The Obvious

I have been waiting my whole goddamned life for you to show up
Ok
So you get it now
Somethings are obvious

They hit you like shattered bar lights out of nowhere
The sky falls, rains glass, sparks fly
Electrify a dormant longing
That you've sat with in long discourse

As the specter on the pillow on the other side of the bed
The soft foolishness of recognition
How could I not know?
All this gesturing on dance floors

Swearing at satellites to false moon goddesses
Searching for nature's complement
Flush in gorgeous blood and skin passionately ready
The scars and madness

The torment of longing for a set of eyes
To stare into across a table enraptured in memory
Like medicine for the peril of dying without drinking
From the well we all hope to find in our own time

This is music appearing to begin to play
Realizing this is the melody always in the background
Of everything one has ever known
Surfacing into the foreground

Found in a pair of eyes and skin and yes
At stake in a present moment to declare
I want to try
I will take on the terribleness of the shitshow with you

A tribe life mate, face to face, humble and exalted
Healing and growing in the madness of declaring love
This is the audacity of knowing what one wants
And who one is with another human complement 

hard space

I never seen a feeling from a woman
That in retrospect had vulnerability in it
That if you go
I will feel loss

There is a manner of exchange
A price for presence
To know to be
Accrues a personal debt

That if this is not to be
One surrenders to feel
A space is created to fit
The act of holding

This is where feeling nests
In the thatch of broken aliveness
The egg yolk messiness
The stared heart invests

There is a look
I have seen feeling from a woman
In the way viewing other men
The look exists in this space

Wanting
And when I think of these eyes
I think of hope but most so
What the lack of this space appears

In hard indifference 

Three minutes past

One held breath, staring a clock past midnight, with a pinch of warm ache behind eyelids, remembering the nauseating flavor of hope swishing in aged spit. Two crumpled missives pasted into internet slurry dangling in retort to contradictory responses. Three resignations cumulatively folded into the self, knowing the odds of the bug crawling all the way across the desk before thumb and index fingers smear its exposed body are nil. Somehow the insect does! Applauded by soundlessness recognizing the spectators have all become preoccupied. For today I was a man and will become a boy again, into the sexless invisibility, praying to wallpaper and watching fan blades with a dry tongue.

Hope is

Hope is the most sinister of addictions.

Taste the elixir of safety on the tongue

Bubbles of might populate space taken

To be outside the normalized confines

A man rests child pose on beige carpet

Head to floor facing away from the computer screen

As his American god

No answers in the digital scrolls

The patient agony of expectation

For letters to materialize form the ethereal witchcraft

Of a specified other human’s choice to type

And alter the dreams of another human being

There is a parceled swallow of routine

Disrupted by the hope fuming its way into the parlors of thought

Rumbling down potholed streets like a Sewerage and Water Board truck

Finally coming to fix the leaks

The dare not speaks

The iced over roots of stumped trees

The warnings of best be this way as not to arouse suspicions

Of what it means to be a human wary of hope

The ecstasy and the foul bilateral pinch of the abdomen

Clenching the human form inward to recognize

The silence will remain unbroken

The stasis of this predicament ossifies

Tongue glides across implanted teeth

Stung anxious blood burns in forearms of matted hair

The urge for an adult to rationalize verbal release or tears

Or some representation of the disappointment exceeds the outer expression

For the addiction of a cumulative deficit

The pull toward hope is commensurate with hope’s unclimactic compensation

The musicality is an opera of indifference

Hummed between coronary beats, the pause in the lub dub

The stare outward into the nothing to explain

The did not start, the horror of might, the hope in the getting hopes up

The cliched acrobatics of peppered positive reinforcement

Into the ears of a human trained to second guess every decision

As no path in the labyrinth begets blood flow

The same pale moon and cold hard ground

The torn sheet and numb gaze across the horizon

The seafarer’s mirage hazy hope and full of terrors   

In the Stack

You tell yourself, “Today was just a bad day.”

Then remember one does not count, but there is still a stack of bad days.

