without parachutes

maybe there was always a foreboding

in the way we threw those helicopter buds in the air

and watched as they spiraled to the sidewalk

careening 

like men without parachutes

like blood down a drain

did we know then

how appropriate the crash was?

could we sense

somewhere beneath young bones and fresh skin

that this is how it would end?

or were we really that innocent

before The Fall

Want Goo Goo Dolls Tickets??

Hey everyone,
Sadly I’m being forced to sell my Goo Goo Dolls tickets for the NY State Fair show on the 22nd..
If anyone wants to buy them from me for a really inexpensive price (I just want to give them to someone who’ll enjoy it as much as I would), feel free to visit my ebay listing or email me if you want to work out a deal (I’m willing to go for a much lower price if you have some goods to trade).
The ebay page is HERE and my email address is stormintheforest@gmail.com

Like I said, the show is next friday, August 22nd at 7:30pm at the awesome NY State Fair in Syracuse, NY. The opener is Gavin Degraw (not my bag of beans, but maybe you’re a fan?) and I promise you, if you haven’t already experienced the incredible energy and emotion of a GGD concert, you must! So if you find yourself facing a boring friday night next week, grab a friend and spend the day at The Fair and the night enjoying the best performance you’ll ever see.. (Excuse my melodrama, I’m pretty upset I can’t go)

Hope to hear from you, love

until we know our distance

when we get younger, we’ll be weightless

we’ll run around impatient

we’ll be scared but we’ll fake it

we’ll make it back here

with bruises on our hands and on our faces

on our knees

we’ll know our distance

we’ll know our fate then

but until then, boy, don’t waste it

we’ve all been zombies 

haven’t we?

fucking each other up

and over

and roughly in backseats

we’ve tangled our feet with glazed eyes

and strangled cries about being too aware

that something’s wrong

we miss it

and when we get younger we’ll miss this, too

no one tells you that you can miss the missing

as much as the kissing

and tangled cries

and freedom of zombie nights

yeah, girl, we were happy then

as dead-end kids

riding the swings through thunderstorms

and picking thorns out of each other’s tan arms

and, yeah, i know it got sour

when the holes in their arms turned much bigger than ours

but, boy, now that we’ve seen the face of this place

we can rest easy

sleep easy

twilight calm

because we know 

we’ll only grow young from now on

Real

to everyone that has emailed me or commented about the Goo Goo Dolls’ “Real” mp3 i uploaded, you are all very welcome. i guess this song is receiving some recent attention because of the olympics so i’m so glad more people are taking notice of the band and another one of their amazing songs. hopefully everyone is going out and buying greatest hits volume 2 in the next few days and contributing back. 

again, it was so nice to hear from other fans and just plain appreciative people from all over the world. so thanks for all the feedback!

much love

we can still be orphans

I’ve never been one for making deals or begging but if you would give life one more chance I promise I won’t let them hurt you. We can find a beat up engine for a couple hundred bucks or just strap our backpacks to the front of our bikes and we’ll ride until we can’t smell this town anymore. We’ll find the open fields where we spun around in circles and drew peace signs with our bodies in the dirt. We’ll drink from the creeks where we held hands on bridges and talked of drowning. We can sleep on every cliff where we thought of gravity. And flowers will be ours again. We can pick and choose and shy away with smiles and overlapping fingers. Forests can be home. We’ll pedal until we can’t find powerlines to stripe the canvas and until no sirens interrupt our beating silence. I promise I won’t ever let them find us again. But you have to keep your side of the bargain and keep breathing for a little while. 

I can’t blame you for hiding behind smoke from the end of the world.

sing-along dirty-kid foot-stomping wide-eyed unrelenting feel-good folk-punk music as my raison d’être

if the ggd saved me in my childhood, than this other band has been my bandana-clad guardian angel in the past 5 years. i’ve yet to find a situation, experience, conflict, or emotion that they haven’t provided a song to accompany and because of that i’m both grateful and perpetually inspired. during my dark year these songs alone saved my life, literally.  there’s no possible way to overstate the benefits of sing-along dirty-kid foot-stomping folk-punk bands on my mental health. 

 

here’s one of my favorites and a link to download it:

Oh,Susquehanna!.mp3

defiance, ohio — “oh, susquehanna!” (printed with all due respect but no permission from defiance, ohio)

We walk at the paths at the banks of the mighty Susquehanna, with our feet made muddy by your tributaries that trickle their way to the Chesapeake. It’s like we follow I-83 down to harbor cities with strip malls and tar-mac, people swirling and teeming. It seemed so exciting, but now it seems like such a blight. I grew up near Kentucky’s Mountains of Zion, and all that was there was some old cemetary. All I wanted [was] to be able to walk to the store. Now I don’t live there but there’s too many stores, some apartments, and a Sunoco. And I wonder, what did they do with the bodies? Oh, Susquehanna! And I miss that place behind my house where I hiked and climbed and played, where I ditched this noisy century or just hid out from the decade. M-I homes thought it could stand to be updated, forced it all into a grid until it looked like the funny pages. With every trace of life, it seems, confined within a frame, the faces move from day to day but the strips all look the same. And the punchlines are resoundingly unfunny for those trapped in this architecture of easy money. And I feel like this could all come to no good. The kids who populate these culdesacs will never know what stood beneath their cookie cutter houses: fields and streams and woods. They’ll sit in cars and wait for mom to drive them out of this boring neighborhood. Oh, Susquehanna!

