In My Wilder Dream (poem story)

 I woke up at the motel on Graygutter Ave, mucus-choking with lame sorrow and inhospitable sleep. I made sure the phone still didn't work. The phone still didn't work. The clock on the wall said 9:06 like a streetthug rethinking his bank account. And my cab was on time, I had these handsome shoes, enough cigarettes to make the night sky famous and fair. Out the door, graffiti in my lungs, hand on the metal door and inside, up the stairs to my therapist's office. She has the inspirational posters everybody has, platitudes, Eastern Christian Philosophy with graphics to make you reconsider how many times you'll die or if once is enough. I pulled the door shut behind me. I sat down in a chair. I thought about the rules. "How's it going, today Mr. Lopez?" "Oh, it's going," I said. "I'll complain as soon as possible." She smiled. My therapist has this look of serious injury, like a cow with a broken leg that doesn't know it's its leg that's broken yet. I started seeing her after the last one made threats of suicide faster than I can drink beer or roll joints or count the days getting away like traintracks. This one wasn't any better, but sometimes you've got to compromise. "Have you been keeping a journal like you said you would?" she asked. "I'm doing my best. Sometimes the words aren't there." "It's the effort that counts." "The effort hangs over my questionable sleep with a razor like a Frank Sinatra ditty." "Oh? You like Frank Sinatra?" "What choice do I have?" She leans back in her chair, her eyes undressing something I can't reach. She moves her knees apart, like a robust 'v' and I know we're bartering. June floods bashing and howling outside against the giant windows. My gut sinks down to one of those bad portals they'll tell you you're crazy if you dare to acknowledge out loud. I don't say anything. I wouldn't tell her how bad my mother fucked me up for a million dollars. I don't want to climb into her bed, either (of course). I think about what I've got to do to get out of this place, but the phone doesn't work. There's enough scar-tissue on my soul to write my way back to the beginning. 

I'll make sure to snatch a few business cards on the way out. You never have enough scratch-paper. You've just gotta remember where your feet are s'posed to go. Everything else takes care of itself after that. 




****




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Various Appointments (to be completed, soonish)

ONE  At night, he'd lay a plastic tarp in a wooded area near the edge of the city he relied upon, a certain modicum of gratitude in the ritual. He'd remove the comforter from the large leaf-bag, unroll it, shake it, lay it upon the tarp. He'd take some default note of the temperature--typically cold--and provoke a small memory of endurance, push against the unkindness of his situation. It was all but permanently bad, hardly more than an accumulation of rudeness and inhospitability that consumed the energy and good will that wagered against it. He'd lay a backpack with a few books and like supplies and everyday needs such as a toothbrush at the head of the blanket and remove his coat and sweater and fold them into a pillow and set the bundle atop the backpack. The hard air running slow and steady through everything. And on nights when he was sober enough to, he'd remove his shoes, socks, pants, shirt, and set these somewhere dry enough, close enough, for the morning....
Read more

the respiratory habits of fish

if there's some habit, vitamin, pharmaceutical that corrects short attention spans I haven't seen it.  all day long my eyes drown in the hapless, abject conformity of turdsuckers overpiling with words and not a flare of meaning or  whit discernible,  their voices trapped in some world before language: immigrants of this unwanted country this timeline all futures would beg to be spared from-- the leaves and the rocks and the wind and what else move in the space of the expanding universe and I try  to meditate on the respiratory habits of fish: those whose ancestors navigated, bred  endured trials century and millennia old, hungry, thinking creatures with a perception older than dinosaurs, citizens of a world no name has been provided.  **** 
Read more

glass [and] razorblades

 glass ~ even the routinely-poor are afforded  some small mercies and graces --  earlier, today, for instance  a discreet 3-panel  animation of a woman  smoking in close-up  of narrowing proximity  rolled into my periphery of  a sudden at the weedstore  and, tonight, outside the church  where my eyes close to some rest:  the fierce stone of the architecture  spraying indismissibly into  the moment...  ...when counselors,  nurses,  clerks, interviewers,  doctors, various staff  ask me why I consume  alcohol to the degree I do,  this is what I can't remember  or manage  to tell them, this  perpetual, permanent  withering, something abundant yet  feeble in its abundance, the glass  before something else  that always  was.  ****  razorblades  ~ stuff this into your brain:  there's this overflowing pile  of billions and more...
Read more