He who lives in the moment lives eternally

Christembre

2011-09-30T22:48:00.001-07:00

Down by the riverfront, or so it’s been chanted
Lies a building where the ninth month of the year has been duly supplanted
Replaced by a vector of little bohemia
by artists and musicians and poets who speak in alteration and onomatopoeia
congregating en masse where art adorns the wall
in the month playing host to the equinox that is fall
all sharing their works in a bouquet of leafy foliage
Orchestrated by a simple painter, and the name of the month he decided to pillage
They gathered agog in this aesthetic den, artistic lair
So join us know as we reminisce over each calendar square.

We listened to stories snuck in a few frigid Pabsts
and devoutly supported the cause presented by TAPS
the ghost accompanied the bass in ambient shrills
to the work of Mr. Ankrum which gave me the chills
especially when the reverb resonated oh so lo
before hearing the story of awakening by Jeremy and co.

What a joy it always is to wade in the dulcet imagery
compliments of Miss Jessica Stephenson
John Phillips facebook profile features a quote from Mason and Dixon
and whose prose is reminiscent of a prow from a ship
skidding vowels into an unknown sea
read in a gallery offering caffeinated samples from a company called broken tree
The maverick known as DAZ was on hand to transcribe
and optically chronicle while poets’ imbibe
He details winged guinea pigs in an art sine called Faerie
and how cool it was to have an intellectual discussion with a lass named Cheri

Adam read his narrative straight from the text
and that Krazy long haired poet who always writes about sex
and the human experience which is often lonely and hard
Aaron Strickland always tells it like it is a carefree drunken bard
next to works of art that will leave you still life awe and feeling full inside
while basking to the syncopated chimes of Suit en tie guy
who played along with View from Mothership, Gush in Cloud in thrashing loops
while the audience orbited their torso's in one Miss Lynn's hulahoops
That hillbilly southern song writer whose voice remind me of Lucinda Williams, I reckon'
Derrick sang straight from the last name of his Hart which beckons
acoustic twangs above the art shows heralding neon brow
Check out that cool guitar buy chief journalist Justin Glawe!!!!

There is art that will destroy you and make yer heart tilt
Not to mention the worlds largest polyurethane bag quilt
Artists like Keith Wilson, Wes Duffy, Connie Fauth have been in
KT DID creates art and she doesn't even have a drivers license
Phoebe attacks the canvas in striking agitated blows
her art dances in tandem to the colorings rendered by Kathy Oh.
There is Anthony's Couri's anatomical homage to the late marquis de sade
and a room dedicated to a sexy artist named Raghead
Some of the most alluring paintings that I have ever seen
and man, you just have to experience firsthand the work of eddie the fucking art machine...

….And then in the back perhaps if you squint you shall see him
the artist whom the month was named after in filched appropriation
the gallery's now most conspicuous tenant
interviewed on television by the infamous Joe Benett
You'll see him stroking the canvas with mellifluous intent
wild paint splattering, pent up sperm recently spent
ejaculated across the forehead of the canvas in searing encores!!!
as the audience screams out I WONT BE BROKEN ANYMORE!!!
Akin to Kerouac's roman candles, the Soul at both ends that doth burn
the spirit that ascends while the flesh achingly yearns
for a metaphsyical union while eventually you glean
that art is a reflection, it is your own life that has meaning
..so those times you are lonely and down on your luck
those souls who are there for you and people who fuck
you over and over when you have no where to go
There is a place on Jefferson, It's called the Art Show
with artist that are polite and vivacious and somehow never curt
watch out for numerous sightings of Erich Gilbert
when music and readings take place we will always dim the lamps that are best
paying homage Will's legendary readings held Champs West
and in between acts perhaps with a prayerful chest lull
discern art and poetry is alive and sometimes nocturnal
in this little art gallery Hannah covered on Solitary Journal
ferrying downtown so much sprinkled euphoria
the building David Foster wallace mentions in his novel set in Peoria
A toast of gratitude or apt elegy to be sure
to thank you so much for coronating this month of September
like tonic sans the gin it would be an alchemical-sin
not to thank visiting artist Christopher Robin Keller
and the Curator, the Lovely Miss Gavra Lynn....

It takes a tall man to cast a great big shadow, boy ( part aye.)

2011-07-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

You arrive home between split shifts in the splattering hard nickel breath of late January just after dusk, the forehead of the planet bowed away from the nearest solar bulb so that everything is draped in a cape of winter ink. The stove is still on as you enter the backdoor, a propane Pentecostal bluish-hiss is heard as you wade inside as if being metaphysically reeled through the linoleum igloo-white of the kitchen, through the dining room where plates have been situated in front of the vacant ribcage of chairs. You see him in the living room where the geometric slate of the television is still on, seated in the pink recliner, his head tilted, body seated in the fashion of a upthroned patriarch at a renaissance fair who has just imbibed too much mead. His glasses are still on. His lips are contorted in a rubbery fashion that looks like a preschool mother’s day corsage craftily configured out of pipe cleaners and twist-ties. You touch the back of his neck. It is still warm the way that herbal tea might be described as being tepid in a café menu. You ask him if he is okay. You shake his body gently at first and by the shoulders as if he were some sort of magic 8-ball at a junior high sleep over. You peel open the hush lid of his eyes. You shake him again, this time with distillated vigor. You clap your hands in front of his face. You tell him to snap out of it. You tell him to quit fucking around. You tell him to quit playing. It is like his body is some sort of limp question mark that has been trampled and pissed on and fortuitously placed at the end of a long run on stream-of-conscious sentence teeming with Joycean proportion, say the fleeting narrative blink that is one’s exhaled shot at the expired breath of existence.

You tell him to quit fucking around again. You shake him again. Your voice clads itself in an authoritative monotone devoid of either a scream or that of a yelp.

You reach for the phone with your thumb stamp out a singular nine and twin-tandem ones and tell them that you just arrived home from work and that you found your roommate unconscious and that his neck is still warm but that you can’t seem to snap a pulse out from his deflated anatomy. The voice on the other end tells you that he is sending an ambulance and then informs you that he is going to need you to implement CPR and that he will dictate instructions to you on how to do so. You tell him that you have already been trained in CPR. At the same exact time the siren across the street from the apartment you will find yourself crashing in come two months time nasally begins to shrill as if it signaling an air raid as you hoist and lift and lug his oversize six-foot four frame off the chair where he is seated. His entire anatomy seems like it is dripping, a saturated curtain of listless flesh. He still feels warm. It is almost like you are endeavoring to ferry a sarcophagus made out of waggling hospital jello as you place him on the Persian carpet below, his head toppling back, listless, smashing into the floor offering the domestic area code of the living room an echoing gavel. A punctuating thud.

You got your CPR certificate renewed just two weeks ago.

Down on one knee as if proposing to death you pinch his nose like a light-switch and flip back his head, leaving his mouth agape the size of a neon-turf hole at an abandoned mini-golf course. In supplicatory fashion you kneel close and inhale and bend down towards the nozzle of his lips. For some reason every time you plosively drill breath into his body you close your eyes. It is like your entire body is scrunched into your purled cheekbones and tense facial muscles and that you are cannonballing into the deep end of a pool during summer free swim for the first time.

The first time your lips crash into the crevice of his mouth you ricochet back in jilted disgust. The welt opening that have become his mouth tastes like sandpaper made out of an overturned car ashtray. You reel back in a sort of stuttering revulsion, a sour expression folded into your face. You spit. You cough. Your shoulders seem to perform a little electrocuted tango. You have never had a taste like that in your mouth before. Tersely you think of the expired grocery list you made when you were all of twenty-five at the kitchen table of all the different females you made out with over the years and how they were just a random assortment of etched integer rungs leading up a ladder leading to nowhere. Mike’s body is still in front of you like some sort of raft sans paddles. You can’t get his taste out of your mouth. You tell yourself to be strong. You tell yerself this needs to be done. You tell yourself you can resuscitate him. His body is still above room temperature in spring.

You tell yourself you can do this.

Sans grooming trepidation of any kind, you plug his northern air passages again, press your lips into his face as if you are making a Xerox copy of the god gene and blow like hell.

You listen into his neck for a pulse. You configure your palms in dyslexic prayers and press down into the center of his chest. An audible crackle is heard the first time you knead the lower vector of your palms into the center of his body signaling that you have broken his ribs. It feels more like you are practicing resuscitation techniques on an abandoned carpet filled with broken Christmas tree bulbs then on a viable human being whose organs are still fresh and transplantable. You try not think how in the renewal for CPR they instructed you to perform the rote chest pumps while blithely humming along to the BeeGees ‘Staying Alive.' You perform the twenty interval rote thrusts and administer two more safety breaths, still inexplicably welding close the shutters of your eyelids every time you plough the oxygen of your being into that of his own body as if trying to bulge air in the plastic nipple of a water-wing. You have nothing against kissing a man but the taste seems to linger in your mouth is what can most aptly be described as noisome. You listen to his neck again as if trying to hear the ocean through a conch in the middle of the contiguous states. You order Mike to stay with you. You order him to work with you. His forehead is the color of a thoroughly used q-tip. Everything about his anatomy seems urine flavored and somewhat sallow.

You check the temperature of his forehead as if he is body were nothing more than a holiday oven. He is still all of warm.

You repeat drumming into the center of his chest which now somewhat concave. The hi-pitched sneeze of the West Peoria fire siren is beginning to detumesce. You have been performing cardio pulmonary resuscitation on him for a good eight minutes, hammering into his chest for twenty-chartered increments at a time, before blowing into body, listening for the recess bell of his pulse and then repeating.

You still can not get that taste out of your mouth.

It will be more than a week later when you will come to the cathartic acknowledgement that you just had a 10 minute hardcore make out session with an expiring corpse.

A neon thrash of variegated lights reminiscent of bad disco strobes through the living room window. Two officers with short crisp hair erupt into your home without knocking, one of them is carrying a defibrillator under his arms in the fashion of suitcase explosive and bad cable. You tell them you have been performing CPR on him for about the past eight say ten minutes. One officer begins to open the defibrillating stowing briefcase while the other kneels down next to you and says he’ll pump if you continue to blow. Furniture has already been scattered across the room in unlit bonfire fashion and from the stilt-like shadows cast from the overturned lamp the silhouettes respectively cast the treble-clef shapes of the officer and yourself bowing and pressing and blowing resemble nylon colored pistons culled from a nuclear generator or a silky stage backdrop from the thespian production of the titanic the engine room musical.

He continues to press and you continue to blow. The secondary office has completely unbuttoned the front of his shirt and is applying little crop circle like stickers into the center of his chest. The voice on the defibrillator sounds like a female variation of KITT from Knight Rider counts to three before erupting into his anatomy. After the feminine voice administers a third shock with lilting authority you tell the officers that you need to run upstairs and attend to Anthony. You tell Anthony that Mike is having company and that he needs to stay upstairs. He gets money from the state every month because he’s listed as functioning retarded but he’s not dumb. He can intuit from the echoing pinwheel splash of red and blue light that something downstairs rather significant is somehow transpiring. You rush back downstairs and find that an ambulance has pulled up into the cement tongue of your driveway and that paramedics are kneeling nativity-fashion around his splayed body. More furniture is thrashed and overturned. Butch from next door comes over to see what all the fuss is about. You tell him that Anthony is upstairs and he says that he will attend to him. There is something eerily reminiscent of Titian’s image of a limp Christ’s body being dragged off the cross and Mike’s body is hoisted on gurney and led through the front door, almost like they are trying to ford a canoe midstream. You give the officer your cell number and tacitly try to explicate who you are and your relationship to the man on the steel hammock. The Ambulance skids off in staccato-like bleeps down Heading Avenue. You ride with the West Peoria fire chief who has an albino handle-bar moustache who you know from the bars and who last you hung out with three weeks ago watching the flames billow and snap as landmark Haddads grocery sunk into a nesty graze of ash.

You tell him that he’s had heart problems before. You tell him that he’s been spacey over the past month although honestly you’ve seen him much worse. You tell him how, two years ago, when you found yourself moving back in with him, he weighed a hundred pounds more and was always screaming in his sleep and once even fell asleep behind the wheel and skidded his Cadillac off the interstate. You tell him that two months after you moved in, he bounced back, he lost weight, he had more pesky energy than a jouncy excessive sugary-satiated third grader the day after halloween most days. He just didn’t stop.

You arrive at the almost stagecoach entrance to the emergency room and follow the gurney inside the building like a church procession. Mike is ferried into a room with enamel white doors which flaps open. You can hear them hovering over his body, administering shocks. You can hear some sort of bleeping metronome. There’s more shocks. If you look in you can see the shadow of his body undulate and swerve against the dun paneling of the wall.

Your fucking cell phone doesn’t get service in the ER so you use the phone behind the counter. You trying calling your mom and leave a message. You call your best friend Hale and can’t get through. You call several of Mike’s contacts and leave urgent messages for each one you to call. You can’t phucking get a hold of anyone and right now, you are in the hallway and you are all alone.

There is something overly sterile about the interior of ER hallways, as if the arrival of death will somehow be welcomed germ free.

It has been ten minutes. An aged rocker with a braided cigar ash for a beard and a correlating pony tail who has been in a motorcycle accident is wheeled in next to you in the hallway and he is trying to remove his neck brace and the ER nurse with a voice sounding more like squeaky gymnasium tennis-shoes is asking him not to move while addressing him as sir although he is defiant. One by one the paramedics who were moshing inside the interior of your living room all of twenty minute ago push and exit through the flaps and into the whiteness of the hallway, each of them having their heads askance into the blades of their shoulders like they are trying not to look directly into the sun while operating a vehicle. A few of them seem to be exhaling heavily, their vision skirting nowhere near the direction of your face. There is an aura of everything feeling deflated. There is a feeling of pressing the pause button in the metaphysical video game called life before toppling over the playstation precipice variegated cliff and witnessing the GAME OVER sign sink into the center of the screen. For some reason you are certain that he is going to be fine. He was fine this afternoon before you bitched and groused and kicked the side of the wall after writing for five hours telling Mike that you hated every facet of your life and he made you lunch before you left to go to work a double. More medical personal plow through the doors as if leaving the kitchen to wait tables and note one of them stop to look at you though you make it an overt point to offer a gruff and austere chin nods in their directions. The last one out is the doctor who looks at you and perhaps void of any other pertinent explanation asks you simply if you are the son of the old man who just passed away. The old man who is no more.

The old man who just died.

Chasing after you with my 8-bit Nintendo sized heart, baby…

2011-02-21T01:05:00.000-08:00

Grisly myogenic robot-headed console
shushed in yawn
Replete with DUCK HUNT AND SUPERMARIO BROS. upon purchase
A laser gun two tedious control pads
which look like something Amish women might use three
Days a month as a sanitary napkin

to sop up the spilled blood of the feminine lamb

Reset power-button winking
At you from the opposite corner of the bar
Invitation to grope joystick of the male anatomy
accelerate through the next level
In search of a thumb-print sized

Air-headed princess
who, in reality, would probably
never abandon the money-colored dragon scales
of her suitor for a poor man’s middle-age
Italian plumber like yourself

When first we met that night baby

We fit together
Like Tetris blocks

The geometric shapes of our bodies
Free-falling
Contorting like a parachuting anvil

Learning how to slip
Into the distilled
Gravity of each others flesh
Snapping chasms of whispered silence
Spaces across the windshield nothingness of a Russian plain

Dissipating all together in one townhouse sentence of joy

I chased you across neon bleeps and zaps of fairytale kingdom
Stomping on turtles-with wings oblivious mushroom
Sized creatures resembling beanie baby STD’s
Garnering points that rise and evaporate like steam
Banging the brow of my working-class forehead
Into a QUESTION mark shaped brick of reality
Hoping for a one-up mushroom, an extra life
Cursing like QBERT when I found you downtown
in the arms of another man
Wishing I could ejaculate fireballs at him

That I could battle him

crunch him

defeat him

Watch his body phase
in and out

slowmotion demise

A game over sign

Flaring inside me
Asking me If I would like to press
start back at the first level
in electronic pursuit
just to find you somehow again
Inside my chest
where my heart
Is shaped like the cement bone
8-bit Nintendo System
a dated entertainment
The box we sometimes had to unplug
and bow in front of first
blowing into its rectangular
lips several times
before inserting the cartridge
and pressing play.