You open up your Facebook feed to friends’ posts “Remember to be kind to yourself.”

A poet advertises a lyric t-shirt “I love you. I’ll miss you. Be careful.”

In a realm where no one talks ear to mouth.

Not alone feeling alone in the stack.

Play Pen

There is a fundamental question, do I want to be? I try hard to want to say yes, knowing the parts of me that deem it so logical to say no. These parties hold a pathetic argument. Neither wants to speak too loudly into the microphone. So I go through my days neither being or not being hazed in depression seeing little point to life, seeing my being as an anchor for others and self-isolating to minimize the collateral damage. Occasionally I can invent an illusion in digital correspondence until I say too much or too little or utter what feels like the truth at the time. I laugh at how simple a question like an infant that refuses to eat his food. Plop dumb and squalid in a stink playpen. Shit in diapers. Refuse to develop the muscles to stand and climb out.

Reruns on channel one

It is difficult to take yourself seriously when a vision of your hand holding a gun to your head and watching chunks of skull and blood fly out onto the door of the room you are sitting in replays over and over all day long no matter how you try to occupy your time. The humor of the repetition flops in every so often that this scene is always impossible for the human choosing the act to ever see. So it is suicide remains in this fantastical quality of unrealness. That is unless you survive, but even then the failure in the incomplete act stalks the actor as the goal was not to see the film, but to finally un-see it.

A note to my yoga teachers

A note to my yoga teachers, know on the days you see me, more often than not I am present for basic survival reasons. I come to yoga because at least I know I can do this. I can go to a room with other human beings, hear a real human voice, be at least peripherally observed that I still am alive by human eyes and move my body to accomplish something small. At least today I can do this.

I can be in yoga near other human beings and not feel like I am violating other people’s space to succumb to either rejection or complete invisibility. I can smell the scent of visibility even if no one directly speaks to me in the entire before, during, or after process or I to them.

One of you, my teachers, may be the only human I speak with face to face all day, and cumulatively you may be the only group all week in whatever perfunctory politeness or genuine exchange occurs. You are the modern American therapy for the bargain price of less than a hundred dollars a month.

The radio reminds me physical isolation and lack of relationships is a greater risk to shorten my lifespan than lack of exercise or an unhealthy diet.

Robin's Eggs

The irony of emotional availability is that it smells like desperation to the other person’s instinct to hunt what does not wish to be hunted. The animal within senses both the lack of external labor as off-putting and the presence of internal self-reflection to be present intimidating. It is in this dichotomy we teach ourselves to wear masks and go through the world so largely unloved.

I miss the sunlight. 20180626

I told my family I think about killing myself sometimes eight months ago. It is always in there like looking at my own nose. There was a perfunctory we would rather you not, but a summarily understood exhalation that there is little any of us can or will do. So it is, as before, and for these decades, I am on my own. Fart. To be or not to be. I think about work, unemployment, America, personal relationships, art…I figure write a few books and when the gas sputters out of the bank tank say goodbyes. I don't want to say goodbyes. I never have. 

I manufacture a story that the kid wants something to do with me, but that’s mostly bullshit. Occasionally I get to text. We have a call. Laugh. it's god damn beautiful, but compartmentalized. 

There is this radiant numb sort of perpetual weight. I cannot afford to get a diagnosis or drugs or a person to talk to about it because why bother. I tried the shrink. It didn’t shrink. The irony in America is if you seek professional help and get diagnosed the check boxes on forms change, employers or reports or people who want to extricate you from the subways or court proceedings get notified and the gyro of the world starts the pariah stigma of labeling the crazy one.

This is my fight with the voice that is gleeful that this could all end. In all the meditation and trying there is a voice in the subtext of everything that just says it is all illusion. None of this is real and every waking day requires theatrical performance to conjure the self-deceit about why anyone would want to be alive. I have my reasons. I choose to stay. 