5 out of 6

sometimes when i’m bored or curious i sit quietly in bathroom stalls and count how many people i can hear leaving without washing their hands. 

you’d be surprised.

love/intrusion, diagnosis/disorder

It wasn’t the moving, I could have handled that. And no, it wasn’t leaving behind that house or the one after it, or even the dog in the backyard. It’s true there are nights when I can still smell it, the barn that sat back behind the covered porch, behind the garden. Some nights I wake up with the feeling of hay stuck in my hair as I sit up. Smiling, I shake it out and end up shaking my head at the awkward illusion. There hasn’t been hay in my hair in over two years, I tell myself night after night. But yes, the smell of that loft is still clear. As clear as the spider webs we watched forming above our heads in the shine of that one lightbulb and the Moon. The door was always open in the loft, even after the snow began to fall. It never mattered how cold it was outside. And beneath us, through the rectangle of wood that swung out over the yard, there were always two horses. No one ever thought about it really. Two horses and a dog.

And there was the attic. The five of us, four boys and I, moved a stereo and a couch up the stairs. He put up cheap plastic glow-in-the-dark stars that made our every weekend neon. Our nights were always electric. And even still, the Fall always smells like pizza and must to me. Real stars didn’t shine as bright for a long time until I told myself that I can’t compare those nights in barns and basements and attics to the sky, I can’t hold a memory in front of my life. And I moved on.

But not before the new house. They left his dad and dog with The Barn and the attic. His mother took him and a futon and an heirloom couch. The couch moved into the new basement where we found new sounds to fill our nights, but with his angst, he brought new smells. And my winters of snow angels in the golf course behind the old barn turned to cold days of second-hand smoke and late-night consolations; his doctor said it was up to me to keep him from suicide. No one succeeded in keeping him from anorexia, bipolar disorder, depression, psychosis, overdose after overdose in the following year.  Somehow in the middle though, I learned to love the newness: the new bedroom with a futon and a ceiling fan. The new basement with its empty bottles and graffiti. It wasn’t hard to fall in love in those days. And we all did, and spent our Friday nights in lazy postures writing on the walls and singing old songs that meant everything. That was all that mattered, and it’s funny now how none of it really matters.

I thought it would be impossible to leave that second house behind. To leave his mother without warning, though she had warned me to save myself before. Maybe, I often thought, if I had known that one night would be my last, I would have taken the time to cement it in my brain for good. But it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. We watched Fight Club and ate pretzels and said goodnight, not goodbye.

I can still remember pulling out of the driveway that last night. When I think hard, I can smell the sour summer air, recall the weather, hear the sounds of cars on the other side of the woods. But those parts are dim now. Mostly, I just see him. And not all of him really. Just, very clearly, the eyes. They were clear blue when we met. The bluest blue you can imagine, not ocean blue or sky, but bright bursting Crayola blue that sucked you in. After the move, they never lost their color, but the whites around them turned veiny and red, bloodshot. And the shiny black pupils were always too big or too small, depending on the night’s poison. On the last night they were too small–the needle he used just before I got there had sucked the black right into its chamber.

It wasn’t always just the eyes. In that last image, the one I see clearest when I think of him, there is a mess of black hair, spotted green and blonde, a result of careless dye jobs. A nose perfectly shaped, like his mother’s, straight and narrow. And the shy mouth, two lip rings, self-inserted, and a set of pure white teeth that would have surely needed braces had he cared enough about his image to pursue the matter. He was tall, too tall for me but not imposing. At seventeen he weighed 100 pounds, bones protruded from his shirt when he sat. You could trace every vertebra. He could wear my pants. None of these were flaws to me. Not even the holes in his shoes, newly burned from red-hot cigarettes, or on the knees of his torn black jeans could have made him seem less than perfect. Only the bag he hid under the speaker in his room, only the syringe in the shed.

Looking back it was easy to block out the leaving. It was simple to tell myself the smell of hay and innocence and Fall nights in barns, winters in basements and attics and golf courses could never return and that I had no business holding on to something so inherently fleeting. I convinced myself his parents were ghosts. When I drove by Larchmont and later, by Harrigan I taught myself not to look, not to even hope to see the car that drove us around on late nights when I would lie to my parents to sneak off to shows and highways with him. I didn’t even cry when I went back to the silo we used to climb to look out over the ruins of that burned down building. I didn’t cry when they sealed up the entrance and trapped all our memories inside. I let them stay in there forever. It wasn’t hard to find something else to do with my Fridays and Saturdays and in between every class in school. After he dropped out we just stopped showing up at his locker. I threw out all the notes and dried flowers from our first walk in the forest, our last Valentine’s Day.

It was easy to accept never seeing his father again too. We all hated the man, knew it was his fault that everything came crashing down. His fault for cheating and lying and putting his son’s head through a wall. It was his fault that Charlie had to get away. No, it was easy to let go of all that.

So if I could so easily turn away from buildings, moments, seasons, dogs, why couldn’t I let go of a ghost? Surely, I could at least loosen my hold… But always, nights and mornings, he comes rushing back in a flood of two blue waves. The bluest, hardest blue to have to face. And once my own eyes connect to them, I know there’s no escaping the rest that washes ashore: the breathless laughter, the singing voice, arms moving lightning speed over a beat-up guitar, the smell of soap and smoke and skin, the jokes and serious conversations, the slow rhythm of breathing on a sunny futon afternoon, the plans for a crappy apartment when I graduated college and he made it with the band, the dreams of something better, something far away from here, the sound of a quiet voice over the phone just before sleep, swearing that things would never end, that when we woke up, everything would be alright.

 

 

He was a castaway at the age of seven

They put his head through a wall so he built his own up

Growing higher every year

At sixteen he can touch his fingers to heaven

 

He stains his town with the ink of veins

They split up and left him a futon, took his dog

Sometimes he seems him on weekends

Chewing grass, father and canine

 

And each night he stands at the edge

Sees his reflection and thinks of gravity

Considering the last safe place, he’ll step back

But always each night, back where we met

 

And there’s a hollow line right down the middle

Dividing love and intrusion

Diagnosis and Disorder

And the rest of us are always there to solve his riddles

 

There to support the skeleton boy

Fingers tracing spine and jutting clavicle

Mind racing to keep up but never quite

He’s never quite here but we keep the light on

 

“Just in case,” we tell ourselves

In case he finds the last safe place or better,

In case he asks a stranger for a quarter,

Comes riding home with a smile

 

I knock on the concrete every so often

Sometimes he’ll stick his head out and let me in

Mostly he remembers the times before

Remembers what happens when the gates are lifted

 

But sometimes, alone, he’ll take me through

I can still see the other side in darkness

Because his garden is always in bloom

Its always summer on the other side of the wall.

