Pendant

Some days I do not trust the sun in its cherry glory and wanton transgressions. When I was a boy I walked the creek collecting crayfish in a yellow bucket, too heavy for its plastic handle in the velvet flesh of my wet palm. Sauntering away the summer in what felt like miles before I knew what miles meant.

Once we caught two carp in the bucket. Carried home in a hundred shifting pounds and the sound of miniature thunder slapping the insides in twilight. Mom said to take them back and they swam like two freedoms spawned in the shallow water.

The days lasted, and the sun lingered low into the night like a stoic pendant. Long enough to make it home when home was the Braxton back door and dinner at dusk.

Today I’m sitting in the car too often pledging seasonal wishes that the lidless eye dip-dive in time with my moods. The pact is a loose rope, letting out too soon on my grip, a bright ball hanging too high for longer than I would approve.

Shapes

The first thing I did was open the spine, soft papery resistance,
and set the pane aside, no streaky interference.
I needed to see through everything for the death of a butterfly.
The frame is heavy gold, fading in the urgency of a thrift store with second, third life promises
and paint worn enough to make you believe in something once beautiful.
Held out in front of me to confront reality at its edges of forced geometry.
The chronic imposition of humans, fitting everything into boxes
—conditional shapes and nothing fits.
I’m taking deep breaths wondering what’s looking back in liminal,
lay me out exposed for as long as I can bear.
Between the frame, hoping to fill the ornate adoration of heavy wood
and the death of something that no longer suits me.

2008

there is always a chance that I never woke up.
I know the story, the flirting, the push, the car.
the ambulance ride with Ry,
I’ve retold it so many times that
I can see it, seated, deeply in my frontal lobe.
a small torch, swishing in the dark,
bleeding loss of control.

quantum immortality suggests a split
like the “Y” shaped crack in my skull
new consciousness from a hospital bed
a long way from home.
every year my family remembers my face
intentionally, together.
not like the individual breaks.
not like the way that every time I see a set of antlers on the wall
I remember my Mothers Father.
wet grief, heavy eyes, confusing laughter.

when I tell the story I see a party and a yellow dress.
drunk twenty-year-olds with new faces
crowding into the wallpaper, with petals overwhelmed.
lingering smoke and light beer in the opening of a second decade.

when I tell the story I see the ambulance insides,
white-red-white, terminal overexposure
in an outburst of terrible enlightenment.
quick recognition of my best friend in the corner,
watching them watching my vitals.

when I tell the story I wake up to my parents
quietly waiting for my first appearance.
wide eyed naivety marking the end of adolescence
and the first breath of uncertainty.

I died in 2008, in the story.
but my edges are fuzzed and
my souvenirs are ordinary treasures
and a constant ringing in my ears.
the source code beautifully banal.

when I tell the story
I can’t help but wonder if I died in 2008.
or if the idea is just a split-brain relief for my previous
lack of vocabulary in terms like anxiety, depression,
attention, and overthinking.

I almost died in 2008.

Moody

I don’t want to talk to anyone
In the hallways
Making eye contact with the floor
I wonder if they’ll consider
Their existence
Without my acknowledgement

I want to talk to everyone
And stretch myself for perception
I wonder if they even saw me
And do I even exist
Without their acknowledgement

I skipped two barbeques on Sunday
Because I couldn’t decide if I wanted to talk
And be observed. Lies…
I wanted to be seen
I wasn’t ready to talk
But if you don’t get in the water
Everyone assumes that something is wrong

Too moody
I am of two moods

Focus

The definition of “Focus” is in a dictionary, and I forgot to look it up
Again
Last week I wished I was autistic
Because I would rather love one leaf than every leaf…I think
There are a lot of good leaves though.
These drugs are supposed to open my third eye
But the pupil is too dilated
These drugs are supposed to change my life
Or am I
These drugs are supposed to make me focus
But how can I focus if I forget the definition

Streaming

Two spinning dueling motors grinding me away to fuzzy lights bright and out of focus shining through my pupils disconnected upside down I’m slithering lines electric heavy breathing trying to define myself in moments undecided dining black and gray on snowy TV static with the voltage of disarray popping cracking in opposition of the exterior of my face I am softer than I appear but I demand control over trivial things and control demands stoicism so I’m reading unapproachable as observed and begging for a word that isn’t a prayer to be something I am not. 

Consent

No one likes to talk about dying
I don’t think that’s fair
People are dying right now
And they deserve recognition,
A new achievement unlocked

We have two things in common
Before we know their names
If living demands dying
Death commands life

I want to talk about dying
The transformation of your face
To an idea
Like the picture of me on a motorcycle
Smiling to a curve
Will they remember the freedom
Or their fear of it

Mortality the thief
Three years, two grandfathers
Surviving spirits, knives and pins in my dresser
And when I see a pool table
And when I see an antler mount
And the dreams they’ve visited

Fox has cancer now
I’m watching my closest friend
My weirdo confidant, the Roswell refugee laying in the bathtub
Withering to his hips, scared of his shadow
While his shadow fills him in

We used to make jokes
About the pandemic of men in their thirties
Sticking their heads in the oven
Knowing there was other options
Would they have committed if they knew
Sylvia Plath did it first?