I stare into the ledger of joy. I look out across the world. I feel the awfulness people do to each other. The ooze baby of our self-hatred elected to the throne in D.C. I taste the steel in my mouth of the dehumanized corporate mechanics. The lack of kindness feels lethal like a big fucking snuff film with an orgy scene before the grand finale for the march of the pigs.

I do not want to be here for this. Imagining faking it for another person feels Sisyphean. Then I think about the child in me, the one who cannot imagine anyone wanting to stay around. I confront the paradox doom loop of depression repellent, the contagion, the way the kid talked to me, the way her mother did, the way my family looked at me so bored when I told them I think about killing myself. Hard to convince me inside they do not feel the same. All faking it, struggling, stirring the roux that this world is worth staying in if we can just lie to each other well enough.

Maybe we each find different drugs. I wonder if I ever had the capability to love, like really be in love, if I could get there. I feel like my ankle is roped to a hole and it’s just a matter of time. So meeting new people or talking about it is just a disservice to others. Whatever illusion other people can muster, I hope other people can keep it, because the rawness of all of this is just too much. Then I think that's all bullshit of course I could, I just need the right season. 

I have not felt safe in years. I think about if there were suicide stores where we could just go get an injection or a breathe helium and off ourselves, millions would do it. It would be the only thing to get the Orange Slut off the news. All the world would need is a tipping point and the bodies would just be leaping into pits to end this farce. Fuck it humanity, if you don’t want to be here…if you are this cruel, I am exhausted and an asshole. I am no hero, no voice, a shitty writer whose best talent of saying no to his demons is quavering.

I miss the sunlight. But I know it exists. I stay for the sunlight behind the clouds, knowing as Eric Draven taught high school me, it can't rain all the time. 

An Image of the Male Body

The untouched male body

I live in

Walks into a dark house at eight p.m.

And talks to himself

With simulated sitcom conversations

Of how was and guess what

Dinner is always in the refrigerated plastic

Cooked ahead for the week

Consumed in totality by this stomach and these lips

Subsisting in a deficit of tactile contact

Recycled folly exercises honed in the realization of the way

A woman texts “I don’t feel romantic potential between us.”

The awful politeness of coded honesties

To be a man who was engrained so young to know

I am one of the ugly ones

I think women look at me the way I look at the ugly women

So it is one big animal pit of fleshed judgment

I am almost forty  

The sexlessness is the only Catholic thing left in me

I can no longer blame god for the celibacy

This is just dry runs bathed in PTSD and the mirror

The ghosted unreturned phone calls and the never given chances

This time I gave her a ride home mid-date

After she left to move lumber from incoming rainfall

My penis finds this humorous

The curtesy, the indifference

Never long enough to receive hatred or anger this decade

Just terminal expedient assessment of no thank you

A divorced man with an executive salary

A yoga body with muscled abdomen

A full head of hair

Re-transplanted top-dollar smile

And this face of lonely blue eyes 

Questioning his entire life how to talk to females

As anything other than friends

The sexlessness exudes my pores so much

I was once kicked out of an erotic writers group

By email because my demisexuality was not up to snuff

No retort just go, please stop, another no thank you for your service

We just do not see how you fit in here

I remember the week before my wife left

After ten years the last time we had sex

Was at her company Christmas Party

At a hotel on Bourbon Street

The image of her body on top of me rattles in my brain like rape

I remember how she insisted on the condom

I remember her anger at showing me in public

When we went downstairs for the dinner

I remember how clueless I was of what she was about to announce 
The unreadable beast was soon to devour me in courtrooms

I think of this decade since

This so long untouched skin

I want to feel safe

Like there ever was a place

Timid for coquetry in this Me-Too era

I want to play

Patience from the other seems so short

To get to know these cheeks

Like rusted bicycle spokes unridden left out in the rain

Sometimes I put my fingers to brushing up from the neck

Washing up to forehead, closing my eyes

Dreaming that this is not my limb

That the whole universe is one big thing

So it is like even in this dark house at eight p.m.