 

how long do you look for the lost

it was like trying to save an ice cube from a flood. and i was swimming, swinging arms and fighting to keep my eyes above the current but i couldn’t and when i looked up it was gone. so i made a boat out of dried flowers and wrinkled letters, stretched out smiles and that strip of balsa wood you gave me. and i reached out my tired hand and tried to sweep you up into a cup i’d made from spider webs and orange leaves and skin. but you insisted on floating along on your own. 

and so i kept on rowing and you just drifted away. and there’s just no way of knowing where you’ve been melting all these days. but i hope it’s sunny there. i hope the weather’s fair. and in case you ever wonder what you’ve missed or miss the way we wandered through our lips, you should know i’m traveling on and there’s something pure about this. 

i’ve left a trail of shedding days in case you ever choose to follow.

stray

i’ve been staying up late nights thinking about things like energy and personal freedom. calculating hours i’ve wasted wasting hours of sleep but not for not trying. sometimes i just forget how to talk. because it’s such a shame how we can never find the words to describe the things we see in the dark–the things that keep moving, like stray cats and the homeless, like wrecking balls and cranes. no one has the time to listen, anyway, to desperate explanations and irreverent revelations. so we’re faking all our audiences and falling asleep to the sounds of crumbling buildings. and cats.

do strangers find you charming?

a stranger paid for my bridge toll last night. and another held the door for me today and waited patiently with a smile as i approached from a mile away. and though neither act was epic and i’m sure neither stranger thought much of it, it made the whole world a little warmer.

mild prostitution

like kids hiding knives in their teddy bears while their parents hide guns under the mattress. and no one’s saying a word even though they all must be waiting for something. and isn’t it all just mild prostitution? the way we shimmy to work dress our best right up to the bloodshot eyes. we bend real low to say thank you while they sign our paychecks with our childrens’ blood. we’re going backwards in overtime. and we seem to like it.

growing up dying

we get dressed.

we eat sleep and breathe the toxic debris of 40 generations. and when the time comes we’ve got 40 generators to make up for what the lightning takes away. striking us down in our humble homes to avenge the brothers and sisters we stole from it– the trees and salmon, the hope and innocence. 

we drive on. 

and we think we’re electric. we think we’re powerful ghosts, untouchable and innocent. so we cover our eyes, tie our hands to our wallets and stuff them deep into polyester pockets. 

and we go to work. rats on endless wheels, we pay up front and stab each other in the back. we sit down and stand corrected and kneel, giving the sign of the cross and forgetting what it means to have faith in anything. 

we fall asleep.

 

it’s too late. we don’t wake up.

19

i want these days to last forever. i don’t think i’m electric–just alive.

electric

when we thought we were electric, i saved each message you left just in case it was your last. and maybe it’s strange, maybe i’m sick but at every funeral i imagined it was you unblinking and smiling the cracked crooked smile. it’s not my fault. you just seemed so temporary. 

and we tried to make you permanent–tried to make those loud days last, those neon nights never grow older. but we couldn’t, they didn’t, they did. 

and then i spent three summers, three winters, too many falls putting you on pages, writing to you across city lines and under lonely trees. but you were already gone. and then every obituary did list your name, even though none ever did. they might as well have.

we miss our calloused-fingered friend. i miss my shy-smile skeleton, my blue-eyed ghost. but i don’t hang my head don’t hold my pen in sadness anymore. you’re one tragedy i woudn’t take back. i wouldn’t take you back now even if you came around. 

in spite of everything, you found something permanent and you let it in instead. you let it fill your veins and replace us. and now you’re a new kind of distant, a sadder kind of lost. more untouchable than the day we met. 

i just hope it felt as good for awhile. and i hope you still remember us on november nights.

it’s sad but i’m not sorry.

where we went wrong

In the song he sang last night he said its never too late to be what I could have been, To do what I could have done. But at breakfast this morning I took death tolls with my French toast. A glass full of helicopter crashes. Weeping widows at the fireside. And the gunshots as the sun set were not meant to alarm us. The cops said its not to worry: ”Fireworks over the river” Or something innocent like that. And we believe the flashes in the sky are a celebration Like the 10 millionth down. Of course. But as I wrote it down I insisted art is alteration. Desire, destruction. Even though a voice is never viable: Scream all you want but they wont believe you. They wont accept it til we see the edge of the world. On fire. And we joke about acid rain, how they send our disposable citizens to the Congo. How it’s ok Because they were Canadian. Even though they live American. Bleed American like 8^th grade melodies. And the first time I saw those videos, Sang along, Saw peers lose their parents to progress and progressive lies. Still no one will question it. It’s too touchy a subject like all of us. All of us love touching. We love loving for touch and eating for taste and driving for wind, But hate winding down our taste to touch something clean. Then there’s always the graduation songs they refuse to give up on. It’s not that hard to write your own goodbyes. Its not that hard for most because they wont remember. Theyre drinking blood and smoking steak and we’re all too fat to realize where we went wrong. It couldn’t have been the French toast. It could have been those crayons I stole in kindergarten that sent us all off course. They told me it would get me someday but I didn’t think it would take us all down. If only someone would have warned me About Macaroni & Cheese and Purple Mountain Majesty.

How was I to know we die so young?

have you?

I’d like to write a story about London, though I’ve never been.