Rearview reflections and mirrored muses--a remberance of 2010, the year that somehow escaped us still....

2011-01-19T08:23:00.000-08:00

The year convened with the billowing hard-Arctic cough of a mid-January wind skidding down from the feral tundra of the north in icy sheets of isolation and hollow blankets of loss banked beneath the chalky outline of petoskey flavored clouds looming overhead in grisly claustrophobic blimp-like fashion, as if gazing into the plateau of the planet through the lidded ceiling of smudged Tupperware, the writer addled and all alone on the cumulus bulb of a seasonally frigid globe trying to find something he had lost so long ago, changing my itinerary at the last second in the snow, boarding an unknown bus in the frost-riddled breath of downtown Chicago, looking at the barbed-wire lassoed ink of my expired decade old handwriting culled from a journal thirteen years earlier like an atlas of youth capitulated and loss, dreams as stale as expired new years eve confetti, finding myself in Milwaukee boarding a second chrome-colored bus heading north for three hours through the chapped snow abutments and abandoned barns breezing through what looks like leftover Leinenkugel country almost swearing that if I stare through the tint in the back of the window in the charter bus long enough I can see my nineteen year old visage staring back at me like an forgotten film negative, a strip of undeveloped light. Arriving in snowy paragraph footprints welcoming the bucolic hamlet that looks like a diminutive Christmas village as one arrives wailing and bleating into the periscopic consciousness of life, feeling like the size of a bushel of fodder corn all alone freshly ferrying carryon luggage lugged over my back like a Neanderthal man and a fresh kill trekking the three miles in the snow to my hotel room, stopping at the library to confirm the digits of her old address, chain-smoking with locomotive intensity as I meandered, stopping beneath an overpass and taking intermittent swigs from a forty, thinking of Chris Mccandless and Jack London tramping out into a glazed lip of unknown ice. The last time I was in this town I was nineteen years old and spontaneously dropped 500 dollars on a plane ticket just to wade in the scent of the sensual-seraph I had been writing letters to all summer (the kind you had to mail with a stamp, undressing the envelope w. the tips of your fingers, giddy with schoolboy elation upon finding the tithed rectangle in the creaky jowls of yer mailbox opening the white shape like trying to unbuckle a bra for the first time before skinny dipping into the sentences of her breath)long just to espy the solar wink of her smile, to hear the carbonated echo of her laughter. To buckle my northern anatomical limbs around her petite frame like a life preserver of hope before reeling her into my torso, splashing my lips against the cinnamon bagel-architecture of her neck. To read her the poems I had written for her. To recite her poems by Rumi and Shakespeare and Whitman and Jack Kerouac. To tell her that I wanted to be a writer.

To tell her that I wanted to be with her.

On a wintry-whim I decided to traipse to her town in the middle-o-bumfuck-nowhere curdled cheese countryside of Wisconsin somehow to find her once again even though she lives two thousand miles away dandling a two year old, the scent of her lover indenting the foamy topography of her mattress every night, following the tracks of my journal entry from over an eclipsed third of my life earlier. Eating breakfast at the same ma and pa restaurant where she testified in front of the empty jury pews of my chest that it just wouldn’t work out between us (note thirteen years earlier we were both furiously chain smoking in the booth when you could still light up in ma and pa restaurants). Ambling past the soporific shingles of her house the next day, thinking that if I squinted I could somehow see through the quantum bridal veil that is the transitory tissue of time, the illusory see through shower curtain of reality, could somehow perceive the inky shadow of the crisp haired nineteen year old lad from all those years ago. Uprooting instead a local nest of writers of light. Meeting Dave at Jim's. The immortal ROXY RENO who writes for a kick-ass indie publication in Green Bay called the SCENE, looks like a KILL 'EM ALL rendition of James Hettfield from Metallica, bounces at Cleo's and reads poetry on an overturned bucket like I read my poems on the pouting emerald lip of a local bar. The classy girl with short black hair batting the rich Caribbean azure of her eyes and who I was too (wait for it...wait for it)tattered-hearted and timid to speak to, handing the bartender a forty as I exited the Jim's on North informing to keep to buy her a bottle of the Merlot she was sipping compliments of the crazy yet shy lad seated at the far end of the bar. The year of the poetry of Kyle Devalk meeting him with both hands hovered and cupped over a beer as if trying to stay warm at a homecoming pep rally wearing a trench coat and beard looking like a 21st century ricocheting Rimbaud fraught with fire and wit, Kyle Devalk, a fellow poet beat aficionado, high alcoholic content microbrew drinker and a true brother indeed who I continued to pound beers with in clinking accelerated tempo before making out with the middle-age married woman at the end of the bar, groping her shaved treble-clef pudendum beneath the penumbra of the counter, not realizing at first that her husband was outside smoking, watching her head loll like an inebriated otter as I endeavored to yank her into he stall of the nearby MENS room, slamming more shots of Jameson before her husband rejoined us for another, the couple driving me back to my hotel room, having her repeat the digits to my room number to me one final time like a rote Sunday school bible verse memorization contest as we embraced, leaving the door to my hotel room slightly hinged open awaiting her breath as I passed out on my mattress anticipating her nocturnal arrival. Waking up five hours later, the sun entering the room like a vodka-screwdriver in translucent tangerine ribbons of flaring orange, myself stapled on the mattress in crucifix fashion, rising into the drunken earth of my flesh, slipping into my jeans like a denim mermaid fishing for her lost fin as I stuffed my bag like a grocery check-out clerk before leaking out of the bedroom sans kissing the snow globe center of her forehead faretheewell.

It was the year of arriving home and finding all of my friends out of work, desolate-eyed and downtrodden. Sad. Arriving back into the financial wound and working class welts of the sleepy river town where I live and finding everyone I love bruised and spiritually bandied, jobs wadded up like corsage-shaped overdue credit card statements of loss. My friends, working in the same tractor plant for over a third of their lives, dripping with emotional distraught, arduously assaying the inside of the classified ads, willing to work any shit-time job just to fleetingly arrive at the existential punctuated stump of another week, burnt out, jaded and alone.

The year where I worked six days a week, third shift, and had no social life whatsoever and felt like a burnt-out exclamatory mark all the time.

The year of falling in love with the domestic happy-hour cyber herald known as the Peoria Bar Review living vicariously through the elusive-shadowy entity known only as the chief (hell if I'm unplucking the feathery headdress of his true identity) vigorously stampeded through the bibulous underbelly of Peoria night life in search of soused stories of working class beer-belly blathered bliss yearning to intellectually imbibe and draught from the perfect pint and then blog the phuck-out about the aftertaste.

The year of "Shouldn't it be Jennifer Smith?? Think about it?" (Bobble-visaged pensive scowlish underwater slow-nod cosigning pendulous deep thought).

The year of obtaining the dilapidated BMW which I'm never going to sell--(it was the same type o' vehicle that was used in the Guns-n-roses Don't Cry video at the end where AXl is limping into the cemetery and sees his own grave)from my cool brother-in-law who simply handed me the keys in the middle of march madness, the day Northern Iowa upset top ranked Kansas and inquired if I could keep it parked in my garage and then inquired if I would be interested in purchasing it for a frivolously low price. The car I always find myself harnessing the steering wheel furiously chain smoking, blasting into the Flannery O'Connerish rye-bread colored country side of Illinois chasing the pastel sentence of a pink sunset through the windex silhouette of my reflection. The vehicle where, the second week after I found it stowed in my driveway, the swivel esophagus of the rear view mirror inexplicably fell apart, shattering into a visor of glassy triangles and rather than fixing it all I could think about was the Frank Lloyd Wright quote about how every time he gets a new car he rips the rearview mirror from the front window so that he "never looks back." To plow through life genuflecting into the direction of one ebbed and fleeting universal narrative and to not phucking look back ever at all.

Not looking back at all.

The year of (sexy) Barbara Antoniazzi...If all english professors were as sexy as you baby the catastrophic epidemic of errantly misplaced commas would be globally assuaged. Barbara who teaches Cormac McCarthy in Berlin and lectures at literary powerhouse Dartmouth in the summer. Barbara who stumbled across a poetic pasture of some of my writing when she was doing academic research on Nathan Englander (I've been a dilettante of his prose since the late-90's and I'm still not sold..."Tell us about yer new book Nathan. I bet you're really gonna be creative with that six-figured advance you garnered and the protagonist for yer new novel is going to be jewish again !!!").... Barbara who has said just gratuitously kind things about my writing and who herself is poetically pissing out a beautiful dissertation that has to do with (well, what else) the liberating feminine vagaries of high-brow prostitution in late-19th century (c)literature. Barbara, who has been a true buddy these last couple o' weeks as I've been emotionally dredging through some arduous times and who, after she uprooted me on line, I began addressing solely as Beatrice, to which our good friend Miss Antoniazzi then sent the following almost haiku-like missive back in return:

Dear Dante,
Beatrice died young and unhappy, you know that.
Moreover, it wasn´t me - although on the whole it sounds like a fun night.
We never met.
I found you.

...thinking only after I read it that sometimes it feels good just to somehow, in the narrative valence that is the rippled continuity of time, be found indeed...

The year Peoria native Marty Womabcher (whose liver must look like an elephant pissed on a cracker-jack box by now) jousted like a clumsy knight clad in alcoholic amour and frequented a different bar everyday for the dainty discourse of an entire calendaric year. Marty Womabcher who constituted and scribed this phenomenal bulletin called P.O.P. (sounds like what my Chicago relatives call my pepsi) back in the day and has been crashing in Manhattan for the past 18 years. Marty punctuating his year-long sozzeled sojourn of alcohol-induced ambrosia inside the kiwi-avocado lime pie flavoring ice-shack sized exterior of one of my favorite neighborhoods taps lodged in my backyard.

The year of finding myself draped in the pasty pergola of her limbs once again, late February, the woman I had spent the previous autumn making love to under the cosmic constellations doting the skyline of my backyard, floating into eternity beneath the clanging nest of galactic orbs, burrowing our respective loins into the life raft of each other's respective limbs as if entering the palette of the universe in sputtered, pedaling thrusts of aching consciousness, chiseling Egyptian hieroglyphics into the sweaty canvas of each other’s lower neck . The creature who dissipated like quavering coffee house incense mist around thanksgiving who I found once again, looking behind me at a poetry reading, only to see the coy hush of her smile. Misreading her Facebook profile status discerning that she is in love, misintuiting her mantra to mean the solipsistic creature I have been lodged inside of like a miniature windows-arrow-transitioning-time capsule for the entire discourse of my usurped existence, realizing only too late that she was reunited with a former friend plucked from an earlier highlighted chapter in the beautiful narrative of her life and that she is madly in love as the hard snow caking the scalp of the planet began to transition and slosh into weak-tea colored puddles of street gray, somehow the promise of a new found sun reflected in each muddy dinosaur footprint-sized moat.

Somehow the promise of spring.

Spring opening up from inside the fruity womb of the earth the way a woman opens up her body for the fleshy sheath of a man. Spring arriving in fused shocks of lavender and drizzled-lemon petals of iridescent light, the arable turf of the planet jisiming in countless colors of applause. Spring where I moved the writing desk belonging to my late-father out into the woods and wrote (long hand, on parchment) every morning, sipping coffee, sometimes knocking back a few beers after work, almost always doffing my shoes as to feel the pulse of the planet with the peninsula of my bare feet, wildly stamping away as if trying to click into the chorus of a sentence on 10 acres of raw nesty foliage-fretted land, a bulbous-chinned solitary slab of crisp earth galloping above the lavender silhouetted hills behind Cams bar on Farmington rd ejaculating the see-through-washing-machine of swirled oscillating emotions stuck inside the empty socket of my chest waiting for a metaphor to peck itself free from the egg-white freshness of a new page and to somehow hatch.

Spring where we planted Sully, Peoria's premier barkeep, into the used coffee grounds of the earth down the street from my house, dying on Good Friday, the incipience of the season of new life.

The spring where I became truant in paying off my student loans (note--nothing like owing 20,000 dollars to an institution that has your name on the wall in its most prestigious hallways and then who fired you for unfounded remarks).

Echoing in the chorus that is spring with cloudy cackles of laughter on the first fake-candle integer shaped day that is the formidable farce of April. Engendering an outlandish narrative about meeting the love of my life MAE DIFLOWRZ (b/c April 'fulachio' showers bring May (de) flowers) flaring amorous facebook status updates fabricating a fragrant dyslexic-ditzy star-crossed narrative about driving all night into the horizontal lavender slit of a pending Spring sunset down south sans state-required rearview mirror b/c, of course, I don't look back, plowing my carriage into the dusty arteries of back roads to find the girl I lost oh-so long ago, using a usurped photo from the ol'-spring-titled sitcom BLOSSOM b/c when I shear my hair short I look just like this phuck (ie, damn gaunt euclidean-angular nose that looks like a beak-shaped acute right angle from sophomore geometry class...no shit....when I was in great America in '92 all these teenage girls with crimped side-pony tails and tattered SKID ROW t-shirts and training bras kept accosting me for autographs and I played along and told them thanks for watching before scribbling something illegible below their necks and then the same scenario happened later in London that same year) christening a facebook page for my mock muse, employing the author-shot of then little known writer CE MORGAN to serve as my surrogate deflowering spouse, CE MORGAN whose anorexic Ashley-Olson sized novel ALL THE LIVING is the length of a vacation bible school bulletin with glitter and who was lil' known last April and then in June, hit the publishing lottery by being coronated with the NEW YOREKR appellation of TOP TWENTY WRITERS UNDER 40 (phucking richwads, well I have 2 Golden Liver awards for being the soused scribe to immortally imbibe the most 40oz. under the age of 40). The gag, working spilled wonders, garnering backward-hurled rubber chicken bridal bouquets of lapsed levity getting AT LEAST 10 of you (fess up, you know who you are) including one second cousin in Canada who sent me a forty-dollar check and offered congratulations and profusely apologized for missing the ceremony (um, spent the money on a half-keg of Moosehead lager there, eh) and an ex-girlfriend who sent me a scathing valentine stating that I had way too much time on my hands (which I replied, 'You outta see what I have in my other hand,'). By far the best response was from my old buddy Joe Milton who read that I got purportedly nuptially-manacled and then never learned it was all a laudable lark and three months later was in a bar telling a mutual friend that I must be busy with that new wife of mine when he discerned the hoax and sent me a tirade-laced three minute voicemail beginning with the vituperative phrase, "Dave you cock-sucking sonuvabitch motherphucker all this time!!!!!!" As for the author CE MORGAN (ie Mae DiFlowrz) I am certain we shall meet tete-a-tete someday. Writers harbor an incorrigible proclivity to tear into and open each others’ body with frissoned passion the same way they tear into and dog-ear annotate books so undoubtedly our incumbent meeting shall transpire in the same fashionable inflection of Ted Hughes meeting Sylvia Plath with either a mad cocktail-induced make-out session ensuing or simply she will bite me until drawing a pint of blood.

It was the spring where sometimes I just couldn't quit.

The spring where I went through three months where I just couldn't stop watching this movie and couldn't stop drinking beer while watching this movie, commiserating somehow with the life of cowboy drunkenly drifting into a beer-botched sage-brush blur of reality only to be awoken by the lips of a good woman chirping out the scent of her smile in the chords of a song.

Spring where my house got struck by lightening blowing out two televisions, a house alarm, a dvd player (my entire basement erupted in a vesuvius like sneeze) and where I lost everything on my desktop hard drive (always back shit up people).

Spring where, as is tradition, I find myself outside the granite collesium of US CELLULAR field in the southside of Chicago with my brothers Danish and Mike Nelson, drinking beer on the PERFECT opening day. Southside pride, watching with athletic awe (and from the first base sideline) when Mark Buehrle defied the vicissitudes of physics and made, quite simply, the play of the year hiking the stitched planetary orb like a football on fourth and goal into the knuckeled-clutch of a barren-palmed Paulie all the while Lord Nelson was straddled on the porcelain throne (you and yer damn beer shits mike).....