Maybe they were trying to be poetic
No one told them that
A poetic suicide is a long life

Undoing

a day spent moving to
keep my body preoccupied
and avoid the compulsive
need for engagement
everything I’ve done is second
to anything I haven’t
on the run in a captive state
captivated by the accomplishments
of other people
stark admiration and
jealousy in smooth undulation
my life’s work is an
image of fawning evasion
and ideas made to be adored
this will be my undoing

Two Birds

What I am doing.
What I am not.
Two conversations and
I have nothing new to say.
On Sunday I saw two birds.
One hopped for life, the other felt the force of the grass from an unknowable height. I knew in the five minutes between them that I was both. Unable to fly beyond obvious commonality. Dead against the immovable objects I’ve imagined for posthumous admiration in the shedding of mortality.

Eels

I’ll get a tattoo of an eel
for mystery and origin
in honor of Freud’s bane
ironic obsession with
dick shaped animals and
an overactive scalpel
but it isn’t the mystery
it’s the plot twist
an excuse for self-deception
I live in negligent opposition
of what makes me
and regimented chaos to conform
eating time as a commodity then
panicking when I’m forced to stand still
itching for the freedom of
nonchalance and cavalier fantasies
yet my life is full of things that demand my attention
eels would never live like this
slipping into the Sargasso Sea
Taylor told me once that I was an enigma
and I wanted to bathe in the recognition
I’ll return to the sea and consort with the eels

Bedlam

instability
is the picture of a scorpion on the back of my shirt
and thoughts of a hard left turn into the highway barrier
the rosy bloom of annihilation
screaming “There Goes the Fear” with The Doves
until I believe it straight faced corporeal
instability
on the course of my life
I’d like to get lost in someone else again
I’d like to lose myself in the wreckage
and have something to believe in
like faithful bedlam between us
cut softly into the frame of days I used to have
speeding on the backroads
looking at houses and imaging my life in them
looking for an accident around a curve
with the windows down
and the air conditioning on to soothe the humidity
with you in the passenger seat
telling me I don’t make sense
and I squeeze your hand
as it rests in your lap

Ornamental

Sedona
Santa Fe
Taos
obsession is a road trip I’ll never take
calling in the name of Edward Abbey, in the voice of myself in a dream.
it's the year of the desert and ornamental longing
post-luck clarity in memories of the first stop from home in a long list of firsts.
you never forget your first life, and the distance between adolescence and New Mexico.
my first love was a bombing to combat loneliness that circles back every few years
a reminder that I’m as dead as I am alive,
like former lives abandoned in boxes and hangers at Goodwill.
those are my old uniforms, and I don’t like telling people who I used to be.
a thousand futures from a single past, lost
in the perfume of places I’ve been dripping noxious from my eyes
wide open facing west.
you never forget your first desert
the sunset’s yolk sliding into the sagebrush
and the spirit of desolation sneaking years off your life
with cigarettes in social circles.
speeding north on 54
there is no way to read the cracks in the road against the heat
the only surprise on the highway is the constant distance of the horizon,
80mph as far as forever, wide and dry
El Paso
Orogrande
Alamogordo

Solitaire

The plants in the dim upstairs pool room surprised me with their lack of atrophy, growing in the kind of space you expect to be decorated with the lingering fingers of Parliament, clouds and beer breath. I’ve been wrong before. This is life in the desert, and the landscape reminds me that I live in a state of patrolled vulnerability, open at every angle and fortified against the future. You were effortless, the solitaire of Albuquerque, and reminded me of an old dream, something like Dean and Sal. Something like a freight train into places that only exist on gas station postcards. Something like the sun falling low enough into the horizon, drunk on its fire, that you can’t remember if it’s dawn or dusk and you realize they are the same. The train never stops but I got off somewhere between Florida and The Black Hills (deadlands/badlands). You were soft, and asked for things with no thought of apology, a hand, a vast collection of sweaters on your 40th, and company in the sandy hours of fire before night. Time was slow and undisclosed, sitting under the bar library on a one-side booth, watching the room undress while we wait for them to call our names.

Unrest

thinking of buying a cemetery plot
even though I want to be burned
so anyone can visit and
remind me I was a person
because I routinely forget
to slow down
and take it in
with that one breath that feels like home
to bring me down in the dirt
come see me at the stone
and say hi
because I’m probably going to die
doing something I don’t even like
and I’m so scared of missing out
on anything 
that I’ll miss everything
and live in fevered nostalgia 
for my final act of unrest

Stirring

changing of the seasons make me impulsive
I’m stirring too much
to keep up with myself
mad at the sun for its audacity
when it’s 70 degrees
but I planned on it being 42
and have nothing to aspire to

now I’m free to overcompensate
with imagination
and longing on the porch
when dark drank the day
burning pink into everyone’s eyelids
leaving us sun clean
and open for the evening

I poured whiskey directly
into the wine lacing my glass
vestiges of the last thirty minutes
and I’ve moved on to
the idea of traveling as an escape
I want to go everywhere
I won’t go anywhere
that’s too many destinations to overthink