That’s usually how the conversation goes, I love Europe. Oh, have you ever been?

Been what? I am all the time, but no, I’ve never traveled to the continent of Europe, or very far from this one, come to think of it.

Pity, they’ll say. Pity what? Pity whom? How is it that we’ve come to use such words on their own, I wonder.

You say, Pity, I’ll say, Yes, it is. We’ll grimly nod with eyes fixed on a far off point.

Europe maybe. On the horizon.

I sit down, all goosebumped with the idea of exploring an exotic city in my mind.

He steps into the cobblestone street. Cobblestone? This must be 1820.

I realize I only know London through Charles Dickens. He’s reciting his novels, start to finish, in my head. All of them. I haven’t even read all of them. But somehow when I close my eyes to write of London I see him on every street corner. Next to the dusty fruit seller. There’s Madame Defarge knitting and knitting.

So let’s go modern.

He exits his hotel, lights a Newport and hails a cab. Cab? Trolley.

Trolley? My mind slips to Hershey Park, fourth grade. My whole family is there, and we’re dripping wet. The Tidal Force ride was everyone’s favorite so we rode it again and again until the park closed and then held up our heavy shorts as we ran as fast as a soggy, laughing, rubber-legged family could run. We caught the trolley just in time and fell asleep smiling in uncomfortable puddles. David Copperfield dozed at my right.

I’m back in London. Maybe going modern was a mistake, David Copperfield has morphed into his contemporary identity now, and he’s performing his death saw illusion in the town square. There’s a guillotine. There’s a crowd of peasants and a crowd of fashionable London elites in leggings and slim straight silky dresses. Everyone is smoking Lucky Strikes. My family is there laughing and dripping and screaming with their arms in the air as an invisible bench lifts them slowly to the sky then hurls them forward into an unseen river. The crowd of beggars and businessfolk protest the wet affair. They squeal as imaginary water leaves white trails in the dirt on their faces, leaves transparent circles on their white-collared shirts. David Copperfield levitates above the scene. Madame Defarge keeps knitting. Charles Dickens whispers in my ear, It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. 

I know, Charlie, I know.

So it’s spring I guess. The spring of hope, yes, I like that. A motive for his travels, a goal, a start.

He exits The Dorchestor, lights a Newport and hails a checkered cab. I fact-checked—a cab is realistic. He didn’t mind the $400 he had had to splurge for the room, it was all part of the program. He had left his family, his whining girlfriend, his stagnant friends, the drugs, the job, the dog, the crowded subdivision. Winter had been rough. Too rough in fact for his already fraying state of mind.

Too dramatic, he’s just a kid, maybe 26. 26 sounds right for determined naivety. Who flees to London? A 26-year-old from a New Jersey subdivision who’s trying to forget two and one half decades of remembering. It makes sense to me.

He had spent the night erasing.

Trashing bottles of prescription stability and handwritten notes. For an extra $20 you could request things like paper shredders. He flipped through his journal and brushed black paint over every story that resembled someone else’s. He blotted out every name that he hadn’t made up. There would be no ties, no connection, nothing to indicate he wasn’t a newborn baby with absolutely no link to a life before this. A few times he felt like a fugitive. He was Harrison Ford dying his hair in a foreign bathroom, Will Smith trading his family for a life of fighting alien invaders.

I guess the story is pretty old. But it’s not like that in mine, I’d like to think. There isn’t anything specific he’s fleeing. More like a giant conglomerate force made up of each tiny embarrassment and car crash and electric bill. It adds up quick. It takes exactly 26 years to implode. It takes two and one half decades to lose the last sense of self.

Is he me? I’d like to think this isn’t how I’ll end up, though I’d love to go to London. I’ve never been.

I use small insignificant facts about myself to create larger than life characters in stories filled with drama and epic endings. It’s self-serving but it provides perspective, helps to let go of one itching flaw at a time. Makes me think my life is a film worthy of a Sundance Award for tragic creativity and stark realism. I know it would have the perfect soundtrack. He listens to it on his portable CD player.

I don’t want his world to be modern enough for an iPod, because then the trouble would be too big, too imminent, too grave to be remedied by fleeing the country. If he lived in iLife he would surely die. There would be no spring of hope, the end would be too near and he would be wise enough to feel it.

He often thought of himself as a sedimentary rock. He, too, was made of random particles eroded and added to, washed ashore and set adrift into chaos, chipped off by strangers and temporarily cherished, built and built and built upon by large and small pieces of earth. The magic of course, is that the whole thing is at first held together by cemented sand, the essential being of the thing itself. But as it goes, as the large and small particles multiply, and the constant motion of surfacing and submerging and collecting takes it toll, the sand eventually disappears. The conglomerate pieces become a single sedimentary rock and the filling, the essential fabric, is lost. The rock becomes a product of experience alone; it is recognized only by what it has collected and cemented.

I wanted to write about London. I didn’t want to think about memories or meaning or rocks.

He exits The Dorchestor, lights a Newport and hails a checkered cab. He didn’t mind spending the extra cash for the ride, or the $400 he had had to splurge for the room, it was all part of the process. He had left his family, his whining girlfriend, his stagnant friends, the drugs, the job, the dog, the crowded subdivision. Winter had been rough. Too rough for his already near-fatal disillusion.

It was time to go. The new year was already three months old and he hadn’t found that meaning he promised he would seek. Instead he woke up to familiarity every morning and fell asleep to bored despair. It had been winter for the past 26 years. So he fled.

The cabdriver carried him at the perfect speed through the city. It was gray but still sunny enough to keep him interested in the way light attaches to some things and leaves others behind. He was hoping to do the same.

