September
Tonight there must be people who are getting what they want.
I let my oars fall into the water.
Good for them. Good for them, getting what they want.
The night is so still that I forget to breathe.
The dark air is getting colder. Birds are leaving.
Tonight there are people getting just what they need.
The air is so still that it seems to stop my heart.
I remember you in a black and white photograph
taken this time of some year. You were leaning against
a half-shed tree, standing in the leaves the tree had lost.
When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over.
Tonight, there are people who are so happy,
that they have forgotten to worry about tomorrow.
Somewhere, people have entirely forgotten about tomorrow.
My hand trails in the water.
I should not have dropped those oars. Such a soft wind.
- - Jennifer Michael Hecht
I didn’t take a picture of the child-sized stuffed gorilla sitting out with the rubbish when I was walking the dog this evening. The child-sized stuffed gorilla has been leaning against a fence at the end of someone’s driveway for a week, but tomorrow’s our rubbish collection so I guess it’s done for. The stuffed gorilla, being child-sized, is too big to wind up as one of those toys the collectors lash to the fronts of their trucks, and too big for a bin, and so it’s sitting there on the grass verge, leaning slightly on one of the bags, looking out into the road. I didn’t take a picture because 1) why did I want a picture, anyway?, 2) the lights were on in the front room of the house it had come from, and I didn’t want them to see, and 3) a child-sized stuffed gorilla is not a sad thing, it’s just a thing, and I hope it wasn’t thrown away because it was a sad thing. Maybe someone in the house once mentioned that they ‘liked monkeys’ and gets one every damn birthday, except god, gorillas aren’t even monkeys - google it, Nana. Maybe they got an even bigger stuffed gorilla. Maybe it’s cursed. Maybe someone in the house is sweet on a certain refuse collector who ‘likes monkeys’.
My Hero
It’s O.K. to keep hearing your worries, so long as you
stop talking to them. Shun them like a double-crossed Quaker.
Imagine how quiet it would be, like shutting off the droning ocean.
That’s how our parasites must feel about our hearts.
What a racket, all that pumping. Shut up shut up.
Cicero said Chrysippus said that the life in a pig is a preservative,
keeping it fresh until we want to eat it. What then is life in us?
Chrysippus wrote more than seven hundred books, none survive.
(We have his bio in the Diogenes Laertius “Lives,” and small
comments like the one Cicero preserved, about the pig.)
Imagine how much the man talked. Imagine how his daughters
felt, sitting in cafés, virgins listening to young lawyers. Lawyer
ready to move from mom to virgin ears, to part the aural curtain
to the heart of the flesh, to grease up and force his listener to stay,
pressure like a fork, squeezed down inner tubes to hidden narrow
chambers. The daughters, who could not listen anymore, worked
into first-date conversation, “Of course I’ve had it in the ear before.”
There were no second dates. Fierce Chrysippus sisters, full of hate.
There were no surrenders. That’s why I’m so tender about my
resignation. Because all these years later a nation of one feels
like one too many. Caesar was tough, but not by himself
did he conquer Gaul. The superlative for all alone is all
- - Jennifer Michael Hecht
For those who might be interested, Dan Lepard’s ‘Short & Sweet’ cookbook is a thing of beauty. The introductory sections on their own are worth it. Plus it actually stays the hell open to the page you’ve chosen, which makes me practically giddy.
My Brief Careers
As a doorman I didn’t know who wanted in,
who out. As an anesthesiologist, I wanted
every one awake between the rotten heart
cut out and the motorcyclist’s installed
to say how it felt. Under the robe,
I wore a holster. I became unafraid
of ladders. I confused the word career
with careen. I was a walk-on bastard
with three lines dispensed by the second scene.
I mean how one morning you look in the mirror
and there’s some foreign, yelping argon
but such tenderness in the world:
people and their guard dogs,
snow smashing its crystals in the lawn,
shushing the crows’ ecumenical arguments,
proof of the persistence of the soul
people think you’re crazy if you say so
even though they have their own bird-brained
promises tapped out on the night’s tins
of rebuffed skepticism.
I believe you get to apologize
maybe twice. See a sunset once.
Death, well, I’ve lost count.