The year where spring sliced into the elongated evening chapters of a summer night and I found myself riding around the back country roads in tandem with my best friend Hale always smoking cheap cigars looking for Podunk-trashy country bars with female bartenders bearing big boobs and bad teeth. Bars with so much white trash you'd run out of twist ties if ever you'd ever try to bag it all up. Bars like McDucks (the Schlitz sign looks like the Atlas Shrugged cover from Van Halen's 5150) and the Goose Pit in Banner. Bars like the Edwards and Manito Blacktop tap and the Blarney castle in Rome Illinois, sitting down, having a few drafts, listening to peoples stories. The Shed in Buzzville on Lake Chautauqua sitting next to the seventy year old denim overall-clad farmer who spontaneously swiveled his bar stool in my direction and said, “Can you b’lieve this shit. My girlfriend gave Chlamydia. Phuck’n Kly-med-dee-uh. And she’s not yer young kids age either phuckin' everything in sight. She’s phuckin fifty. Shit.”

Places that are semi-seedy like Marty’s tap in East Peoria or the Get-a-way in my backyard. Katie McButts which I adore or Whitey's where I drank on my birthday. Larry's in spring bay where the bar is intrinsically an old-fishing shack and in the autumn the colors are achingly stunning or the Hannah city tap where the floor panneling has been kept the same since it was a railroad depot in the late 1800s. Drinking at Whitey's on my birthday the day I turned the same age as Christ b/c that was the last bar Sully drank at before he died. My best friend Hale driving me home in my vehicle, asking me what happened to my rearview mirror.

"I uprooted it out," I told him in a half-truth slovenly drawl, "I don't want to look back. Ever."

The summer of live art, Phoebe and co brandishing the stems of their paint brushes in orchestral conductor like-tandem on the cement hyphen of the riverfront splattering visual cadences of collective human longing with each flagellating stroke as the sun casts lavender ribbons of eternity against the lazy slink of water below. Phoebe who I found for the first time (met)sitting all alone a la ingenue-eyelided Ponette from Les Miserables on Bloomsday inside the sunken emerald glower of Champs West, sidling up to her with a Guinness in paw as if learning how to parallel park for the first time before dipping into the silent semi self-conscious hush of her smile.

The year of spending every other weekend in the air-conditioned brick-kiln like contours of my moms house off Smithville rd and spending HOURS combing through my novels on the marble desk she refurbished in her kitchen, staring out into the sylvan merkin behind her house, espying the swang-song shadows of hobbits and fauns, often nursing a DAVE's Pizza from Bartonville (can't beat their combo) as I continue to pelt and massage my fingers into the keyboard of a fresh doughy page.

The year of DJ Ferg. My cousin, forever the smirky countenance south-side smart aleck eternal rocker who extinguished his own individual demons and vices and now continues to shine.

The summer of witnessing my dear friend and creative cohort in all things passionate and poetic Heather Fowler, small press princess and nuclear incendiary-haired firecracker when it comes to productivity. Congrats on the release of your new book girl!!!Nothin' like the life of a wayfarerin' writer or, in yer case Miss Fowler, the lips of a sensual scribe french kissing the forehead of each fumbling vowel with a voice that is somehow all her own....

The Summer where, after two skipped laps around the sun, my hair finally spooled into the tanned canyon of my shoulders and became pony-tail length again and, for almost inexplicable reasons, I dyed the auburn tresses of my hair a menstruating shade of crimson...Danish asking me outside Comsikey park, "Whadidyoudo, have wet dream about that girl from the Wendy's logo again??? Nothin' like a post coital-frosty in lieu of a french fry eh-there Ronald McDonald?"

The summer where I verbally went off on (emotionally lacerated) the woman who for the last eight years served as my every poetic pulse, my creative compass, the bartered oxygen of my every breath. The woman I met while she was giving a lecture on mysticism and who I have this weird metaphysical bond where she gave me a chunk of copper that looks like a cancerous testicle and everytime I would think of her and grope the copper I would glow. The woman who I wrote a love letter to everyday for over two years even though she got sociologically shoved in a wedding dress when she was young and has been married since before I obtained my drivers license. The woman who when we were together our limbs would buckle around each other's limbs as if we were trying share the same husk of flesh, cloaking ourselves in the sway into the pond of each other's thoughts, wading in the time signature of each others breath and somehow it was gentle and pure and then it was still gentle and pure but it became about something more. The woman the narrative of my whole life revolved around like the earth to the nearest day star for over the past eight years. The classy creation I said things that I knew would hurt her, pissed that I wasn't her disgustingly rich husband, pissed that I felt I was never good enough for her to wake up next to every morning. Heading out after the tirade to my writing stump in the woods and witnessing the slow change of the seaons. The earth cooling off as if after an intense workout before practicing pialates. Crickets emitting sputtered intermittent time-to-change-the-battery-in-the-dildo staccato-like purrs, straddling the seat lodged at my writing desk all alone in late august when the refulgent nod of the sun paints the world through a bottle of Southern Comfort fools- gold yellow,the colors of the planet transitioning the earth into leafy shades of copper, chestnut, nutmeg, continuing to write, thinking about the last eight year using only the crust of the earth as my dashboard, the rearview mirror of reality being superseded by the kaleidoscopic veil of the setting sun as I continue to press my fingers into the keyboard welcoming a new season and a new page.

The year where we lost one of our own. My best friend Hale finding her body swaying like an upside-down metronome, an extension cord knotted into a fitting noose around the petite frame of her neck in lariat-colt like fashion, a CD playing some sort of GOTH song over and over again while her twelve year old progeny caterwauling out of control, spining around like a police siren emitting screams.

Jenny who was a heroin and later a hardcore methodone addict. Jenny who tried to commit suicide the week before by jumping off the Murray Baker bridge, only to be restrained at the last minute by a gaggle of police. Jenny who met her ex-con loser husband in AA and who had a schnauzer-like orange goatee and a skull-sized tattoo of a sick clown etched into the veiny dome of his bald head and who didn’t even show up to the funeral.

Jenny who married one of my oldest friends when she was 17 and he was only twenty (guess the name of the recently turned 21 year old lad who purchased the booze for the reception??)...Jenny who was only married to my friend for six months because he covertly taped her cheating on him. Jenny whose smile made you immediately tilt yer head and smile back at her for some reason and who had just plain disgusting things happen to her courtesey of a hornball freakish stepfather when she was very young. Jenny who is the mother of 12 year old Zac, the coolest kid I have ever known. Zac who b/c of his house situation was crashing with my best friend Hale. Hale who has had one bitch of a year and is out of work and who I have (quote) never heard complain or grouse or bitch even though when he was making bank and employed at CAT he was the bread winner for three families. Zac, irnoically, hanging out with my sister ('aunt bethany') running around the Gatsbyesque house her and her husband purchased on the lip of grandview drive overlooking what looks like eternity, playing with the cats, making "Kiddie-condos" out of cardboard boxes at perhaps the same moment his mother fitted the wiry extension around her head like a tiara of loss, tightened and pulled.

Thinkin' of this song though I hadn't heard it in years. Thinking how Jenny made her mattress only to lie in it. A princess bartering the beauty of the bridal chamber for a bed of syringes, thinking of bassist Kristen Pfaff who died on a heroin overdose shortly after this video was shot.Kristen Pfaff who died on Bloomsday '94. The day my favorite movie Before Sunrise purportedly takes place on, the summer I got my drivers license, always adjusting the rearview and side mirrors before coasting into the stream of traffic ahead.

There are other memories of course. Lifting up the front of Loorie Newmans shirt like the stage curtain to a victoria secret puppet show in the antique center with dave and Matthew and watching as her face transitioned into a blushed shade of burgundy.Flirting with Wendy at Tartann Inn (I wanna be Peter Pan to yer Wendy...Maybe you could help me find my shadow, baby). Reading GATE AT THE STAIRS and having the tang-colored light of a June night casacade all around me and just crying for the last forty pages. Hoisting the sixty-year old denim flanks of my uncle's legs in alighting teeter-tooter like fashion as he did a keg stand at my cousin Brianna's wedding and barking at him in fraternity-laced monotone to chug. Jessica calling me ‘Brawny man” as I shovled her tire free out from the snow. Sauntering with J through the clover aisles of Barnes and Nobles and watching with delight as the most erudite and well read mother fucker this area code has to offer alighted the untattered spines of Vintage contemporaries up to the ceiling as if looking for a watermark and smiled with joy. Coercing the writer Stella Link into a nature hike in Bradley park even though cinderella was clad in stilletos. Stella, adorning my neck with a cool necklace she crafted inside One World on a rainy august afternoon which, after almost six months, like a collar, has not left the shadowy circumference below my jawline and chin. Listening with awe to Jeff, my favorite bartender on the planet, at the Billy Goat tap to his stories of getting drunk with the late Mike Royko and Bill Veck. Painting Shannon’s apartment a pastoral shade of lime with Adrienne on a screeching autumnal night and listening to a radiohead CD which for some reason kept inexplicably skipping back to this song over and over again like a searing industrial chorus of existential loss. Looking at the chandelier overhead blown-fuse of expired stars and drained solar systems in my backyard with Dan Hinckley, talking about chatras and mulling over the metaphysics of all mankind and (oh yes)all the while making references to Morrissey. Sitting next to the 85 year old former editor of the Journal Star John Armstrong at Champs West while smoking cheap cigars, reminsicing in a plume of smoke the size of a sunday comic-strip dialogue bubble about the old writers and hard-drinking journalists from back in the day who just didn't give a phuck, feeling, at the end of the night, that a metaphorical torch of some kind has indeed been passed. Refelcting over Thanksgiving eve, chain smoking clove cigarettes in the rococo-flavored lobby of the Old Madison theatre remembering a time (remembering it well) when our tresses scaled back from the cognizant attics of our respective scalps like Rapunzel patiently awaiting the tug of a wished-for suitor with Charlie Bennet of Freudian Press renown apres his kick-ass reunion set at the Whammy bar. A minstrel. A wizened gen-x troubadour who wields his guitar upsidedown pelting out acoustic locomotive frets of loneliness, whispered epistles of eternity, symphonic folk anthems culled from the leftover childhood magic in the air of a cradled lullaby-- delightful indulgence of a dared afternoon daydream. Charlie and I who talked about Abbie Hoffmann and who is a serious baseball aficianado and who I can't thank enough for the role his music has played in the skipped soundtrack of my yielded youth.

The year of say chop-chop.

Chop-chop who is the size of a fire hydrant and is a vivacious perennial spume of energy.

Chop-chop who makes la-la Telly Tubby sounds when she cums. Chop-chop who I called drip-dry because she kept on using up all of my god damn toilet paper as in ‘learn to drip-dry, bitch..” (Chop-chop 2 DVB via text: Girls don't drip-dry, David. That's dirty-dirty). Chop-chop who is into antiques. Chop-chop who I get off on thinking about her with her jeans reeled down, lassoed around the ivory piano key-colored caps of her knees.

Chop-chop who tastes like a pop tart and whose freshly-cut cucumber porcelain hued flesh is classically reminiscent of sheet music sans the dripping dollop of imprisoned quarter notes. Chop-chop whose hair is a cidery orchard of autumnal flavored tresses and who looks just plain sexy as phuck in that checkered blue-flannel shirt always inexplicably buttoned to the top.

Chop-chop who for a glorious month last October-slash-November was like my best friend and whose smile does things to the interior of my chest.

Chop-chop who made me wait downstairs for I swear damn near a phucking hour the first night we met almost a year ago and I peed on the potted plant in the lobby of her apartment building at four in the morning and it overflowed like dropping a freshly opened agitated can of beer into a baptismal fount in front of the altar of God in an act of sacrilege.

Chop-chop who I christened with the moniker “chop-chop” after waking up in the stippled impressionistic yawn of early February the morning after having met her and hungover, endeavoring to scissor my way back into my jeans as she adorably shooed me out of her apartment cause her sister was coming over to look at her car, clapping her hands in stuttered applause echoing out the dual-syllable snap like a chorus as a feisty refrain to tell me to get the phuck out. Telling me to hurry up. Telling me to chop-chop.

“Chop-chop.”

Chop-chop who I didn’t see for six months and then had an awkward Age of Innocence Newland Archer staring up into the balcony of Countess Olenska in Paris end of the novel encounter and not having the balls to say anything moment when she drove past and I was helping my aunt move and we both kinda looked at each other still-life and poetically petrified and said nothing.

Chop-chop who texted me the next day.

Chop-chop whose facebooks statuses always crack me up and whose smile fueled me with this weird sort of kinetic splashing energy where I was just plain phucking happy all the time in a goofy way and where my chest felt like this helium beer keg of sunshine...an energy I somehow was able to harness and then (shit, phuck) write (sic) for hours on end.

Chop-Chop who would always erupt in a pint-sized carbonation of sprinkled giggles and then flirtatiously slap me with the wing of her left arm after I said something inane and then she would look down into her lap in coy-countenance fashion and then smile again and then point in my direction and tell me to shut up (shut was always one monosyllabic word said with a tilted smile) and then bat me with the lithe foam of her forearm once again.

Chop-chop who everytime she drinks a beer always inexplicably peels the moist label off in medias swig so it looks like she is giving the amber-colored stem of the scepter-shaped bottle a long overdue anniversary handjob.

Chop-chop with whom I commenced volleying long-long tortuous letters back and forth, each letter almost always ending in some Krazy-krazy video clip while devising a private lexicon: (Wait for it…wait for it), oh lord, (seriously) For Chrissakes put some panties on!! The write (sic).You Kill Me!!! The scribing out and delineation each others' dreams which we, for some psychoanalytical reason, both appeared in. The peacock. Talking to Gladys on a bananaphone by using my imagination, burt. Telling her to go queef into a cornet because she is always horny. Her telling me that I am forbidden to have sex on the giant trampoline in the house she wants to buy.

Chop-chop who taught me how to write (sic) the expletive 'fuck' using a ph to make it look more scholarly.

Chop-chop who always called me by my full name, which kinda meant alot.

Chop-chop who when I was havin' a bad day sent me a drippingly adorable picture of herself with a doted red-orb (???)photoshopped and buttoned over her nose which made me laugh.

Chop-chop who got drunk one night and sent me a message overtly ordering me to write her poems that would make her cum (note: I obeyed).

Chop-chop who I informed to refrain from answering her phone after one of our libidinous two-hour text-sex bed-tittering-meandering-messaging-phuck-fests, leaving the scene she shared with me from one of our video-bartering letters, the first clip she ever sent me from a movie I had never seen, stating that this is how she envisioned us initially meeting in a plural universe, me telling her that she plays very well.

Chop-chop: So do you.

The year which ended in the similar fashion in which it began, embankments of tufted snow aligning the chapped sidewalks of the town where I live, everything bone-marrow cold, the color of an expired ice-cube tray lodged and forgotten about for years in the back of a deep freeze. I found the bar I drank at in downtown Peoria the night my father died, doing shots of Jameson with my good friend and mentor folk singer Dave McDonald. Dave was also in Freudian Press back in the day and, like Charlie, is a troubador and a story-teller. He owns the guitar shop downtown next to the antique center and, like the rest of us, like my best friend David Hale like myself two years ago, like ten percent of the working class american pabst blue ribbon swiggin' populace, lost a job he truly cared about earlier this year. Dave and I who used to traipse from Braldey campus down to Jimmy's bar by foot through the frisbee-golf hurling hippies in Bradley park down Farmington rd, not too far from where my writing desk is now and sit in the beer garden and drink Jameson-sevens (tall! you won't find a more potent one in the state) and smoke clove cigarettes and poetically pontificate aout life. Dave whose anthem of lost "Merry Monday Happenstance" I kept on thinking about when my father died. It was noon and Dave and I were almost done with our lunch when he kicked his barstool in my direction and said, "You know what David?" (Dave has a deep trumpeting resonant voice, that sounds kinda like a cherub singing the blues with sandpaper lodged in his larnyx) "A couple of years ago bro I was in Red Rock (colordado music festival) and I was trippin' and I just started thinkin' about this one girl and I hadn't seen in like a decade. There were all these people around and I really strated thinkin' just about this one girl, I mean really thinkin' and then about ten minutes later I turned around and shit, she was there. We both live nowhere near where this festival is happenin' but shit, I thought about her and the next thing I know she appeared."

We both saluted our drug-tested size shots of Jameson, gave a farethewell-fellow-traveler tight squeeze embrace, wished each other a happy new year when Dave turned to me again.

"You know what bro? I think there's just something aout going out and finding a girl. Finding something you once lost. Finding something that once inspired you and meant something to you."

We hugged again. I went to my dilapidated BMW and thought about his mantra.

"Just something about goin' out and finding a girl."