He turned the volume all the way up and put his back against the passenger side door in the backseat—if he bent his knees enough, he could sit sideways and view London from the opposite window, reclined and ready to travel as far as 50 American dollars could get him in a checkered cab. M83’s “Farewell/Goodbye” was on repeat in his headphones but he didn’t tear up this time. Among the things he had spent the night erasing was a notebook of memories he attached to his favorite songs. Today, the way they whispered “my everyday is fading away” was more promising than hopeless. And though he couldn’t explain why, the strange sights that passed in and out of focus through his back seat window somehow signaled the new start he had been waiting for.

An old, bearded man stood on the corner of Charlotte and Windmill and read aloud from a giant black book. A bare-legged woman in a coarse, red cap sat knitting outside a bustling pub. A crowd of rich and poor, young and old had gathered in the square before a man who seemed to be holding fire in his bare hands. A family of six ran through the crowded streets soaking wet and laughing as if the city were a maze to be conquered before time ran out.

Everything was new, promising, exotically unfamiliar. He was lost on another continent with nothing but a pocket full of American dollars and a portable CD player. Head against the backseat window, he thought about how nice it would be to fall asleep as a newborn baby tonight, or at least to fall asleep to something other than bored despair.

He closed his eyes and thought of what to name himself.

I closed my eyes and thought of what to name him. I was ok with not writing about London, per se. I’m pretty sure it’s just like anywhere else, only no one would know my name. I could start fresh, walk on cobblestone streets if I have the time to look for them. I could trash my diagnoses and tear apart old memories and love my favorite songs again. Or maybe I couldn’t. I can’t say for sure. I’ve never been.

 

“will this sound ever break down the wall”

11 years ago one song changed my life, and i’ve carried it with me ever since. it’s led me to a million other songs that have changed me in a million other ways, but no voice has ever been as real to me as that first raspy, sad and desperate, tormented and beautiful one. since then–that initial meeting–i’ve traced his every move and their every song backwards and hung on every new release like an orphan clinging to one brilliant fragment of hope and familiarity. 

i wasn’t, therefore, surprised at the goosebumps on my arms and legs or the tears surfacing in my eyes when i heard the first clip of “real” a few weeks ago. after it was released in the uk i searched around for a few days for a generous uploader, acquired my own mp3 of the song and haven’t recovered since. 

i daresay that “real” is as beautiful and relevant to me now as “name” was all those years ago. this band is my oldest and most loyal friend.

for you:  googoodolls-real.mp3

progress

And they cut a slit right down the mountain to put up affordable housing—half-million dollar housing for people that don’t care about backyards (or mountains) and for kids that don’t have a choice. They still cling to suburban ideals like Summer barbeques and patio furniture and every once in a while you can find a grill rusting in the rain on the sidewalk outside their backdoor, a stray lawn chair blown onto Route 9 in front of the ever-glowing Wal-Mart Supercenter. And the poor children—the ones who’ll grow up never having known weekend backyard baseball games with the crooked tree as first base, the corner of the vegetable garden as second, the doghouse as third, and the chipped column under the deck as home. Home.

And I remember when I was told that some things last forever, that words like Love and Trust and Compassion can save the world. I remember believing that a hospital could help me, that teachers tell the truth, that parents are always proud of their children and that best friends will stay with you for the rest of your life. I remember when I thought our planet was immortal and that if two people meant it nothing could take it away. And I remember when I started to wake up, I remember each moment that dismantled my faith. I remember facing death.

And I remember always admiring how the mountains over the Taconic looked like the backs of giant sleeping animals. And how in the Winter the long naked trees stood up like bristles or fur on their white resting bodies. And maybe that’s not so far from the truth. And maybe they’re hurting. Like the families that once called these hills home and the ones that now lay their heads on rocks beneath the Mid-Hudson at night. Or even the ones who curl up on chairs inside Grand Central and pray that someone might offer them one bite of their famous New York City hot dog. Or maybe like the children who age never realizing that anything is missing. And how that’s the saddest homelessness of all.

And I remember the first time I heard them fighting in the bedroom, the first time I sat in a car on the side of the highway at night and heard them scream. I wasn’t old enough to be scared. I remember when Michael’s mom died in her bathroom and he had to call the ambulance because his father was gone, screwing the next-door neighbor. And I remember the next year when the neighbor’s husband put a gun to his son’s head. I remember when I got too old for the wooden playground and I remember the day they tore it down because a child got a splinter. I remember when they cleared the woods and the apple orchard and all the secret hiding places behind my home to put up million dollar houses. I remember when we couldn’t drink the water anymore. I remember when everyone’s fathers started dying from cancer and I remember how IBM hushed it up, how it was still OK for us to go to school next to it. I remember Mrs. Linen’s house and how she always had bags of candy waiting for my sisters and I. And I remember how her children stripped everything from her even before she died at one hundred and six. I remember every homeless person I’ve ever passed. I remember that one orange leaf floating through New York City alone.

And the sirens have been blaring for so long that we no longer hear them–we spend all our time wrestling invisible concepts like expiration dates and martyrs and success. And we only notice the chemicals in the creek when they start rotting the front door, eating through the weeks of messages the fish tried leaving on the porch. We’ll complain when the apples start to make us sick. But not a minute before. “It’s a beautiful world.”

I remember every second every word every smell and song and sweaty palm and laugh and snowfall and texture every feeling of my days with the Charade boys. And I remember being born twice in a warm basement and then dying in a cold smokey one. I remember the first time I saw shrunken in pupils and the bones in Charlie’s face and I remember holding on anyway. I remember believing we could beat it and that a few years would fix it all. I remember when he ran away.

And that was the last day we knew trees. Green became the color of dinosaurs and we never existed. They counted bodies between sobs but this time they didn’t promise to save us. And the contrail vapors were permanent. We stayed inside as we were told. If our neighbors were taken it was only to a better place and we would see them when this was all over, when we could play outside again. The landscape twisted and changed into a grey, desert-iron monster, stretching claws to a blackened sun. It snowed ashes for weeks. The calendar in the sky read The End of Days.