I am not alone.
Laughter percolates in a tussle of permanent loneliness

Naked honesty since thirteen that this predictable

Early death, unattended cremation outcome keeps materializing

The deadliness in sex, fear in touch

The consequential atrocities of an untouched human body   

Thoughts with Hands over Eyes

I just want to feel safe.

Hungry Corpse

I find a vampiric hunger for the sacred feminine

That is inside this masculinity monstrous

Hedging passage into the suicidal,

For this untouched muscle is a living death

To hold conversation expressing feeling

Without the belief of perceived transmogrification

Into the lot of stalker or internet comment section hunchback

Smattered in either indifference or ignominious castigation

Isolate into the self-talk, the closet of silence

Knowing the ringing Tinnitus, the vertigo illusions

Of wanting to feel greenery inside

The cobwebbed shadowed compartments of post-divorce Me-Too America

The over-abundance of caution in dating the nation of the once sexually abused

The reluctance to initiate coquetry without this hedge maze of consent

Inside one’s psyche that says, “She does not really even want to be here.”

Knowing I could be fooled for a decade of a marriage and not know

There is an anchor in me, a carving tool of metal plunked to the sea floor

Clawed in through hurricane and rig explosion

A deep-well Louisiana oil muck

The Kraken that fled me into the cavern of atheism

Safety in nonbelief

That there ever was a plan

Merely billiard ball mathematics

In the countless tears to the empty side of the bedrock

Crying out as if there was a nest of breasts to lay my cheek

These eyes at rest in fathomless softness

So foreign to manhood that this body shakes in caked on metal

Armored skin to breathe in and out without fidget

My body becomes ever isolationist

Statuesque dehumanized in such unipolar sensorial intake

An inner world of convalescence tasting compassion like contraband whiskey

The slow sip of old fashioned bitters in a gentleman’s agreement

Hope shall not enter here

I am not allowed to be an injured thing

I am to be a hunter, confident in a world of monsters

Daring to say I would like to get to know you

Is the talk of flowered men stomped and castrated

Be a devourer, comment on the deliciousness of women

Boast of rapaciousness, bulge and detach serpentine jaw

Slide maw, disclose nothing and ask, “Do you want hear The Snake story?”

I know the terror in misplaced hope.

The moved-away, the absent invitations

The wanting to kill myself dogeared pages

The prayers for any kind of response

The rut of libraries and skipped school lunches

The fear of the sitting in a large space

Building up skin to learn how to go everywhere alone

To accept this is how life was likely always to be

I remember the anticipation in knowing when the jig is up

When the other party you so wish to believe

Will help break the pattern can smell the desperation on you

Recycling the exquisite silence

The bubbled garbled speech

Wrinkled oddity

Hours that go by like descending pillared prison bars from heaven’s cackle

Splintering perception through which one perceives one more soul off limits

Choice of sequestered silence absent explanation or interest

In how another is feeling to interface with commensurate presence

The immensity of disproportionate valuation registers

Like water to a desert or rainforest dweller

So it is the nature of things

These mirages

Always so hungry mouthing phantasms of hope

In dead bodies  

Note to the New Feminist Protocols - 2018

If men are expected to up our games in the nuance of flirtation,

Knowing our entire reputations can be destroyed for an incorrect calculation,

And yes this power exists and men fear it whether you have no intention of misusing it.

We can trust your discretion all we want, nevertheless this threat exists.

And yes we fear this whether you want us to or not.

And yes we will not approach some of you or

Not speak up in certain situations where we may have in the past where you wish we would,

But we will be by nature more selective in this paradigm,

Because yes some women do attempt and accomplish ruining men’s lives with this power.

So in exchange for this respectful caution,

Please consider applying a reciprocal calculation

When you choose to break up with men in the ghosting department.

When you ghost us,

On some level, whether you wish to apply this or not,

It indicates an implicit indictment or our incapability to handle a face to face declination

Or cessation of the dating experience.

Aside from the normal discourtesy,

It is a measure of assignment that a man is closer to the cannot be trusted

With not turning into an abusive character

Or is somehow emotionless in heartache to the end of the relationship in part because of his masculinity.