As I drove through the vacuous-chilled eternity of the city where I live, I looked out the canvas of my windshield. I couldn't see the girl who 14 years years ago I gave up everything to be with and who last year I went back to her town once again. I couldn't see the classy artistic (noveau riche) goddess who the last eight years of my life evolved around. I couldn't see the woman I shared my bed with all those cold nights a year ago. If I squinted hard (real hard) I could probably make out chop-chop or at least hear her sprinkled laugh, chop-chop who I was meeting later on that night to celerate our christmas and who left her phucking kermit-the-frog flavored glue drizzled lancome-laced emerald vest under my bed which I had been sniffing the phuck out of like a high school kid trying to show how cool he is by ingesting cocaine at a house-party but truth is, I couldn't see her either.

I don't have a rearview mirror.

I don't look back.

When I arrived back to my house I went out into the woods back to my writing desk. It was maye fifteen degrees outside and too cold to take my laptop out but I still chained smoked and thought about the last year. I wrote a few pages, smiled, and somehow remembered that I still as of yet have a job to do.

Feather

2011-01-01T23:54:00.000-08:00

Your body hung like a wet quarter note pinched from
Sheet music so white it matched the pasty color of your forehead
The day before your first born progeny found you
In the bass cleff den of your uplands apartment
Extension cord lassoed around your neck
Swaying in almost pendulum motion
Limp metronome, flaccid and lost

your son

screaming out of control on the bottom of the basement steps

Finding a note pinned to your chest in almost voodoo-doll fashion
An inky receipt culled from the past thirty years
Crumpled into a corsage of destitution
I remember in high school between church services
Hearing about how your father fished his fingers
inside your carebear underwear when
You were all of eleven while

the rest of the family was bowing their
heads in reverence to a faceless diety at the thanksgiving dinner table
And how you moved out the day you got your drivers license
With a pack of Winstons and a Metallica CD
Blaring the chorus of Master of Puppets
As you shifted unknown gears

The first time you shot heroin your
Eyes hushed closed like the lid
To an advent calendar popping in reverse
And you thought your belly button
Was the stub to a broken telephone wire reaching back
Into the conch of whispered time

and

How you lived your life like a feather shed
From an angel gang raped and battered
Bitched slapped by a bearded god the father
Clad in a white beatie drinking Miller hi-life
Dildo fucked by a flattened brim of her own halo
bleeding bible verses
All rise for the gospel
The victory of our god
cross shaped ladder
sans the assistance of a (wished-for) rung
A swan whose song still has yet to be sung

CHRISTMAS CARD POEM from the phucking crazy literary cadre known as the Language Defibrillators to all of you with love....

2010-12-15T08:11:00.000-08:00

A CANTICLE OF SEVERED GEESE LADEN EGGS

.....A holiday longing fraught with Greetings of
Wished for Light from Champs West....

Twas the corner of Kellogg and Western Christmas lights are festooned
Winter solstice is basking there is a full moon
The snow is a static of cable-porn and in flurries
When out of the echo of night the poets do scurry
Headed as if without any rest
To the emerald oven of a bar in the direction that is west
They arrive here once a month to congregate and to read
To gregariously chatter while engaging in banter
And offer keen insight in prose and pentameter
And empty more than just a few alcoholic liters
so
Please join us now, chug a Jameson or a Pabst
As we reminisce over of a year gone by fast
And toast to our future with Holiday cheer
For the writers and souls who have chosen to spend their year here:
There is
Sexy Sarah who cheers for my immortal white sox
And Nora whose licorice root
I mistook for a fallen dread lock
And who earlier in the year looked at me rather vexed
As she accompanied me on the “237 reasons” why we should have more sex
Blessed be thy scholarly erudition of wit that is a capital J
Who reads William Gaddis and sips a deep pipe
And Harshi whose smile is an autumnal slant of light
Shannon came back from New York to now join us
Erica, Brandice, Steve, Amanda, Hippie-Hannah and Bay
All chomped on burnt liver and chugged Guinness on Bloomsday
Nate with his tunes and Huck with his poetic score
And that one dude who broke the chandelier the moment he
Entered the door
Professor Worley, Demetrice here was last seen
And Adam who read and then joined the Marines
We were visited by the columnist from the paper who all the bars love to lynch
And Diane Happ who I kissed on the lone piano bench
The classy woman who scribes for the serial “Midwestern fowl”
And what a pleasure it always is to bask in the presence of the Doctor Blouch
They all congregate here in this neon leprechaun nest
with Phoebe whose paintings yanks at athletic cup near my chest
To read poems by Sylvia Plath, William Butler Yeats, selections from James Joyce and Anne Sexton
And hear the radiant chimes of Megan Canella
whose bra-size I’m just not allowed to mention (double G), reading

Poems about meandering jaunts in nearby cemeteries
Poems about one night stands in dual-eternities
Poems about superheroes and longings and unbidden sin
Poems about angels with dildos and Dionysian menstruation
Poems fraught with metaphor and ricocheting insight
Like Ethan who captured the color words make as they wane into light
Jessica Stephenson read with poise and searing intellectual allure
And conveyed what it feels like to truly Live, LOVE and conquer
Jenifer rose clapper recited her high school diary chronicle
Aron Felder’s fiction was both picaresque and rather comical
Anna Christenson who reminds me of the jovial wife of bath
Andrew King whose rhymes always makes me laugh
There are souls who will love you, alcohol in excess
Dave Griffin who likes to mime about the first time he saw a breast
Danny Severance read poems that are austere and demure
Alfredo whose wit just cannot be deterred
Britanny, cool Abby and Jessamyn all listened to
the wisdom imparted to us by Duffy’s truisms
and partied with the likes of both Gilbert and Hale
who sip godamn Presbyterians and who never fail
to splash a smile on my face—so next time
you find yerself combing the streets of west Peoria
Empty-pocketed and lonely in search for a jaded euphoria, an epiphany or a story
Feel free to enter
This den that was covered in the journal star
Leading one to inquire, “whatever happen to draft beer in this bar?”
Where the atmosphere is convivial regardless if the crowd is surfeited or few
Learn how to hush when the bartender yells ‘Silence in the pews!!!”
It matters not if yer an intellectual, broken hearted, coy or just fey
Just stop in and read, you have so much to say
And then party
w. the language defibrillators those local poetic boozers freely who feast
In this establishment whose name means opposite of east and is far from a loser

On the corner of Western its not very far
There’s always mountainous crates of cold PBR’s
To swig and to sip and to give you a chill
As you listen and acknowledge
That poetry is valid and has meaning still
And we owe it somehow all to a poet named Will.

For my mother, who gave her engagement ring to Jesus....

2010-05-06T06:11:00.000-07:00

The fifth month of the calendar year arrives zipping on the back of one's neck like a gentle breath of hope, with the clovery taste of mint-juleps mingled with the rainbow sight of roses lassoed around the necks of oblivious thoroughbreds. It arrives with the lobed sight of limp-eared hostas and greek-sounding perennials for sale in the doorway of local retailers. It arrives with the spiked lavender shock of hyacinths inching like troops as if saluting the heralding arrival of tepid temperatures leading up to my front porch. May arrives with track meets and with baseball standings. With overtly caffeinated college students living in the university library for days on end teeming with nerve-clattering anxiety. With hormonally-addled high school lads delicately unearthing the frosty plastic cube of a corsage as if it were some kind of big mac made out of their grandmothers’ wedding china, manacling it sport-watch fashion around the tube of her wrist while lost in the frizz of her hair and the scent of her body and the wild conjecture of what has the possibility of transpiring later that night as he brandishes his elbow in front of her eyelashes like a boomerang for her to grope, escorting his date out the front door of her parents’ house after posing in front of the customary fusillade of camera snaps, the perfect spring evening, his senses lost in the pulsating almost floral scent of the creature waltzing next to him who somehow smells brand new.

Who smells like spring.

May arrives with the sight of a single pink helix-ribbon pinned to the blouse of survivors, cantering as if treading water around midtown in a billowing glob of awareness and of, intrinsically, hope.

May is the month of transitions--of solemn almost pastoral garb and geometric hats bearing limp tassels bobbing as if in lost unison at the rhetoric and ramble of a commencement speech. It arrives with playoffs and barbecues. With seasonal hoppy pilsners on draft. With time off requests and looming summer itineraries. With dreams of packing everything that aches with longing inside your chest in a carry-on bag and leaving and then coming back somehow changed.

May is the month where every kitchen I walk into seems to noticeably reek of windex. The month of people wearing shorts who blatantly just shouldn’t go there. The month of twenty dollar bills unassumingly slipped into graduation cards by relatives you hardly know. The month where the morning sun begins to ricochet off the planet in a canopy of pre-dawn tint around six a.m., and set even later, casting out a neon-pink sail bejeweled with a rusty patina, dappled with slight splotches of copper and blue into the horizontal balcony of the overhead west.

And dangling in the background like wished for white noise the intermittent nasal buzz of a stuttering lawn mower followed almost always in tandem by middle-aged curses.

May, the month winking open like apple-blossom flowers on trees, yawning into pedaled consciousness, attacking the senses with wisped seeds of life scattering in random places in hopes of propagation and growth. May, the first Sunday, the stem of the wedding bride-colored carnation set aside like a matriarchal baton, aesthetically asterisked for the creature whose aquatic nest seasoned us for the first nine months of gestation, the womb where consciousness began with a flipper and a pulse and ends nine months later somehow cradled in the limbs of the woman you will one day refer to as mom.

And this flower is an epistle of thanksgiving to my own mother on mothers day, my mother who gave her engagement ring to Jesus.

***

As if traipsing through the botanical garden that is spring and feeling the scent of the planet enter your body in little puffed bouquets of vitality every time you inhale, here is a panoramic resume of the visual syllables hovering through the greenhouse of my psyche every time somebody says the word quote, “mom":

I think about my mom with her birch tree lank to her almost anemic limbs, skinny as a wind-chime with her soy milk and her fridge fraught with vegetables. My mother with her love of thrift stores and her clattering blue sandals and modest denim dresses leaking down from the dimensions of her strip pole-skinny torso like a bell. My mother with her weekly Ladies bible studies and her potluck dinners and her killer lasagna and her German coffee cake that is out of this world and her special egg, sausage and cheese casserole she furnishes for the entire family on Christmas morning. My mom who is a pastural cove of kindness in a biblical unselfish sense that makes the recipient feel humble and serene and loved just to be around her. My mom who has spent the bulk of her career patiently helping kids from turbulent backgrounds learn how to read sentences, how to read books, how to express themselves through the hieroglyphic tinker-toy ink of the alphabet.

My mom who believes that her assurance rests elsewhere.

My mother who is the strongest woman I have ever met.

My Mother who votes almost nihilistically with the candidate who is pro-life but who said she prayed for the health and safety of Barrack Obama when he was elected.

Mom with her homemade quilts and her shit I can’t stand christian radio always blaring in the hushed marble counters of her kitchen. With her recycling projects. My mom who for the first slipped decade of my life (lets face it) harbored a bad eighties perm which was slightly reminiscent of public televisions Bob Voss's afro.

Mom who is always praying. Sunday morning in the Baptist church she now attends, the litheness of her arms configured like a football line officiate making the sign for a valid field goal in the direction of heaven.

My mother playing the organ, always directing handbells, sitting in the front row of our church every Sunday taking notes, inviting guests over after the second service cooking a big dinner as my father watched football and read Rick Baker in the palpable beast of print that was once the Sunday Journal Star.

My mom who now lives in a house that looks like a cross between Thomas Kinkaid vignette of light and a brick kiln that would roast hobbits, the house her late husband grew up in, where he lived with his parents when they first started dated, when she arrived in Peoria of all-fucking-places to do her student teaching at a school situated on the south side of town.

I think about my mom who grew up in the working class south side of Chicago (hardcore whitesox terra ferma for all those who know me) an area now which is almost completely demographically Hispanic. My mom, the youngest of a big Czech family who was raised almost entirely by my grandmother. My mom who today still won’t drink a beer because when she was little her alcoholic father somehow splashed a shot of Blatz in her milk and she got sick. The whole family scared to death of my grandpa, his wife included. My mom being less than five fingers old hiding in the closet from the encroaching silhouette and sour mashed bourbon scent of her own father who has once again come home drunk and is looking for someone to wail on.

My grandmother taking solace in a nearby Lutheran church, partly because they had free day care.

My mother growing up pious, going to Lutheran college down the street from where Ernest Hemingway spent his formative years, the street riddled with the oblong planks and the cataclysmic architectural tilt of Frank Lloyd Wright houses who no one wanted to own in the mid-sixties because they thought they were eccentric. My mother finding herself teaching in a somewhat seedy river town two hours south of Chicago, meeting the coiled-spring gait and clumsy smile of my father at the church affiliated with the school where she was assigned to teach. My father falling droolingly in love the moment the goggly lenses of his glasses fogged up with internal soul-mate longing as he laid eyes on her, romantically cozening my mom to escort him into the wild backroad feral dips and tangles of the country the first night they met to stare at the broken cosmic chandelier braille of the overhead stars. The two of them blasting down the turns of Smithville road, my dad driving off the road, his three hundred dollar dodge getting stuck in the muddy banks abutting the side of a nearby creek, the oratorio-like chirp of various insects snapping on a hot summer night as my future parents hitch into town in the back of a truck, my Uncle plowing them free later on that night.

My mom who made my father lovingly genuflect on to the indented corduroy caps of his knees like a maladroit shoe salesman groping her slender overturned palm and proposing three times, coercing him to stop smoking and playing the lotto before her lips finally assenting, saying the word yes like she says the word amen every Sunday to his request in a smile.

My mother being modest, thinking that the ring my father bought her was too expensive, beckoning my father to exchange if for a cheaper one, the excess money my parents deciding to give to the church, to their lord as a tithe of their pending union.

My Mother and father who walked themselves down the burgundy runway strip of the wedding aisle into the pastel cumulus of the altar of their Deity bartering vows in front of the only god they have ever believed in while my grandfather, estranged and bitter without a beer, later confessing to his youngest daughter that he was in the parking lot of the church but just couldn’t bring himself to be in the same room with my grandmother.

Couldn't bring himself to walk his youngest daughter down the aisle.

If the thermostat-slender frame of my father looks like the luckiest man to have ever bartered oxygen with carbon-dioxide on the atmospherical forehead of this planet there's a simple reason.

It's because he has the smile of my mother matchlocked for life in the bridgework and geometry of his arms.

My parents who honeymooned in a christian conference in Dallas. Always serving the lord. Always putting his will first. Always praying together before meals. Praying together before bed. Always believing that the metaphsyical stock of their insurance lies elsewhere. Always putting their westernized-variation of a deity in front of that of their every materialistic desire.

My mother, who cropped the long swaying stage curtain alluring svelte of her diaphanous black tresses into an almost luting paige-boy at-a-madrigal-dinner chic finesse when she first became pregnant. Wading four years into their marriage before conceiving. Rejoicing at first. Offering holistic hosannas and pslams to their God, the bulb of life gestating somewhere above the stem of her torso. Like a flowered nub of spring. Like the resurrection. The promise of the life that is to come.

Then one night it happens. Three months into the pregnancy. In the porcelain baptismal font of the toilet. Everything falls out of her into a sanguinary pottage of lost entrails. The blood of the lamb. The tears of my mother who believes that even Jesus wept.

The two of them have supplicated and prayed. They are heartbroken. The gentle-bearded assessment of my father stating that they will get pregnant again. That this loss is somehow the will of god and that God is somehow to be praised in this unerring time of darkness.

My mom quoting bible verses, saying that she will still praise him. To let the Lord Jesus Christ be praised.

There oldest son being born less than a complete year later. Realizing drunk one night when I am in my early twenties realizing somehow that if my mother had never lost the gestating yolk of initial life kicking inside of her, had never experienced the pain she felt that night as she looked down into the baptismal font of the toilet and saw her tears reflected in the interior pulp of her anatomy— that if it wasn't for my mother's initial miscarriage, this author never would have been conceived.

My mom being told by a nurse the day I was born that I was the only placenta-caked creature she had ever seen who, when entering this planet, didn’t scream his way into consciousness with wailing high pitched minor key cacophonous octaves, instead I entered the bubble of this atmosphere of being puckered lips and pensive, a periscopic potato sack, looking around as if taking dictation in the new found soil I now found myself being escorted inside of via the dandling breath and limbs of surrounding antiseptic titans.