I remember standing on the edge of the tallest cliff in Dutchess County. I remember the first time Sean took me up there and how clean we all were back then. I remember every drive with Margo and the day she stopped coming to class. I remember all the scars on her arms. I remember every time his voice shook on the phone. I remember when the weight of it took me too. I remember watching that animal crying on a pole without its skin and feeling my lungs stop with it. I remember realizing what it’s like to be my mother and father. I remember when the holes started appearing in everyone’s arms like a disease. I remember when Charlie’s bursting blue eyes faded and the black rings started forming. And I remember sinking. I remember when Joe cried in study hall when we realized we couldn’t save them. I remember the baby bird that was abandoned on our porch. I remember the note his mother gave me in desperation. I remember the first overdose. I remember when everyone left for war and everyone else forgot. I remember when the night sky meant millions of stars. I remember being born and dying in a song.

And as we’re tripping through vomit-stained basements, through commuter trains and checkbooks and lies we barely notice the masked men behind us, we never stop to wonder why someone else’s hands are always in our pockets. We bring them to dinner and to bed. We declare our loyalty, we accept their silence as security, strip ourselves in the name of sincerity. And all the while we’re forgetting where we are.

I remember “The Moon.” I remember when he started to slip and I remember thinking we could help and that there was always somewhere to go. I remember every hospital we called, every doctor and teacher, every parent and hotline and cop, every friend, every brother and sister and prayer. I remember how no one cared. I remember feeling helpless. I remember when fear and pride closed the door on our hope, how everywhere we turned, the lights went out. I remember how my mom used to cry on the first and last day of school.

And far off somewhere the record still spins, telling us over and over of the American Dream. He says it’s never too late to be what we could have been. Some of us still believe him and we pick ties off the corpses in the streets and apply for jobs in advertising, engineering and art. We go home to the frames of our split-level houses and wait for our wives to cook us dinner. Sitting at melting three-legged tables we don’t notice that our wives are decomposing in the fallout shelters until we start to get hungry. We don’t notice that the dog hasn’t barked in weeks. Or that the water burns our skin. We review our resumes.

I remember losing him. I remember the last phone call, watching Fight Club on our last night together and having to go home when I could have stayed and saved his life. I remember pulling out of the driveway and I remember him waving a peace sign as I drove away. I remember how he called back three times and how we promised, he promised. I remember the bench outside of K-Mart and how we’d walk and talk and make a scene for hours in the South Hills Mall. I remember the first time we went to the silo and the walk with him and Joe in the forest behind his old house. I remember the lake and the cliff above it. I remember the barn and the attic with its glow-in-the-dark stars and taped-up stereo and the basements the basements the basements. I remember every note of every song they wrote. I remember all our Fuck You dreams and punk rock plans to change the world. I remember that his first words to me were Thank You.

And there are things I don’t explain, like how I don’t take pictures as an art but out of a desperate fear of forgetting each heavy moment after it’s passed. And how each word is a weighted attempt to find meaning in this giant disaster. How I have to keep everything in letters and photographs so that I can tell myself later that everywhere is somewhere real and golden. And everyone is someone special. Or at least that everyone has a story:

I remember being lost. I remember how the four of us kept each other alive when he was gone and how it was such a broken kind of beauty. I remember being able to write about other things and feel other seasons just as passionately as the Fall. I remember when they sealed up the silo. I remember when they knocked down the forest and we lost the barn and attic and the basement where we were born. I remember when they first announced that they were demolishing the South Hills and when they blocked off our lake and dragged it for the murder weapons. I remember when Adam destroyed every song they ever wrote. I remember realizing that punk rock can’t save the world.  I don’t remember his last words. 

And no one remembers the day that all our pictures disappeared, the morning we woke up with no memory of families or purpose or life outside these four walls. We go about our business, clocking in and passing out and forgetting to notice our sons and daughters lying in piles on bedroom floors. If anything seems different it’s just our generation. If anything is to blame it’s just the effects of growing up in times of war. And still we never wonder about the last time we knew peace. Just like the last time we saw trees, it’s all a fantasy now. And we’ve been warned against dreaming, threatened with the fate of dogs and photographs and life outside these four walls. No one remembers what it was like before we disappeared.

I remember the “bad batch” and everyone it killed while no one cared. I remember every phone call of the last six years. I remember the matching bracelets that said “LOVE” and the day his was replaced with numbers. I remember believing we had escaped the system, that we were invincible revolutionaries. And I remember being proven wrong. I remember when he said that love was temporary but we were permanent. I remember reading about him in the paper. I remember learning about Darfur, and then watching it stay the same for the next four years. I remember what it was like to find out we’re alone. I remember every familiar face I’ve seen in a coffin and the crooked way they try to make them smile. I remember the way the corpses always looked cracked, like life is just a long fight to keep ourselves in one piece. I remember losing and losing and losing.

And somehow if the earth survives and they ever come looking for our story, they might find a filthy black notebook. Maybe miles and years from here they’ll find a photograph of desperate teenagers singing and screaming in a warm or smokey basement, and endless words of love and loss, trust and death and compassion and hope and they’ll paint new pictures of a life outside these walls. And maybe they’ll remember in a way we refuse to.

And I remember vowing to never take part in the habits that stole my youth and then realizing it won’t make a difference. I remember when all of them fell. I remember learning for the second time that the things we hold the tightest slip away. I remember the desolation of the first Fall without them and sleepwalking through a year in a new town with faces I couldn’t connect to. I remember being numb. I remember how I brought myself back to life with a pair of headphones and a black notebook. I remember birth in a new kind of song. I remember when Margo said we feel too much and how this is both a blessing and a curse. I remember realizing that my life is mine. I remember that last 4am drive with her and realizing that our story is worth telling. I remember when I discovered there’s still time. 