It turns out a guitar is a lousy oar,
its wand founders, its head of smoke
can’t empty a spit valve. Stabbed
by the sky, stitched up by an unknown
farce. Dad watching me putt into the windmill,
green ball being knocked back.
It’s all about timing, how if
you’re in the parking lot when she’s lost
her keys, you get to kiss her breasts
but if you’re in Philadelphia, a star explodes.
That poor piece of music used in a movie
thirty years ago still struggling
to freed itself from the seduction of idiots.
I wore a button that said May I help you?
I carried a bucket from the quaking basement.
Who I went to see would soon be dead
and I didn’t know how the tape recorder worked.
Who knew pigeons could be so loud?
Is it okay to take on faith the mountains
when all I trample are ant hills?
Is it all right to let the cricket keep me awake?
Autobiography is a story the fireplace
tells to a swimming pool. I’m not sure
what else to embroider in my hankie.
We have to go soon, don’t we?
I want to touch everything to be sure.
- - Dean Young (via: kathleenjoy)
(Source: narrativemagazine.com)
I’ve been thrashing around in this small, stagnant puddle of misery, but luckily the ‘This username and/or password has not been recognised’ message which signals the closure of my university account has really focused my mind: now I can stop mucking around and get on with some proper directionless upset and jaw-clenching.
My walk to work is laughably short, even with the added difficulty of a highly-strung dog to wrangle. I have short legs, too, and I’m not what you’d call a morning person. My enthusiasm is always low, that’s what I’m saying. I listen to episodes of ‘Robin & Josie’s Utter Shambles’, but since my walk is only seven minutes long, and I never remember to untangle my headphones until I’m halfway there, it takes me a long time to listen to a whole episode. This week I’ve been working on the episode with Alan Moore, which is excellent, and I was sad this morning to reach the end and hear that the next guest was Ed Byrne, who I can’t stand.
The moral of the story is: although they will tolerate you eating porridge at your desk, when you pour a bit of tea into it everyone will discuss what a monster you are and you’ll want to tell the Internet and it won’t care, and in some quarters will also maybe think you are a monster even though it’s just tea with milk, you jackals, I don’t have to explain myself to you.
Finally, the voice of reason.
I’ve been driving for six years, but this afternoon I have a driving lesson because we have an automatic now and I’m terrified of driving it, shut up. I’ve been in charge of an automatic car once, and had an ugly crash when someone slammed into the back of me, and somehow my brain has convinced me that it was my fault.
What do I do with my left foot? Will the driving instructor remember that I am A Crier? Will I throw up? Will someone buy me a bus pass?
The thing I find most compelling about the BBC’s Sherlock update is that in the world of the show, no one in a 90s movie will ever have said “No shit, Sherlock”, and no child will ever have experienced the soul-terror of that creepy, adorable-dad-kidnapping bat fuck from ‘Basil the Great Mouse Detective’.
Thank goodness they passed that law allowing you to kill anyone who answers the question “Do you take sugar?” with “No thanks, I’m sweet enough!”
I guess I’ve been working on a base headache, just getting some colour down before I go for the real thing. Something about the light in the office is off, even after the man in the next desk climbed up and unscrewed a couple of the flickering bulbs overhead. This same man puts the smoked ends of his roll-ups in our shared bin, but I’m trying to be nice - he runs the clandestine tuck shop, after all, and I owe him 60p in back kit-kats.
I tried to send myself a note telling myself not to worry about this thing I’m worrying about, but it wouldn’t let me, so I just did the thing anyway. Or part of the thing. Research for the thing. Self-soothing by not being such a twat all the time. For instance, I went to the optician and paid £40 for someone to blow air into my eyes, then take pictures of the back of my eyeballs. When I stood up from the bank of machines I headbutted the most expensive-looking one trying to get my coat on. Everything is fine with my vision: the very nice man said I should get a lamp.
I wish I told better stories. Yesterday two of my mom’s brothers called her to say that in the barn on the farm one of them had inherited (a total surprise, from neighbours who had no one else) they’d found a Model T. Close-to-working order. In one picture they sent Neal’s sitting in it, while Bruce mimes pushing. In another, they’re both standing next to it.