My mother naming me David out of the bible. The very vacation bible school agape appellation meaning "Beloved." Meaning a man after the poetic pulse of God's own heart.

Mother who thought my name was always going to be "No-no David," when I was two years old since that is all she ever said to me. Her son who just can't stand still. Who is a sloppy eater and wakes up in the middle of the night and can't stand up straight without bouncing around like an integered slightly breezed lotto ping-pong ball and screaming. Her son who inexplicably always wants to go to Szolds and who always inquires "Mom, where do you think all those people are going?" when he is three and they are stuck in traffic. Lil' David who can't stop clanging the pans in the kitchen together and clapping to the metallic din and syncopation of the echoing sound his ears regsiter to be the gnawing silt of an unfolding reality. Her son whom his mom took an almost prophetic picture of when he was randomly pelting at this daddy's smith-corona, the cursive caption in the book chornicling the first year old my life reading, "Maybe I'll be a writer someday," couldn't be more apt.

So convenes the story of my parents, dual lavender hushed progenitors in a nativity scene at the end of somebody else's usurped notion of time giving birth to two more (girls) musical savants. Memories of mother growing up- hunched over in an emerald (70’s fabric) housecoat in a pre-natal second tri-mester position in front of the yawning grille of the heater in the dining room, always a thoroughly annotated dog-eared bible next to her, always scribbling down her thoughts in a notebook in politely looped carbonated cursive handwriting. Feeling blessed to have somehow eschatologically inherited a family of two parents who adamantly believed in hushing shut the cyclopic iris of the television screen and reading to their kids every night. Memories of my mother reading Box car children to us in the old southern rocking chair they refurbished (role playing under the grand piano, gnawing into the rooting stalks with imprints of our baby teeth ), mother reading George MacDonald's THE PRINCESS AND THE GOBLIN my first formative read. The protagonist named after my mother's mom, mom reading the tale to me in the bed where I more than likely was conceived.

Thus how myself and my two sisters were raised.

Raised in a house with the pastel breezy gentleness of a Sunday afternoon in spring. Raised in a house with Newberry award books doting the shelves of bedrooms and with musical chords evaporating in thunderous staccato puffs above the ivory tumble of the piano. Raised in a house where my father somehow found time to assist his kids with everything. To lob a ball in the side alleyway after school. To write songs about his kids on his guitar. Raised in a house where Christ was King, where there was always music and devotions and laughter. Raised in a house where evening meals were a five member family obligation. Raised in a house where there was always dilapidated fifteen year old station wagons cluttering the cement snap of the driveway--vehicles that would always seemingly breakdown around the holidays but where there was always music and devotions and self-produced plays and laughter. Raised in the house with parents who supplicated on the caps of their knees and prayed at their kids bed side every night.

Raised in a house that was almost overtly pg-13 rated, (the only time I ever heard my mom curse was on a family vacation out east and I duplicitously cozened her into inverting t he R and the F in the word FUDRUCKERS).

My mother, the strongest woman I have ever met. Standing next to my father on his deathbed.

My father who never had more than two beers in a week and was a non-smoker and who ran every day and who was humble and harvested his kids in a cloak of kindness and who never cursed and did everything right. My father who just two weeks earlier was cracking cheesy jokes and teaching third graders how to read. My father who almost three exact decades earlier couldn't stop smiling as he escorted the bridal sheet of my mother down the aisle while her own father was out in the parking lot getting shit-faced, my father, supine and with IV's threaded and needled throughout his anatomy. His entire body coated in pebbles of bronze sweat, his breathing lapsed and muffled and intervaled as if his entire anatomy was somehow being tossed out from the aching hovel of his lips every time he tittered an gasped for breath. My mom massaging the jaundice continents of my fathers bare feet on his death bed, thanking my father simply for the man he was while No-no David can't stand to be near the gaping breath of his moribund dad without slinking out into the bathroom and doing a bump of cocaine off the lid of the toilet, staying in the room for eight hours that night watching as the arena dome of viable flesh that rises and descends with every pricked breath gradually come to a stutter and then to a ceasing halt and then to a tearful pause, a filter of flesh cardboard stiff and then no more.

My mother standing in front of the yawning casket the day of my father's wake, her body attired in the simple drip of a black dress looking like a keyhole socket to some other world while gridlocked mourners grope the white doves of her hand and tilt their heads in endeavored acts of empathy and wreath their arms around my mom and her children in life preserving fashion and squeeze, talking about it being such a shame that my father died so young and what a man of kindness and character he was and telling my mom to be strong and my mother, telling each of the freight train line of shocked mourners the same thing over and over again as if in a round.

“His faith was in Jesus. He is with the Lord.”

***

There is more I could tell you about the creature I have eternally addressed as mom. I could tell you all about her benevolence to the elderly. How she is caring and kind. How she is always making baked goods or delivering food for people who are shut in. How the day after every thanksgiving until last year when she died at the ripe old age of 102 my mother and myself would drive down to Kewanee Illinois and see my great aunt Evelyn, mom using her good wedding china, giving aunt Evelyn a “chicken dinner” the day after thanksgiving.

I could tell you emotionally what it felt like to sit next to my mom in the baptist church she now attends the weeks and months after my fathers sudden death. I can tell you what I felt like inside, my arm buckled around her shoulders in the pew as tears of loss would seemingly drip out of every pore from her body. I could tell you how she continued to sing hymns loud, continued to hold her hands up in prayer as if performing the wave at a college basketball game, giving thanks to God who is her solace.

I could tell you how my mom was my best friend when my employer for over a decade, Bradley University, royally fucked me over last year and my drinking got out of control. Mom letting me crash in her house for a week to dry out, feasting on her chili. Mom, always praying, always scribing me notes in cursive blue ink riddled with bible verses, with guttural old testament names divided by dotted-totemic colons and integers.

I can tell you that it doesn't matter who it is my mother will pray for you if you are in need or rejoice with you in gratitude.

I could tell you about the time I cried and broke down in front of my mom, confessing to her the truth about the woman who the best times of my life were experienced with and who has been married to the same man since I entered in puberty. The woman I wrote epistles of sensual longing to every day for over two years telling her how much I love her, telling her how complete the metaphysical splash of her smile feels against the shoreline of my chest. Telling her how I can feel the residual glow of her all around me at all times.

The woman I made take off her own engagement rock and slip it into her side pocket before I introduced her to my own mother.

Crying. Telling my mom that my heart feels like it just went through the paper shredder at kinkos before I explode.

Myself now telling my mother how I felt like I was always a paralyzed product of my area code. How I wish that she would have somehow left her husband, but how she never will. Yelling, thrashing my mothers and late fathers ethical assurance in something higher. Claiming that I wish they wouldn't have given so much damn money to their fucking missionaries. To their religious charities. To their invidiously right-winged religious radio programs and instead, siphoned their funds into an education pool for their progeny their kids wouldn't be on the verge of bankrupcy trying to pay off student loans, working shit jobs all hours the day, drunk, dabbling in substanbce abuse trying to find meaning and love and accepatance in their lives.

And my mother not judging her No-no david, not admonishing her son in the slightest for falling madly in love and getting emotionally involved with a classy older married woman. My mother sensing the interior of her son's chest as being nothing short of a concavity of hurt, grabbing my hand, spoonfeeding him the mantra she has spoonfed me since I was old enough to swallow gerbers, saying simply:

“Life is hard but God is good, David.”

And indeed somehow he is.

I could tell you very simply that I've never heard my mom complain about any of the trauma she has endured over the lithe butterfly wings that is a life of faith and of grace. I've never heard her grouse or bitch. I never heard her play the blame game or act biased or cape herself with almost well deserved bitterness at the throes of her losses. Even though I know it destroyed her inside, I never heard her complain about her father not having the balls to walk her down the aisle. Although it wounded her within and she cried for weeks, I've never heard her expressing anything but faith and grace in regards to her inopportune miscarriage. Although her husband was taken from her way too early, taken from her before he was allowed to retire, taken from her before he had an opportunity to walk any of his own daughters down the wedding aisle or travel with his spouse or dandle a grandchild on the cap of his knees.

I've never heard my mom question the rudiments of her spiritual vocation.

I never heard anything say anything except my Jesus Christ quite simply be praised.

I could tell you that N0-no David is struggling to become the David my mother envisioned when she blessed me with the color of my name. The David who (ahem) just couldn't stop writing poetic psalms of light. The David who got involved with married women and who ironically has a best friend named John I seldom get to see.

The david who (telling my mom last week when she questioned my Bohemian lifestyle), telling her that, "The biblical David might have been king, but he sure knew what it was like to live in sheep shit."

The David who still has the shadow of Goliaths yet to slay.

I could tell you that, every Christmas, I give my mom jewelry--I try to get her something nice. Normally in the two hundred dollar range or so. Sometimes its a golden cross or a bracelet. Sometimes it is a ring. Even though my mom is modest and she tells me not to spend so much money on her. Every Christmas without fail I think about my mother who, in the early seventies, decided to sacrifice her emblem of materialistic nuptial union for something even greater she still ardently believes in.

Love you mommy and thank you. Happy mothers day to you all.

Transitioning stumbling blocks into stepping stones—a salute to the man simply known as Sully

2010-04-07T21:41:00.000-07:00

His face was the color of damp cardboard, the type you’d find stranded in an alleyway behind one of his many fine establishments, flattened and vertical, a domestic beer logo branded in its center. He walked with a certain cogitating lank, a thinking man’s gait, as if he were about ready to break out into an Irish jig of enlightenment at any moment. He chained smoked Marlboro lights. He was gregarious. A raconteur. He was kind. He drank cheap beer but served scotch that had been aging in a cask in Scotland for over seventy percent of my calculated existence. He had unkempt stringy hair and an angular nose and a rich oaky smile that made you feel as if you were staring at the hazy Irish sunrise the morning after St. Patrick’s day heavenly hung over on green beer. He drove some sort of dustbowlesque truck that looked like it was flat out of a stage production of “From Mice to Men.” He was always scribbling down shit on a notepad. He hired coifed perfection behind the counter that would pour you a pint of British ale before grilling you the best damn pepperjack burger in town. He was a huge fan of “The Bug Dance Rhythm band” which my dear friend Dave McDonald played a mean folk mandolin in. He was married to a woman I used to work for at Barnes and Noble who wore long swaying lavender dresses and had black hair and ashen skin the color of parchment a renaissance poet might use to compose Petrarchan sonnets on. Together with their dog (who would just never shut the hell up) they lived on the same street I grew up on in the West Bluff, an Irish Flag saluting out from the side of their abode like a wounded javelin. Later in his years you would almost always see the wiry bangs dripping from his scalp cloaked in a beret like a flaccid halo or loose liver, the organ that whistled out on him, fretted on a Gaelic cross on a hillside outside of Dublin.

He loved to loaf. Loved to laugh. Loved to shoot the shit over a plume of smoke followed by a chorus of wit and laughter banked by the clank of goblets and the call for another round for everyone.

The name listed when he took his first communion at St. Patrick’s parish was J.M. Sullivan. But everyone knew him simply by two syllables.

He was simply Sully.

He loved to open bars.

I first met Sully long before I realized he was the Guinness godfather of the Peoria nightlife scene. I was in my early twenties trying to make it as a writer living in an apartment that was part of an historic 1844 mansion on High street (the coolest mansion in Peoria) with an unparalleled view that overlooked the swarming neon nest of downtown. I taught English for district 150 at an alternative high school, walking to work every morning, the sun pouring in from the east in rich tangerine streams like a vodka screwdriver. It was the autumn of 9-11, my hair was a long limp stem tied behind back of my skull in ponytail fashion like a door handle to fire escape of my brain. Every morning I traipsed down from the antiquated crags of High Wine, swerving down the boomerang cement swoop of Main street hill, taking intermittent swigs from my coffee cup, blurry-eyed and just a tad bit hungover, composing dissipating jet stream sonnets of immortality inside my head. Every morning I would see him and he would bob his head in a singular act of acknowledgment holding out his flat palm in a gesture that teemed with the familiarity of seasoned drinking buddies. Of Family. Sometimes he would motor past me in his dustbowlesque vehicle smoking cigarettes. But more often than not our encounter transpired in front of the bar he owned, SULLIVANS, nestled like a sylvan hearth swallowed between a gay and Podunk bar respectively. Every morning he was almost always outside, sometimes sweeping corky butts and glass off the sidewalks or scaled up the rungs of a ladder, tinkering with the window display. With his impish lank and hair that looked like it could pass for a dehydrated yucca plant, he resembled a fairy tale troll, one that would request that you answer his riddle o’ three before allowing you to cross over the inebriated pond of enlightenment alcoholic excess often avails.

I had lived in his bars of course. I had gotten kicked out of ZZ POPS when I was only seventeen for attempting to catch a glimpse of (and hopefully seduce) scarlet haired violinist Rachel Barton, who was gigging there before playing with the symphony orchestra later that night. I had my first gratis (fruity what-the-hell-is-this-concoction) twenty-first birthday shot at the carousel domestic horseshoe sports den that is the original Sullys. I smoked weed in the urine-stained troughs at the old SOPS on the corner of Main and Madison (listening to more than my fair share of Dave Matthew tribute bands than could possibly be salubrious for my sanity in the early part of the millennium). Together with my best friend Dave Thompson (who ran the bacchanalian Vesuvius Lounge inside Dominics at the Metro Center), we would sip 17 dollar scotches before hitting a night on the town or heading to the now defunct Grill or going to Opera Illinois, my long hair dripping into the tulliped chalice of my imported libation, thinking of Jim Morrison slovenly requesting to be taken away to the next Whiskey bar and not asking why surrounded by bottles of scotch that looked like organ pipes bearing names likes Oban and Mccallister and Belvanie. Names that sounded like Tolkein Dwarves.

But for me the only bar that mattered was the original Sullivan's on main street (the bar which now adheres to the somewhat disgusting moniker of Mushrush, ie 'Mudrush,' but whose interior remains intrinsically unscathed in the Irish décor Sully himself so selected and prized). Sullivan's authenticated Irish pub no. 558. Sullivan's with the trademark Gary Coleman sized Guinness harp branded on the front door as you enter giving fair warning to the seraph of sobriety to pass over this public house of drunken bliss. Sullivans with the emerald lampshades and various Irish bric-a-brac and hummeled cheeked leprechauns and vignettes of Michael Collins and one pensive looking-watercolor of JFK stamped on the wall that defies you not to cry. Sullivan's with a coniferous-shaded atlas of Ireland splattered on the wall near when you walk in like a missing Green giant jigsaw piece. The bar with the quote Céad Míle Fáilte (100 thousand greeting) plastered above the leering eyes of the beer fridge.

Sullivans where they always gave you a fifty cent piece for change.

Sullivans where on a Saturday afternoon in autumn blue-collar catholics would loosen the noose of their ties after mass and curse at the television screen as Notre Dame once again came up short on fourth and inches. Sullivans where my dear friend and neighbor Dave McDonald played every weekend, the cidery cone of his amish-like beard dripping into the baritone frets of his guitar as I sat on the corner of the bar near the ersatz stage getting hammered on Caffey's stout or Boddington's pub ale. Sullivan's which was (with the exception of Jimmy’s) the first bar in this area code to have Guinness on tap in the late 90's.

It was the bar where you punctuated the narrative of the evening in exclamatory fashion-- ending up at Sullivans at 3:00 in the morning after a night of clubbing trying to guzzle down as many pints as was humanly possible before moshing your way through the faces of mingling inebriated beautiful mid-twentysomethings reflected in the mirrored rectangular Guinness placards festooned below the menstrual chipped coating of the ceiling, packed, a bouquet of jostling limbs, each crashing into the oak bar like a wave to a pier, getting lost in both the sight and scent of the stranger sitting next you, your eyes momentarily averting into the cyclopic digits of the Tullamore Dew clock stationed above the entrance, waiting for the carol of last call, getting lost in the sight of her forehead, her lips, the sudden snap of her smile.

A few weeks later I would be formerly introduced to the wiry-haired man himself at the establishment I so loved by my roommate the impeccable Dave Thompson, the three of us sitting in hard Euclidean angles at the end of the bar, smoking cigarettes, the seasoned proprietors imparting wisdom salted with wit to the partied out poetic plebeian (I had been 21 for less than two years) telling me stories about bars I have never heard of (what the hell is Barnacle Billy's or The poison Apple?), bitching about things being different from the way they once were. About politics and bar licensing and P-town not being what it used to be.