And someone once called me a nowhere girl. I hope they were right. And I hope I don’t stop marching. I hope that we won’t give up even after our trees become dinosaurs and our children are born without names. I hope that years and miles from here every burning building we see reminds us of desperate teenagers screaming in basements and dark driveway nights in headlights and how each of us almost gave up right before we found hope. I hope we still sing epic songs and remind ourselves of tired orange mornings and how we somehow found meaning in the wreckage. I hope we remember each heavy moment after it’s passed.

 

Assignment (To Be Completed at Your Leisure and Handed in at the Most Inconvenient Time, Directly to My Office Located on the Top Floor of the Building Farthest from Your Dormitory)

4.13.8  

Confirm or deny. Please state your opinion on Timothy Leary on the countercultural revolution its successes and failures on the argument against Western capitalism consumerism rational secular destructionism please define the term entheogen please state your opinion on the definition of the word entheogen on use of plants known as entheogens and then redefine the definition of entheogens in your own words. Don’t forget to cite your sources. Be specific. Reject or concur? Never use the word depends. It never depends it’s agree or disagree. Don’t believe in middles or fractions or the color gray. I don’t believe in the concept of gray because it’s not a concrete color it’s a shade and I don’t believe in shades. I demand you do the same. Please state your opinion on the author’s use of ayahuasca in the amazon. Please make sure it’s the same as mine. Please use the phrases imperialism mindset mental imperialism cultural imperialism social context set and setting spiritual malaise spiritual imperialism and any other polysyllabic term I have mentioned in class even in passing irrelevancy. Please avoid any personal anecdotes connections to reality useful interpretations or general musings. I don’t care what you think about modern parallels.

Please start with an introductory sentence that is as overused as it is sycophantic pseudo-intellectual and boring please be sure to include either “throughout history” or “across the globe” you may also begin with a quote from a scholar or other distinguished member of academia who has no relevance to hallucinogens psychedelics the book being discussed countercultures this class or this century remotely. Please follow the opening sentence with irrelevant stuffing that painstakingly begins to draw a connection to the supposed topic of this paper followed immediately by an extremely specific five to six line run-on sentence that attempts to pile everything I’ve addressed in class as well as the aforementioned required buzzwords into a concise and seemingly sophisticated thesis.

Please fill 8-15 pages with quotations and reiterations and your own personal interpretation of the class materials involving psychedelics but never ever mention your own experience or actual opinion. Please transform the opinions of the author into your own and state them as fact. Don’t forget to cite your sources. A works cited is fine but footnotes make you look more sophisticated. Use them copiously for a grade boost.

Please end with a page long paragraph of sheer melodrama that relates the issues mentioned above with world peace sustainable agriculture the current administration organized religion mental illness and what you can do to aid the spiritual malaise of modern western capitalist superstructure society inhabitants. Make sure you’re optimistic and emotionally uplifting. I don’t like feeling depressed and will grade you accordingly.

In class tomorrow, though you’ve stayed up past sunrise writing this paper to the best fulfillment of my desires possible, be prepared to fully reiterate everything you’ve written during a class discussion that I will lead aimlessly even though I will most definitely interrupt you after the first 5-6 words. Please be aware that I will openly praise and smile approvingly at any student who waits approximately 8 minutes after I’ve said a polysyllabic word and then repeats it back to me in a slightly varied sentence. 

After class you may retreat to your room and forget that the materials we read had any relevance to your life.

Please never actually try hallucinogens psychedelics any substance or experience that may in fact expand your consciousness. Openly declare your allegiance to a specific counterculture or subculture and pronounce this devotion clearly by joining as many related ON-CAMPUS clubs as physically possible (or more, as long as it says you belong to them in writing—specifically your resume and facebook profile) but never partake in any actual activities that challenge the status quo. Attend as many political protests as physically possible (see above) but make sure it’s not a waste of time by sneaking into the viewfinder of every camera you see and collecting free tshirts in every color after the rally. Wear these tshirts everyday. If you have the opportunity to travel abroad to experience mind-expansive natural herbs plants and medicines go only if there is a pretense of spreading your superior American knowledge to the oppressed of the world. Write a 10 page account of the poor souls you encountered and then present it at a forum during parents weekend to prove how our college’s progressive programs are making people across the world love America again how we are giving them the gift of modern television america’s next top model ramen noodles. Tell about your donations of nike shoes, hanes underwear. Make sure the parents think we are very gracious for allowing “the indigenous” to own the products they make in their quaint little factories.

In a few years I will permit you to graduate. Please fall asleep every night after this event content with the knowledge that you are more successful than 85-90% of the US population even though you have never held a job in your life. Make a laminated copy of your diploma and place it in a prominent location somewhere in your parent’s house other than the room you still occupy. Please remain blissfully undetermined aware of your superiority eager to use polysyllabic words as often as possible in daily conversation. Remain convinced that your degree in political science and your travels abroad are proof enough of your contribution to the world and that if and when you do decide to look for an extremely highbrow career in the top tier of society it will be readily available to you.

Above all else, please avoid any information alternate reality dream philosophy religious leader psychedelic hallucinogen countercultural revolutionary timothy leary crusader who tries to convince you that there is anything more to life.

 

emergenc(e/y)

1.20.8            it had been such a long time since ink touched these pages–i’d written everywhere else while i tried to refamiliarize myself with words and meaning. but for the first time i found that i can’t find the words for everything. so i stopped writing and started just living, hoping that i would be able to remember each heavy moment after it passed. sometimes i do. and other times i wish this was automatic–that the pen would dig inside on its own and shape fragments of paradox, glimpses of paradise and revelation, terror and tragedy into letters and paragraphs. it’s harder now than ever before.

but i’ve returned here, to this loyal black book, these knowing pages that have seen the last five years in scribbles and smudges. i’ve returned here because i always keep trying. and now, more than ever, is the time to write.