If women expect men to heighten emotional intelligence,

Male responsibility must coincide with female trust

For the masculine to carry emotional weight including the witnessing by females of his pain.

Do not treat our hearts like mechanic contraptions for we are not.

That is all. 

Stagger Tongue - 20180107

Startle haze spyglass doorway

Coffee shop and I do not drink coffee

Alcove on the left I see you motion

Invitation to approach

In staggered tongue I admit sometimes

It takes me a minute, the stimulus the buzz of it all

Gets to be too much

Two cups of jasmine tea and you ask me

About being an introvert

I mutter about an amygdala

Comfort quilt brown eyes

In the corner of tea jars and a box of lost umbrellas

I found you

In a New York sweater in my New Orleans

There is an observant part of you

That flushed me with permission to be

That is to say, a man who has been taught to hide

Who has long talked to the empty pillow

As if somewhere you were out there in first acquaintance cliché

Nine years of mine and six years and four months in age

Wondering why this flight south
Shaken snow feathered goose down

For a one-bedroom apartment cheap rent and fifteen houseplants

AmeriCorps let you decide where to help

Memories of a father’s Jazz Fest pilgrimage

With music in bold lungs

Zest for clarinet and piano and his second daughter songbird

Here in black and white cloth, blond curls

Tidy stature, bibliophile, brilliant teeth  

Help me remember my own in the whispers

Cured spice bustle of background mocha aficionado chatter

Middle of three sisters for the middle of three brothers

Choir singer like my mother

Father held family round table talks on Sundays

A man with four females

Daughters and fathers

Dating remembering the dead and the abusive

A morsel in me appreciates you have him

Knowing the injury of when a woman no longer can look at a man

My thirteen-year-old daughter

Model for how a man should treat her

Your father cried watching Cadillac Records

Beyoncé playing Etta James singing At Last

I think he must think of you at the microphone 

Younger sister Paul Simon shoes in Connecticut

Older sister pencil skirt big-job married to the Dane in Chicago

Younger brother coffee-fiend / record label marketer

Older brother tattoo artist married to the Canadian in Ontario

Mother paints and you shyly describing your father’s boating

Without saying the word yacht

As if the gilded tinge of something to create distance and yet love

About who you are and how close and sliver of trepidation

Mixed in how others have seen kin intimacy

As threatening in the frivolity catalyst quintet

Of those Sunday shared secrets of where is privacy in bond

Ferried truths of Carnival’s beginning

The bone gang drumming around America’s Jackson Square

A place of memory 1999 New Year’s millennium

On the steps of St. Louis cathedral

Crows on a wire outside your apartment

Recollect an epilogue unanswered of a woman in a crowd

At the pinch of sunset, you exit the door

Hair blown out, straightened, those brown eyes in mascara

Effort offered

I struggle to find the unstartled aperture to compliment you

Until candlelight at a table in the Bywater

Admitting the overanalytical too often bests the obvious

Jazz on the radio, lips moist in delicious patter

Closed eyes welcoming, hum infused animal exhalations

Palm on nape

Deliberate desire

Collusion of bodies in passionate embankment

With a woman prone to buckle her seatbelt

Knowing she is about to be kissed

I become chaos

Love is not an ordered being

Flood of the tempered

Under streetlights of my new favorite restaurant for its spectacular parking lot

Remembering a mariner weary of sirens promising to gnash

The steeple women, the burlesque scorpions, the kundalini yoginis

A mermaid I have yet hear sing

Tale in a barstool of a twelve-year-old boy waiting for his grandmother

Who you help find the confidence to be heard as a person 

Walk out of the bar of cat theater and erotic poetry

Toward a school like the crow on the wire

Spots we have passed so many times before

Innocuous and yet we jolt

Henceforth those places bear gravity inextricably infused in memory

Of how a person does not plan such intersections

Life startles us stagger-tongued

Such beautiful collisions