For the next six months I would stop in after teaching, laptop in tow. If he wasn't there I would adhere to my writers mantra of “ten typed pages a day—No fuckin' around!!” diligently slipping into my back pew, chain smoking, almost always nursing a Boddingtons, wildly pecking into my laptop like a young junior high kid and a drum set after hearing his formative first metallica album. But if Sully was there I would sit next to him and listen to his stories.

There are other barkeeps and restaurant owners in town you salivate like a Pavlovian chihuahua just to be around. You have the jovial Santa Clausian girth of Vince down at Jimmy's. You have Shaman Paul at One World whose good medicine mantra baptizes the metaphysical purring in your soul. You have stories of good ol’ Al Zook olfactory jisming out of control on cocaine and hitting a patron over the head with a pool stick and then looking at you when you order a spirit with the word reserved on the label and treating you like you just graduated from some school with Ivy weave and a cement tower because you know how to pronounce the surname of that certain libation. You had Dave Thompson the armani- clad classy oenophile who always made you feel like a cultural deity as he talked about verticals and vintage years in a way that was not pretentious in the slightest, in a way that somehow made you feel loved.

And there was Sully and there were his stories and for a young writer entering the bar and sitting next to this chieftain and sopping up every narrative sentence that spilled out of his mouth it was nothing short of an honor indeed.

***

No one told a story like Sully, the beerkeg bard. The story of the wayward baby alligator he bought during the Khaki Jack era scuttling out of his apartment like the emblem off a lacrosse jersey is timeless. The story about the time he yelled at an employee for wearing her cocktail apron while smoking a cigarette at the bar after her shift ended (admonishing her that she needed to be more professional and not wear her uniform while in medias sozzeled) not realizing that she worked at the bar across the street, telling me later that after being informed of the error that he apologized to her and then hired her on the spot to work for him instead.

My favorite “sullyism” concerns the origin of the whiskey bar F. Scotts. When I asked Sully if he was thinking about Fitzgerald when he named the bar he tapped an ash off his cigarette commenting, “Now that’s an interesting story, Dave,” holding his beer in his palm like a gavel one second and a feather the next telling me about the time how, when he was in junior high at a catholic school he said the word, “fuck” aloud in class and the Nun who was teaching the class made his stay after school for a week, telling him, “I’ll give you a word that starts with the letter F you’ll never forget,” coercing Sully to scribe out the initialized first middle and last name of the author who scribed THIS SIDE OF PARADISE 500 times on what was then called the blackboard after school for an entire week.

“I guess you could say the name somehow stuck.” Sully added with that smile.

His stories coupled with that of my own memories of his bars.

Taking my best friend Dainish out (we share the same birthday July 6th, his 21st, my 26th) and after slaloming down from Gorman’s to Rhodells, sloshing through Water street (myself knocking over a table at Martinis) raving inside, god, what was then the androgynous ecstasy that was the Underground, having heavily-masacred trollops pinching their cleavage together as if in prayer as we devoutly tithed one dollar bills from our lips inside Big Al’s, throwing up outside of the old SOP's we ended up at Sullivans. John, lost in the bacchanalian din and swirl of blurred voices and limbs the dyslexic first and second primed integers alcoholically avails to the itchy soul. Dainish, telling me he needs to excuse himself and hit the head. After twenty minutes later of combing though the restroom and looking outside and asking the Keep if they've seen this heavily soused dark skinned Lithuanian lad celebrating his twenty-first, I notice that the side door leading top the crypt of the basement is wedged open and on a whim decide to plunge into the darkness yelling out his name eventually to find my best friend and brother John (ie Dainish) seated a la Rodin's Thinker style on a beer crate in the back of the basement, alighting his bottle like an alcoholic scepter in the hand of a bemused patriarch who had just bartered his kingdom for a zip-lock bag of magic beans.

The silly stories: The time folk singer Dave McDonald started playing almost Raffiesque renditions of Kids songs on Sunday afternoon inside Sullivans and (I shit you not) the whole place started doing the hookey-pookey with the exception of one overtly disgruntled author who kept yelling out the name of Woody Gutherie at the top of his libation-filled lungs as if he were at a Freedom March.

The activist stories—my crazy methed-out rockstar cousin spontaneously arriving on my doorstep with his guitar from Chicago in April '07, wanting to FIGHT THE INCUMBENT SMOKING BAN set to take place at the beginning of the next year. The two of us passing out placards all over downtown Peoria reading THIS IS NOT AFGHANISTAN-SAY NO TO THE SMOKING BAN!!!! Out of all the bars we stepped in, only one owner treated us with civility and agreed to pass out the flyers dictated for our cause. That owner was Sully, telling me that this smoking ban shit was enough to make him even want to sell his bars. And one of them he did.

The late-late night Kinky stories. Cruising through the chorus of last call and being way too drunk to drive and stopping off at Swingers world to sober up after a night of hardcore hedonism watching videos in a half-opened state regulated shower stall that I can't even imagine what it must look like under the glower of a blue light. Or the time I was standing in front of the porcelain chin of the urinal at 3:30 in the morning inside the mens room at Sullivans when a beautiful glitter faced girl enters the mens bathroom in tight jeans and linoleum clattering heels and reels both her jeans and panties down to the caps of her knees in one unbuckled yank like she is lowering a flag to half-mast as she squats down on the urinal next to where I am earnestly trying to drain my own baton of masculine flesh, and because I’m sort of an innate flirt and just a lil' bit tipsy I immediately tell her “nice ass-baby” and smack the tanless side of her anatomy that is currently squatting on the jawline of the urinal, not realizing that we are peeing together, not realizing that she is giggling and starting to blush as I touch and begin to bite into her ass with the claw of my finger tips. Herself, finishing before I do, standing up, any garments that zip and or snap into place still wreathed slightly above her shins. Her vagina winking in my face like a portal to another world, her lips giggling, knowing that she wants me, knowing that there is a vacant stall less than three feet away as my mind freight trains out of control imagining our bodies locked and bent over, forming what Sesame street might classify during their curtain call as being brought to you by the lower case letter h lost in the lecherous abeyance of thrusts and pauses, unbidden scratches pinned with quick muffled screams of feral and unalloyed lust.

And somehow in the moment I went to kiss her, my hand still on her ass, certain vectors of my own physiology jutting blood stiff and out of control, I somehow saw Sully's sandpaper visage in the side mirror(even though the bar is now called Mudrush's and they no longer give out fifty cent pieces for change) perhaps telling me even though she wants you, don't take advantage of this cute lil' thing who is throwing herself at you because she has been twenty-one for all of five months and is drunk. Not in this bar you damn near don't and instead of kissing her, I placed my pointer finger between the hyphen thin opening of her lips like pressing an elevator button to nowhere helping her to wriggle back into the lower-hemisphere of her attire like a mermaid to a denim fin.

The fleeting passionate stories:

Or the last time I found myself after fifteen hours of brachiating from barstool to barstool, finding myself like old times, ending the night inside the bar that once housed the proprietors last name. The woman I knew somehow from another lifetime ago and inexplicably recognized the moment she echoed the confetti syllables of her first name. The girl who would smile and laugh as she would almost surgically peel the label off her beer in a Catcher-in-the-Rye Jane Gallgher keeping-her-checkers-all-in-the-back-row kind of way. The woman whose petite lips tasted like a poptart as she waded the gradeschool valentine of her tongue inside my lips like a child pushing a toy boat into a Sunday pond immortalized on an impressionistic vignette of light, grabbing my hand, yanking me away from the sylvan plank of the bar, making out in the seedy alleyway behind what was once Sullivans, her fingers tumbling inside the grip of my palm like some sort of vital pulsating organ that has just been transplanted to a willing donor as she wore my jacket and I escorted her to her apartment in the frosty breath of late February, the sun rising from the east as if on stilts, a chalkboard smudged horizontal pillar of heavy pink light indented into the pastural aerie of tufted clouds and the potential promise of a new found spring.

But there's one sullyism I can't stop thinking about. One story that for me coronates every bar stool anecdote, every late night drunken fete. Its a story about how one man jousted a grim medical diagnoses head on.

Shortly after he was diagnosed a local columnist from the Journal Star interviewed the ageless wonder that is Sully about the recent news of his ailment. The video was stamped on the Star’s website in early January. The interview gives a solid barstool post-shot tingling snippet of the joyful proprietor’s persona. In the interview he says something profound. Something I’ve thought about nearly every day since first I heard it a few months back. When presented with the query of how he expects to deal with this diagnoses Sully tapped the ash off his cigarette and responded with the following:

“Yer gonna have to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones sometime in your life and this is the first day, you know, you do it. And you better have fun doing it. Why make yourself miserable.”

I think about this all the time. I think about how pretty much every one whose sight peruses the paragraphs of this homage to P-towns premier barkeep will, come five whipped decades from now, be reduced to nothing more than a vacant hillsboro coffee can of ash, the collected narrative of their corporeal sojourn licensing a loam of earth as if locked into a bad mortgage. I think about how pretty much every one I know shields themselves in a veneer of naiveté (myself including) to avoid dealing with shit that is often blatantly uncomfortable and painful to fucking stomach. Shit that is scary. I think about Sully. Turning stumbling blocks into stepping stones into metaphysical rungs to scale and to climb and to grow. To approach the cocked nozzle of the unknown with a beer and a smoke and smile and with laughter. And maybe tell the impending shadowy drape of death a story.

This is courage in its most pure and unadulterated form.

You face up to shit that is difficult and unpleasant and lonely and emotionally taxing and arduous and hard and you do it. And you better have fun while you do it. After all, you are here, on the scalp of this planet for a finite time, why make yourself and everyone around you miserable.

Spoken like a true proprietor of a man who honored this fleeting happy hour called life indeed.

***

The night I heard of Sully’s passing I found myself cradled in the saltine limbs of my ex-girlfriend, a local poet. We both work burn out jobs with burn out hours to be able to support the “sexually frustrated demands” the time and nature our respective crafts entails. We stopped dating around thanksgiving, but earlier this year we started spending one night a week, holding each other fully clothed, squeezing the fuck out of each other. When we were dating we never even held each other after sex. Now we don’t even kiss and our elbows and thighs are locked together like legos in a gable of clothed flesh with gentle nocturnal breezes emanating from our lips on each other’s neck, blithe aerial ribbons hailed from a summer wind. Sometimes Zorro the cat sleeps on the mattress with us. In the morning we make coffee and she slides her glasses on her visage the way the ophthalmologists assistant instructed her when she was in third grade, grabbing both stems with both hands and saluting them onto the geometry of her face in one swiping motion of grace.

I have vivid dreams when her pulse drips into mine and the dream I had less than 24 hours after Sully's demise is as follows:

In the dream I am attending Sully’s wake (which for some inexplicable was in a building where Geier Florist is located on Heading avenue down the street from where I live in West Peoria). In the center of the room Sully’s casket is placed in the huge vignette that for some reason is rather rococo and last-suppery-like with a pink sunset hue and looks like something a Davinci scholar might scrutinize with a magnifying glass before authoring a pamphlet on conspiracy related issues. In the dream Sully’s eyes are welded into his gas station cigar-colored face and all these monks, in taupe robes are flanked around his body with their fists tucked into their robes acting very hush-hush. In the room there are mourners and there are tufts of plastic funeral flowers and the monks keep on oscillating around the barkeep. When it is my turn to pay reverence to the man known simply as Sully I walk up to his casket and look at his listless body when the next thing I know, one of his eyes delicately hushed close as if in prayer blossoms open and winks at me. Startled I turn to the monks and point and they assure me that he is dead. As I look at Sully's sandpaper countenance again his supine anatomy starts to titter and shake and his head slowly begins to transition into this blue-windex color. The monks are flanked around his coffin so that only myself and the reticent posture of the monks are witnessing this anatomical transmogrification of the flesh. The flashes of blue splotches out of his pigmentation and his face returns to its healthy color. Sully then audibly “snaps” his neck, opens his eyes, looks at me, winks again, makes a plosive “shhhhhh!!!” sound and then falls limp as if he is only feigning death.

And in the dream I go apeshit. I start telling mourners that he is still alive. That there has been some sort of grave medicinal error. That he is still alive. I begin to titter and to shake, Sylvia Plathing out of control in the dream funeral home of Geier Florists (that has this visible field of rye and wheat gargling like a stainglass sunset outside the window). The mourners are assuring me that there has been no mistake, that he is dead. I point at the monks, I begin to verbalize to the crowd that you can ask them. That they saw the whole thing. The padres remain stoic , standing like untrammeled bowling pins that has just missed the marble globe of the ball to the gutter, silently commenting aloud that they saw nothing.

I get irate. I scream out the word fuck!! I begin to kick the wall. I thrash a bevy of nearby peace lilys. I tell the fellow mourners that they are making a huge mistake. That Sully is still alive. I then call up my brother-in-law (who is a doctor at St. Francais in real life) and tell him that he needs to send an ambulance up to Heading avenue because a significant medical mistake has been made. I go outside and wait for the paramedics to arrive. When the medical staff arrive I lead them inside. I mourners are quiet and looking at each other in shock. Where Sully's body was is now vacant. The casket where he was lying and where he cracked his neck back into consciousness in overturned, wilted flower petals are scattered in the fashion of a damp nest.

I am standing next to the paramedics when a parishioner turns next to me.
“Its Sully,” He says, “The monks stole him.”

I wake up from the dream in agitated sways, inadvertently kicking Zorro the cat off the bed. My ex-girlfriend fishes along the side of her bookshelf looking for her glasses as I relay to her my dream. We make coffee, chain smoke a.m. cigarettes and find ourselves in downtown Peoria an hour later. I stop into the Liqour store across the street from the Pere Marquette, purchasing a six pack and a newspaper. When we get back in her vehicle we drive to Bradley Park. I begin to quote Waylon Jennings about the beer I had for breakfast not being bad so I'll have one more for dessert as I pop one open as the two of us begin to comb through the paper, looking for details on Sully's death.

“Shit.” I say aloud, verbally responding to my ex-girlfriends query of what by telling her that of all the places in town, Sully is being buried at St. Josephs cemetery, the cemetery located on the street where I live, the cemetery that sits directly across the street from Geier florists, where my dream last night took place.

My ex-girlfriend looks back at me with her lips slightly ovaled. She then smiles and gives my non-beer swigging hand a little squeeze.

***

I was in Chicago the afternoon of Sully’s wake and the day of his funeral. When I arrived back in town I went down to Mudrushes. It was my first time spending significant amount of daylight hours inside Sully’s former establishment since I used to sit next to the man himself all those autumnal afternoons ago, pissed off that the Tullamore Dew clock had been moved to the opposite end of the pub(the bar has a much more placid feel at 3pm than at 3am). I drank five pints of Moose Drool (thanking the alcoholic forces that be that this blissful big sky libation has finally managed to migrate its way east) and slammed down four Guinesses, ordering the last round two beers at a time so that I had three separate chalices in front of me. I sat in the same oak patch on the landing strip bar where I tripped into the smile of the beautiful spritely-lipped girl only two months earlier taking down notes, chatting up several of the crisp-haired lads behind the counter telling them I was a writer and asking them what there favorite “sullyism” was (note: the naïve short haired fucks response was 'Sully hasn't owned this place in about two years'). As we were conversing the phone rang and the bartender came up to me.

“Yer not gonna believe this bro."

“What?" I ask the Naïve Fuck.

“You've been asking all these questions about Sully. Phone just rang and it was some guy actually asking if Mike Sullivan was in.”

“Did you tell him he died last week.” I inquire.

“No,” The naïve short-haired fuck bartended replies, “I simply told him that Mike Sullivan was no longer here.”

“No longer here.” I thought to myself, settling my tab, tipping the ill-trimmed sideburns of the Naïve Fuck behind the counter, and, when his back was turned, after I garnered my sans fifty cent piece o' change, I then nonchalantly slipped the superfluous Guinness chalice into the side pocket of my jacket, entering a dizzying splash of spring air as I walked past the fire-hydrant sized Guiness harp petrified on the door exiting the bar, thinking about just how wrong this Naïve Fuck is with his "no longer here" assertion as I look down into the variegated neon signs sprouting out of the sides of dead tooth brick buildings on Main street, thinking about how Sully's legacy is here, how it never left, and how, like my dream, his influence won't die, not any time soon. In fact I saw Sully everywhere downtown that spring afternoon shortly after his untimely demise.