2007 was my year of emergence. it was emergency and salvation. 2007 was the year of everything. i came out of the living hell kicking, and i tried hard again and again to find solid ground–  i slipped back into the dark just as many times. but with the spring and some amazing songs i emerged, and felt free for the first time even though i wasn’t. that’s all that counted then, freedom and fleeting feelings. summer was when black and white turned to color and i said the last goodbye to all my skeleton friends. i said goodbye to the ghostboy in the middle of a crowd, dancing. it was sunny. the idol on the stage sang “fuck the police” and we sang along in spite of our sadness, and because of it. the summer was surreal and careening, and it ended with a crash into something i never thought i’d find again. summer ended with an accident i’ll wear forever.

and it hit so  hard that i forgot all my favorite vocabulary, like loss and intrusion, missing and dying. everything was new. and without familiarity, i couldn’t find the words to put it on paper. it was none of the things that had killed me before, it was everything else. it was everything. and so i started to skip those night time scribbled reflections and stopped trying to find meaning in each footstep. instead i scrawled on walls and stomped through forests and ignored the pens tearing holes in my jeans, the desperate need to interpret every gesture. i just lived every note of every song. and i never felt better. because there are things i don’t explain, like how i don’t take pictures as an “art” but out of a desperate fear of forgetting. and how each word is a weighted attempt to find meaning in this giant disaster. how i have to keep everything in letters and photographs so that i can tell myself later that everywhere is somewhere real and golden. and everyone is someone special. or at least that everyone has a story. and when every word they speak is proof itself, i no longer have to convince myself of meaning. and when every moment burns this bright, there’s no need to fear forgetting.

my story was love and loss and certain death. i was almost at the ending until it cut straight through and brought me back to the start. and suddenly there’s something to hold me back on these cliffs and the skyline is more beautiful than imminent. now i see the tops of orange trees without wondering if they’ll break my fall and for the first time, i’m at a loss for words even when the pen meets these familiar pages.

there’s no way to thank them for giving me trees again, no way to describe what i was missing and why, or how they brought it back. i’m afraid to tell them that they brought me back from certain death. but i’m not afraid of Them anymore. and though the Us and Them is so concrete now, it’s not so tragic when i’ve found someone else who sees through the glitter in the asphalt, the silver in the clouds.

because i spent so long mourning the loss of a friend i couldn’t save that i didn’t see myself slipping until someone came to hold me up. but how do you tell a stranger that he saved your life.

and somewhere miles away i’m still screaming in a basement. but somehow they’ve helped me find a balance here between dark driveway nights in heroin headlights and sunny morning songs with tired eyes and smiles. because it’s never either or. and if this story has taught me anything it’s that you can’t have one without the other. and maybe i know now that i wouldn’t have found this freedom without that cell. or this beautiful view without stepping to the edge that one last time.

and if i fast forward to the fall, it’s clear that it’s never felt this right before. and some days it’s like a postcard. i read howard zinn, and they read endgame on the way to the filthy city. and that’s how it should be. just kids, dreamers holding hands on a train, learning and wishing for ways to start this all over, to tear it down and build something pure with the same bricks we use to smash the windows.. we traveled two hours to get free. spent our last paychecks on the ride and on coffee and cigarettes before we left town. and we made our own way to the river and breathed in epic songs and danced in solidarity. it smelled like  cigarettes and redemption. and that’s all we needed.

and i take pictures of empty things like tennis courts in the rain, ice cream shops in the fall, like widows and bike racks and video stores, laundromats, used records stores, traintracks and doctors’ eyes. and they collect the feathers of birds who might be just as empty now that all their homes are lost. and sometimes all you need is someone to show your scars to.

so under speeding headlights i felt my pulse and squeezed my way back to life. and we all lied in the backseat and their eyes were widening pits and they stuttered and tried hard to remember how to speak. but they didn’t have to. and maybe we’d all lost something irreplaceable, but we refused to talk about it. and maybe what i’ve learned is that love erases loss, and maybe we can learn to start again by gluing our pieces together and squeezing our way back to life in the back of a car. with the fading scent of zombie kids that had shrugged off the drugs and inhibitions and realized that there is no more time to waste before miles turn our tired smiles to memories. so we all hold each other as tight as if  we’re dying, and we hope it doesn’t happen before we find the nerves to speak out loud.

and i don’t know how to say this but i’m feeling safe now. and the bombs and cars and ticking clocks don’t seem to matter much at all and i write like i don’t care who reads these words. because i’m trying to find a new vocabulary just like everyone else. because there’s nothing to feel threatened by when all the shame and bitter eyes have turned into these beating hearts and wooded drives and smiles. so i stay up all night laughing and singing songs and passing time like death has never touched me, like the things i’ve lost are free. and that’s how it should be. because i’ve finally found that peace and it’s been nothing like they said it would be but i’m feeling right at home with these strangers’ faces and stranger places and beating hearts and wooded drives and love.

and in case i look back and wonder, there’s no need for names anymore. it feels like everything. it’s everything at once. everything i touch means the world to me now and means nothing at all. and that’s ok. and i’m ok even though i’m not sometimes. and that’s ok too, because we’ve moved beyond words. and words are the only way i can try to explain it. beauty means being everything at once. beauty means nothing.

someone once called me a nowhere girl. i hope they were right. and i hope he doesn’t stop marching. i hope that he won’t give up even after our trees become dinosaurs and our children are born without names. i hope that years and miles from here every burning building he sees reminds him of desperate teenagers screaming in basements and dark driveway nights in headlights and how each of us almost gave up right before we found hope. i hope we still sing epic songs and remind ourselves of tired orange mornings and how we somehow found meaning in the wreckage. i hope we remember each heavy moment after it’s passed.