I could see his lanky frame refelcted in the tint outside the windows of the former Sullivans, but I could also see him in the beer patio of Sully's, in a gasoline puddle near the cement star outside of the Madison theatre, near the original SOPs, in the alleyway where F. Scotts used to be. I could see his influence dotted up and down Waterstreet epsecially with bars like Martini's and Kellehers, perhaps emblematic of the "Monks" in my dream who stole his body.

As I drove up Main street that day I stopped at a nearby liquor store and purchased a six pack of Guinness. I then motored into St. Joseph's cemetary, across the street from the flower shop in my dreams on the street where I both live and work, on Heading Avenue , the street where another lifetime ago you fell in love and now have a desk in the Nuclear woods. I parked my car outside the pitching mound of dirt that is the man known simply as Sully's final establishment. I unearthed the filched Guinness chalice from the side pocket of my jacket, propped open a Guinness, filled the goblet and set it near the bottom of his grave. I then bowed my head in reverence and told him thank you.

I then told him cheers. Cheers to you brother.....

poem for Kyle....

2010-03-10T17:13:00.000-08:00

Traipsing through Target on Valentine’s Day Eve Disgruntled and All alone after walking in on my girlfriend fucking her roommate, noticing how everything is red, I think about William S. Burroughs

In Mexico City inadvertently
shooting his wife in the frontal lobe
while playing a drinking game
Variation of William Tell on a bet
Requesting that she balance her wine
Chalice on the balcony of her brow
Like a beach ball and a trained seal
Standing in totemic posture ten yards away
The drapes of her eyelids hushed closed
Blinking during the family Christmas photograph
Snap of his revolver
The china-tea of her earlobes
Simultaneously registering
The click of the trigger
When the voice of God the father erupts
Through the crust of her forehead
Ribbons of diverse crimson hues
Skiing down chin and cheekbones
The pale aspirin shock of Burroughs visage
Aghast reflected in the cold puddle of life
alphabetical putty exiting her skull
a wisp of sulfur billowing over
her body like a pair of panties
half ascended up the camp flagpole

the summer when first you fell in love

Before Waking up inside Target on Valentine’s Day Eve

Noticing how everything
Is that damn red color

My thoughts circulating lost and alone
across the elliptical prostitute
lipstick smudge gritty ventricle
clotting transience of linoleum isles
Seeking freight train silence
through the aortic valves of commerce
empty parking lot cart materialism
pausing near the bus stop
wishing I had a beer

No amount of over the counter
Benzedrine shot up with Ken Kessey
Could have assuaged the
Hurt I felt that afternoon when
The cardiac tiles of my chest
Mingled with the Asbestos of her breath
Offering hosannas in mid coitus
The moment I opened the door

Finding the arched steeple
satyr thighs and legs spread like
half-opened albino triangles
facing each other
trying to consume each other
A mason symbol of wedged bodies, stuck
Ready to come in an abbreviated pulse

As I stood in the door
The junkie eating his lunch naked and alone, I

Peeled my heart from my chest like a fresh water trout
And held it above me head
For all the world to see
A coronation of our expired dream.
When you reached in the dresser beside your bed
wielding the hard steel of a weapon instead

saying “Trust me. I’ve done this once before.”

"That on the Ashes of his Youth doth Lie" A retrospective panoramic verbal eclipse of a year gone past

2010-02-01T08:10:00.000-08:00

The year convened swallowed in the wintery valance of uncertainty, December, the cold aged wedding cake frost of the earth, the hard breath of failure, the sunken helium of the chest, the sight of my inky shadow elongated beneath the slender stem of an overhead yawning streetlamp, snow dribbling past in wet prisms of moisture, an overturned ashtray of celestial decadence sifting like something freshly severed and grazed on top of my head as I traipsed home downtrodden and distraught and feeling all alone in the world, freshly battered and emotionally betrayed, exiled from the interior of the building where I endlessly scribed over 3000 pages over the past ten year (and subsequently every blog that has ever been published). Fired for my benevolence to strangers and aesthetic seekers. Fired for lies generated like a nuclear accelerator by a student worker I caught cheating on her time card. The building where I had 98 books checked out at the time of my dismissal while my Boss played Tetris all day and the library director lived vicariously through a torso-slimmed variation of herself via the cyber-medium of second life. The building that I gave my fucking heart and soul to since early 2000. The building where I worked around the moustached-numerical oval of the clock overtime esp. around finals and wasn't paid a buffalo nickel in remorseful recompense while my nepotistic sexually frustrated co-workers would come in before the building even opened to play on-line video games, exiting their allotted shift prematurely, leaving more work for the night staff to attend. Fired after I had just spent 600 dollars on holiday gifts. Fired from the building where I wrote my first short story in the basement (entitled ‘The Drowning’) while still in my teens. Fired from the fuckin’ University where my name is scribed on a plaque in Bradley Hall. Fired from the university for an ersatz education I’ll still be paying for come twenty years time. The canning that somehow turned out to be a blessing. Finding myself full of thought thinking of Jonathon Larson as I ambled through the snow-flake static into the backroom of an anonymous building on Main street catering coffee refills for the dried out souls as we sat around as if in a private book club whose narrative has escaped us and talked about what has somehow brought us to this place.

The year where I monopolized the month of January crushing can after can of PBR in my apartment, watching Bob Proctor's synopsis of THE SECRET over and over again like a congregational holiday round, not caring if all my intellectual quote-unquote well read friends who use footnotes in their writings think he’s some sort of a charlatan. The year I became David Sereda’s first friend on Facebook (something about havin’ a bond with fellow wayfarer’s named David I’m telling you). The year where I spent a small fortune on accumulating the digitalized library of Joseph Campbell after losing the bulk of my collection through the move.

The year where I became re-obsessed with the Journalism of the late Rick Baker, scribing his name on the white interior-flank of my forearm as a ritual before clambering on stage every time I read my poems in public. Thinking of the seedy taverns of my youth where he used to frequent—thinking about the working class wayward souls for whom he sloughed up his sleeves and for whom he so assiduously fought giving hope for the hapless working class arcana— the downtrodden, the disease-ridden the financially-fucked, the emotionally enervated, the perennially pissed, the eternal, the all. Paying fifty dollars for his posthumous novel “Mary, Me In search of a lost lifetime,” and crying as he combed across the arable welcome mat of the midwest taking intermittent swigs of moosehead madly seeking for the identity of a woman who had no name.

The Raymond Carver of Peoria.

The year of being interviewed for my new job two hours after watching Barrack Obama hold one palm out as if being read by a Parent-teacher league gypsy at a grade school carnival while his antipodal palm symbolically blessed the leathery forehead of Lincoln’s own bible in oath—an emblem of change, a punctuation to the absolute political inanity and democratic disgrace of the last eight years.

Somehow for me I have an errant predilection for life-altering shit happening to myself around the date of every incumbent presidential inauguration. The day after Clinton was initially sworn in I won a scholarship-slash-sojourn to England that changed my life and ultimately made me a writer (thanx Greta-Gazelle and Mark-Andrew). The day after W. Bushy was sworn in I got a job teaching inner-city truants, dropping out of college with a four hundred page manuscript tucked under my shoulder like a freshly triangular folded American flag after taps. milking the last eight years lost in a late-night haze, hurtling my heart into the icy rink of a fresh page.

The new job on the end of Heading avenue.

The job that is emotionally rewarding. The job where I pretty much am given 7 hours a night to write.

The year where I moved out of my cockroach-riddled apartment (although I still miss the Murphy bed and my library shelves) across the street from St Mark’s parish. Filching a usurped jenga stack of milk-cartons from behind Sav-a-lot, listening nonstop and full blast to Tom Petty's FULL MOON FEVER, to Peter Gabriel's SO (dreaming of Mercy and of Anne sexton) to Tracy Chapman talking about a revolution baby as I dismantled the books on my shelves like bricks from a dike and packed them. The apartment where the red-haired girl of my dreams and myself broke furniture and overturned beer chalices while dry humping on the Persian carpet in an incendiary blaze of nothing short of unalloyed love and pure metaphysical communion. Wading into the pond of each others spirit through the orifice of each others lips, the knock and sway of our clad torsos bleating for joy. Thinking about this poem by Yeats even now today as I think of her:

I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

The apartment with the Wonkavator ( which was really just the interior of my kitchen cabinets clad with hundreds of diverse beer caps) and bookshelves and college kids and crazy neighbors. The house whose furniture as a whole was a collective assortment of bric-a-brac found combing the alley's behind Moss avenue and frat row in the first week of May. The apartment where I always partied with Gilbert who lived next door—Gilbert who likes a beer and a good time and makes a mean margarita and who looks like a lovable hybrid between Ben Franklin and some really nerdy yet cool dude whom you’d meet at a role-playing convention talking about his seventh level dwarf, Gilbert who Hale lived with for two years, filling a Pepsi machine in their living room with cheap “canoe” Beer—the Hamms, the Red Dog, the Blatz, The Old Style, the PBR (long live the heralding immortality of the Beer machine!!!!.) Gilbert who, along with the maternal benevolence of Diane Happ I eternally am indebted to and will never forget their encouragement and kindness that served as an air mattress for my deflated spirit those lonely and turbulent weeks.

The apartment where I said Goodbye to Tara in early spring, acolyting candles in my apartment cupping her hands and dancing slowly holding each other as if buoyed in the other’s limbs to stray off the inevitable descent of drowning, the inevitable departure. Tara with her Hippie dresses and cool azure jewelry and cool apartment replete with Buddha statue and ferret. Tara who fucks like Mt. St. Helen. Tara who loved to drink and party summer last when it felt like we were a local variation of F. Scott and Zelda as both our banter and our wit brachiated from bar stool to bar stool. Tara who I cheated on with a married woman then tried to justify it because she always openly made out with girls every time we went out. Tara who I burrowed myself in the bouquet of her arms five minutes after hearing that David Foster Wallace committed suicide last September. Tara who the last night in my apartment, made fun of my hair that I was coerced into cutting when I applied for the new job: “I’ve never seen you with short hair before David. It Just doesn’t look like you.” before we kissed for one last time, no tongue, no junior high back seat six pack hormonally induced make-out session, just a kiss, complex in its terse simplicity before she got into her car and began to drive cross country through the galloping overhead thunder storms of early spring, across lone highways of Nebraska and Kansas at night, alone with her ferret and life packed in her car, flinging across the pan handle of Texas like a fledgling stripper and a random flag pole, eventually dipping into the arid aura of New Mexico—the narrative of her life awaiting a new found genesis. A new beginning. A moist dawn of everything that is to come.

The year of flirting with Haydee at Casey’s gas station every morning often buying a cheap six pack or ersatz grape cigarillos or a newspaper or coffee before ambling back to my house via the Nuclear woods, the woods sliced between the fertile neck of heading avenue and Farmington road, the woods behind Nate Lockwoods house where we used to play growing up, the woods I immortalized in my first novel as the “Nuclear Woods” when I was living on High Street and never would have fathomed living on the cusp of the wooded meadow itself—a permeating halo of serenity ensconcing my limbs as I traipse past the oak stalks draped with snow and come across a family of deer in the winter peace of early morning.

The year saying goodbye to Gormans pub, holding my bar coaster out like a handkerchief billowing from a pier on a maiden voyage as I watched my local watering hole for the past decade slowly drift into the hangover horizon of the soon to be incumbent yesteryear. The bar that was one of the first bars in P-town top get Guinness draught on tap in the mid 90's. The bar where I drank with my fellow writer friends. The bar where I quoted Tennyson and made out with Manito-Meredith from Dr. Blouch's English class on a pool table in the back room senior year. The bar where John and I jipped work to witness the red sox win the world series. The bar where Nick-the-writer introduced me to pitchers of Guinness that would take five minutes just to pour from the tap for 14 dollars (no bar does pitchers anymore!!) going through five or six in a sitting, talking about the big boys-- Jim Harrison and George Saunders and Raymond Carver and Don Delillo and Rick Bass. Nick who phoned the library when I was out and said that he was Dave eggers and that the story I sent was accepted and when I went into work early Saturday morning and saw who had phoned I pensively walked out into the billowing November mist and smoked a cigarette and thought to myself that shit, after all this time, I somehow fucking made it before looking down into the scribble on the paper and realizing that it was a local area code. The bar where Nick and I talked about writing and watched sports—where we witnessed the televised slug-fest between Ron Artest and Ben wallace in '04 when the bar went crazy—witnessing a year later the greatest college bowl game in history, as a battered Texas defensive line somehow halted Reggie Bush and co., Vince Young blasting into the endzone on the final two-point conversation heralding an unprecedented upset.

A game that made the underdog in you want to fuckin' cry.

The ritual of egress with Nick the writer and myself, the two of us always punctuating the night with a syrupy-tangerine shot of Grand Marnier served in a translucent tulip-shaped goblet—a shot we'd toast to the writers who have somehow gone before us , who have endured volumes of solitude and shattering hurt and just plain fucking loneliness, the existential requisite of our craft, sipping the orange serum reflective and quietly, as if knowing our role as writers cosigned us the task with going back to work alone.

The bar where English majors would congregate at the end of the semester for the final class period, smoking cigarettes while slurping cheap lager, each verbally reciting one final poem. The bar where I would always saunter into my old high school classmates and try not to make mental cliffnotes about receding hairlines and burgeoning beer belly's—try not to note how age has inevitably settled into the once fertile throne of our anatomy.

The bar with stoic eyed Pete the bartender whose angular visage looked like something chiseled from granite on Easter Island. The bar where, every Wednesday we would smash tables together anticipating gratis platters of pizza.

The bar with the most depressing restroom you ever could imagine.

The bar where I spent hours laughing with the impeccable-hearted Jim Jager.

The bar where I did an unprecedented nine (count 'em) senior walks ending last May watching the now (somehow inexplicably young) college co-eds do fruity shots on top of the bar in their bras. Unbeknownst to anyone, spending the last night Gorman’s was in operation buying my Uncle a beer after he helped me move, sliding the key to my apartment under the winking bottom slit of the door, dropping my books and boxes of manuscripts in the garage of my new house before entering Gormans for the last time, buying my uncle a pilsner-pitcher of 312 before he left, sauntering into the cropped velvet haired artist I fell hard for two years earlier. The girl with the good wedding china cheekbones who spends hours dressed up like a samurai hunched over the hearth of a kiln. Having only enough money left for two PBR bottles, which is what we drank, slowly, as we sat at the bar, the two of us for the last time, and I watched the reflection of her smile tangoing in Blakean symmetry with the reflection of her laugh in the mirror in front of us, the mirror that read simply GORMANS in calligraphic emerald font.

The year where I moved back in with Uncle Mike. Mike who has always been Gandalf to my fretted-frodo. Uncle Mike with his beautiful Baha'i stories and marveling relentless enthusiasm for the faith. Uncle Mike the psychic. Uncle Mike who the first time I met him when I was living on High street told me to “look around you'll be living here someday,” and I looked back at him like he was so full of shit he should be working on a marketing campaign for Charmins. Uncle Mike who I left hanging a few years ago. Uncle Uncle Mike who used to give Psychic readings to Greta Alexander of all people. Uncle Mike who can fucking cook.

Uncle Mike who is the only person I have ever met who I swear grows younger each by calendar square.

The year of partying with ingénue-eyelided Shannon Moore on my birthday. Drinking at Mike's tap with my surrogate-soul mother Dr. Blouch and Dr. Vickroy, conversing with her cool psychologist husband about the intellectual art of implosion. We ended up that night playing pool at the Owl’s Nest.

The year of watching my cousin Matthew stand in front of the altar of whatever God there is and become ordained in the faith that raised me.

The year of monopolizing too much time on (fucking) facebook. Seeing pictures of the women I lost the virginity of my heart to years ago sprinkled in the snow of her wedding gown and thinking that she looks like a little kid playing dress up in her mommy's closet. The year of reconnecting with my brother the inimitable Ali Alibadi, whose lascivious largess is an intellectual lamppost of endless laughter and light. The year of hearing the gentle wind-chimes of Harmony Anne Dusek over the phone for the first time in fifteen years— the woman who half my lifetime earlier I let hold my heart like a grandparent allowing his knee-size lineage to sit on his lap and steer first gear as I held her on the Thames river in the winking lavender dusk of that April and somehow the narrative of my life felt complete.

The year of wildly smiling every time I read a blog creatively crafted by a certain Gazelle goddess or quickly espied and waded in a picture painted by a girl named Polly (honestly babe, how you can be that good after not picking up a brush in a decade does nothin’ short of astound me).

The year I was supposed to meet Daniela at the airport in Bloomington Illinois only her trip got rescinded at the last second, which, we joked, probably saved us a few trimesters.

The year of becoming emotionally enamored with the cyber-pulchritude steeple of renaissance light that is Carolina de Luca (of Exile, WI). ‘Nuff said.

The year of spiritually salivating over Chicago Bridgette. The artist who let me use her office phone to call a dear friend in California the first time I visited the House of worship in Wilmette. The girl with the cinnamon-hued stalactite French braid that slinks down the back cinnamon slope of her neck like a curtain rod to her dreams. The woman whose smile I tripped over and fell into like a maladroit waiter on roller blades. Bridgette with her placid sunrise over the lake shore smile that illuminates her visage like a little kid playing with light brites. Bridgette who gave me hug in the bookstore while a coifly dressed rich kid looked on in almost irritating disdain (yes!!!). Bridgette who I looked for and couldn’t find and then decided to leave and then sauntered into her leaving the architectural dome majesty of the building like it was something in slow motion cut from of a Merchant-Ivory flick.

The year my best friend John's cool martial arts diva girlfriend taught me how to break a board as in a karate chop which I succeeded on the first try. John telling me that I sliced through it like a plastic knife and a rectangular slab of leftover margerine. Kelly telling me that "That was nice, but you are supposed to scream when you break the board."

And yell I did on my second endeavor splintering the plank of wood, yelping like I was trying to get something atavsitic and primal back as the slant of my palm splashesd through the impenetrable hymen of oak.

The year of the swine flu and everyone flooding into panic although no one got very sick.

The year where I just couldn’t stop watching religulous.

The year of MJ suddenly moonwalking into the ashy scalp of the planet. The year of R and B going Gaga over a poker face; of Text-sex and tell’em with a smiley face. The year of having a ravishing woman I hardly know send me naked pictures of herself on my cell phone, which perhaps, makes it not a bad year indeed.

The year my sister Jenn (who was brilliant as Jo in Little Women) and her husband eric (who was brilliant as the lead in One flew Over the Cuckoos nest) moved to New York to pursue the vacillating glory of the stage. The year where Beth and Dan bought a summer house in Arcadia Michigan, two blocks away from the Lutheran summer camp that was my late father’s favorite place on earth. Beth who I can’t help but break into caroling the self-devised Junior League pledge every time I see her, (Ahem), “I pledge, to shop shop shop, to wear pink, to marry a man who makes six figures, to sometimes be a bitch”

The year of waking up in a cloudy bubble of intoxicated oblivion and being unable to speak in complete sentences before finding myself ensconced by the flagellating tempo of ambulance lights inside St. Mary’s cemetery. A writer friend picking me up at the hospital later that evening, screaming, haranguing, asking me when I’m going the quit prostituting my health and all I could tell him that I still can’t get over her after all these years.

I just can’t.

Realizing later that night that three years earlier I wrote a scene in the large novel that takes place in that exact same cemetery, ST. Mary’s in west Peoria, where the protagonist goes crazy and comatose and is found (albeit in a pink silo) three days later.

The year of my crazy Johnny Depp look-a-like rockstar cousin Larry from Chicago telling me that it was possible. That if he could do it anyone could do it.

The year of the Nuclear Woods.

The year of my mom really being there for me when I needed her most.

The year of Nothing makes me more happier in this pebble skipped eternity of space and time than meandering into the labyrinth that is the Bridgeport community in the south side of Chicago on a spring day, stopping by Uncle Johnny's, listening to his stories before gorging on one of his out-of-the-elliptical-gravitational-sway-of-this-planet amazing Italian Beef sandwhiches before hitting up 3rd Base (the bar, not the metaphorical adolescent sexual rung) for a few pints before wending my way to the old ball park, always with my best friend John. We saw Peavy's debut this year. We watched Quentin hit a grandslam on a perfect autumnal evening. We watched Thome nail one right above are heads--but every moment of this season, and other season, would be void without the continuity your friendship in both sports and the 90-feet betwen second and third in the often arduos pitchers ballpark of life.

Thank you.

The year of rediscovering One World. Hanging out with the raconteur wonder that is Shaman Paul. The year where Rachel ordered the priciest entrée on the menu and we found ourselves in a dervish alcohol-infused haze and eventually found ourselves praying for peace in a dim-lit burrow that looked like something a manacled Plato might try to escape from in the basement of the Newman Center. One world with Glover and Hannah and the liter committee. One world with dearest Dave Thompson and Matthew.

The year of reconnecting with Laurie N______ my mistress-muse for over a decade. Making love on her kitchen floor while concocting dinner in her house on the north side of town, the house with the pool and the hammock the ceiling sized bed. Hearing stories about her rich alcoholic husband who drank nothing short of one bottle of Beefeaters a day until it burned through his liver. Looking at pictures of her in her wedding dress pictorial snapped the same year I entered Kindergarten. Waking up after a long nap and walking barefoot and brandishing a Dos Equis in her backyard, telling me in her sensual Newport Cigarette monotone that sounds like jazz that she doesn’t fuck like she just turned fifty years old, while I asked her if she hears the oratorio of crickets that seem to be exploding in punctuation marks of a summer somehow ending, finding a modicum of peace stapled in the sentimental hovel of her arms. As if being single were an ocean an every three months I find myself raft mattress of a different yearning soul, feeling her lips kiss my forehead as she leaves for work in the am hours and I am left asleep somehow again all alone.

The year of drinking at seedy bars where you can smoke (where would I be without the Getaway on Western avenue that looks like something out of an Eugene O’neil play???) Shawna, who flashed me five minutes after I sat down. Smoking cheap cigars with Hale as we blast out into the pumpkin moon autumnal sunset the last Thursday of every month is search for the perfect Podunk haunt, the Road house in Elmwood, Willette’s winery in the sleepy doe-eyed southern hamlet of Manito where another lifetime ago I lived with and fell in love with a beautiful girl. (nothing like going through three hundred bucks at a tasting) the 801 club in Bartonville, the Shed with the beautiful country girl bartenders with “bad teeth and big boobs” in Buzzville.

The year of my mentor, the Great Doctor Palakeel, publishing a kick ass sleek variation of the epic of Gilgamesh and presenting it to me like a confirmation bible over kick-ass Southern-Indian cuisine.

The year of losing the copper around my birthday for four months, the metaphysical talisman that has almost always been pocketed in the indecipherable lata and longitudinal creases of my palm given to me by an eternal companion whose seismic smile alone shatters the poetic geiger counter burrowed in my chest.

Finding it four months later when I was doing room check and a resident had it on his dresser claiming that he found the copper, the thumb sized pebble of my heart in the parking lot a month earlier and kepy it because he thought it was just “a really cool looking rock.”

The year of chainsmoking my way back to a certain parkbench placidly abutting the Evantonian lakeshore, basking in the residue of her lips, the refulgent scent her smile, the warmth of her spirit, the chorus of her song.

The year of Will's monthly poetic gala's at Champs west, the Bohemian nest of local poets. The piano bar on western ave (that I still remember when it was Buzzies Ice cream, when it was staffords dairy) that is owned by my old coworkers at Jumers and that looks like the magnified interior of a clover, home to the artists in town who inspire the fuck out of me. Ethan with his goggly lank and convivial swagger and poems about Lane Stanely. Steve’s cidery beard and fondness for kick-ass spirits (Will whips up the best ol’ fashion in town, I challenge you as if in a dual to find one better). Adam who is shaped like a human exclamatory mark and who reads his work with a very sincere plowing monotone that simply defies you not to cry.

Beautiful Hannah, whose refreshing spirit and abundant enthusiasm for the art (as well as for litter) has been a blessed benchmark in my life for well over a decade.

And good ol’ Shan (god love her).

There is also classy Abby who for some reason reminds me of Virginia Woolf and who is an accomplished scribe in her own poetic inflection. Brittany whom I have known since she was single integers in age and sang Finoa Apple and who is now getting her Masters in English and who looks like she just stepped off the cover of the latest Victoria Secret catalog. Beautiful Megan who scribbles all her poems in hardback stationary notebooks and reads with the authoritative assonance of angels. Cool Alfredo who all the girls fall in love with. Sensual-lipped Anna whose poems rock my world. Groping hands with the “lock and dam” ebullience of Miss Stephenson underneath the oak helm of the bar before she empties the audience of their collective breath in one collective stanza—a poetic pillar of light escaping the podium where she stands.

And Will, the poetic avatar of P-town, a modern day Japhy Ryder pedaling up and down the gritty arteries of Western Avenue. Will, whose promulgation and promotion of the craft I love is unparalleled in the area code that shelters the current poet laureate of Illinois..

The year autumn was reserved for Princess Jessica, a poet.

Jessica who reminds me of Scout Finch smoking camel filters. Jessica who is small and waifish with a whip of scarlet hair often reeled back in a pinch behind her neck. Jessica who wears thick glasses and has cool reiki tattoos coating her entire back like armor and composes out-of-this-fucking- stratosphere damn good poetry. Jess who has a gargantuan queensryche poster vertically splattered over her bed that looks like something an avid CS Lewis scholar might mistake for a wardrobe entrance into another world.

Jess and I who the first month we were together it always rained. Jess with the cool CD collection and a two year old named after a romantic poet. Jess who I fell hard for when we parked our car amidst the stalking cement effigies of Springdale cemetery and she put on John Denver. This song.

Jess and I making love in the tangled brush of the Nuclear woods beneath the optic lens of the moon, the same gravity that holds and presses the earth in tandem to its nearest lunar orb swaying in time signature with the rhythm of our own pulse, the feral sway of our own bodies coupled with the carnal cauterwaul of unyileding confusion and hurt and need and joy.

During the day jess and I would sit in the parkbench in the Nuclear woods and read Walt Whitman and Rodney Jones and hold each other while I would sip beer between our relationship-decimating work schedules, lost in the smattering of autumnal stainglass leaves crunching below.

Jess and I who the first week of our rapport I received a verbal cyber-assault from a guy at the end of the bar who told me he was gonna kick my ass if he saw me talking to her again which only made me want to talk to her again more.

Jess and I who couldn't even make it to Christmas.

Jess who I surprised the last time I saw her at Firehouse Pizza as I lassoed my arms around her waist and kissed the bulb of hair on the back of her head while she was picking up a delivery before walking her out to her vehicle, somehow realizing that this would be our last collective moment together. Jess ask me simply to kiss her in public (which she never did before) before her vehicle shuttered away in an overture of fumes.

The year of sauntering into my surrogate sis from a decade ago, the lavishing countenance of Brooke Ferero on thanksgiving eve and telling her as I kissed the dome of her cheekbone that I am proud of her baby.

So very proud indeed.

There were other memories of course. Making more money than I have ever made in my entire life (which is still far less than 30 g's but makes me feel like the prince of Tides) and still hiding from creditors. Reading everything I can get my grubby little literary paws on. Spending Christmas with my cool cousin Brianna hours before her wedding, adhering to our holiday tradition of driving out in the country with a few beers in tandem, getting lost on the tortuous back roads of Hollis township off Tuscarora road where the leftover glacial slopes are reminiscent of Canada.

On the incipience of a new year the one memory I remember most from twenty-zero-nine transpired inside the Billy Goat Tavaran in downtown chicago. I had just been escorted off of Millennium bridge by a security officer for smoking a cigar while admiring the architecture of the newly opened Modern wing of the art institute (which looks like something I made once in summer camp with tooth and popsicle sticks) and I was pissed of at the Li-young Lee "City in which I love you." Pissed off at the hog butcher to the world. Pissed off at the city where my great grandfather worked as a bootlegger for Al capone ferrying a coal and Ice truck (stowed with moonshine) down the buegreoning industrial ash and chrome of Wabash. Pissed off that she wasn't with me. Pissed off at the superficial rich fucks walking past the lonely solitude of the poor in existenital suitcase doting existenial traipse. Pissed off at all the tottering sadness and loneliness in the world. Pissed off that, for many us, our dreams and ambitions and potential are all too often occluded to the dome of our area code.

Pissed off that I was having all these thoughts when I have lived in the United states my entire life and, sadly, unlike the bulk of the planet, have always had access to nutritious processed food. To clean water. To toilet paper. To a surplus of technology that I can utilize to assauge my existential loneliness twenty-four seven and make me feel that I am entitled to more. The advent to individualized human avarice.

Pissed off that the rich fuck who calls himself an artist by making a recursive looped video of a santa clause taking a dump purloined my grant money (I’m sorry, a recursive-looped video of a holiday harlequin taking a dump is not art and will not be considered art a century from now).

Pissed of at the city of Saul bellow and Studs Turkel and long time south sider Nelson Algren (miss reading those award stories in the trib!!!). Pissed off at the city of my beloved White Sox and vernal-meadow coating of Goose Island IPA. The city where I was blessed to introduce my mentor, George Saunders at the now defunct Barbara's Bookstore on Wells back in 2000 during the kick ass Pastoralia tour (read “Sea oak” and “The barbers unhappiness”) and then afterwards on the subway, saw the most beautiful girl toting a violin case ( remembering how smiled at me and blushed and grabbed my wrist and then, I shit you not, dissipated) I had ever seen. My fourth chapter portrait of the artist as a young man Bird woman angelic muse.

So pissed off that I did the unthinkable and went into the Billy Goat Tavern. The worlds most notorious Cubs bar.

I ate a few "doubles" my body, enervated, slouched over the lip of the bar like an over used question mark in a junior high exposition paper and began drinking. The bartender was an old man in his early sevnties and wore an all white apron like the bartenders used to wear years ago. Two other old men sat next to me on all sides. Old men who were born during the blitzkgrieg genesis of the second world war. Men who have endured bouts of cancer. Men who each wore thick glasses and had catarcts. Men whose face looked like wet-corrugated cardboard. Men who has been drinking in this damp chicago hovel, waywarly cheering on my cross town rivals since the late fifties.

Men who have been sitting in this exact bar the same day Catcher in the Rye was published.

"This is the sort've bar guys like us a place go to to get away from all the tampons and the nail polish." The guy next to me said. I lifted up my Schlitz as if in salute, seminally feeling out of place on the alcoholic wing of the geratric ward.

"She-cawg-oh ain't what it used to be though. You used to be able to smoke in here. The whole fuckin' place was just one nest of sportswriters and smoke. Now you have to fuckin' go outside to smoke. That fuckin sucks if you ask me."

I again toasted my chalice o' schlitz in Salute

We began to talk. I told him that I was a writer from downstate and that I come up here every three months just to walk around and look at people.

"If yer a writer you'd be interested to know that Mike Whoi-ko used to practically live in here."

"Who?" I ask

“Whoi-ko” He says again, as if ordering from a Sushi menu, pointing to a wall splattered with articles.

“Ryoko?” I ask. The old man nods.

“Yeah,” He says, “Harry Caray used to drink here too. As well as John Candy. But there was no one like Mike Royko."

When I ask them where former tribune columnsit Bob Greene used to imbibe he smiles.

“He used to sip tea with the all four year olds at the american girls store down the street.”

There is a collective chuckle inside the bar.

Fifty years from now Ryoko will be Kobe to Rick Baker's Michael Jordan. Both are amazing, but Baker died tragically when he was only thirty-six. The same age as Jonathon Larson who wrote RENT. The same age as Mozart.

Still Royko was damn good. Ask ask journalism major. And this was his bar.

"Royko used to drink beer and talk about the cubs right about where you are sitting.” The cool bartender dressed all in white said, handing me my third beer.

I began to sit with men and average thirty five years my senior and talk about sports. They knew that Ryne Sandberg had been coaching in P-town for the last two years and inquired if I thought he was moving up the coaching eschelons of the Cubs organization. We talked about the bears and Jay Cutler and Bobby Knox. We laughed. For over and hour we sat and drank, the elders and the wild child talking about sports.

Then something happened that I wasn't expecting. The bartender, the old man clad in a sheet of white looked both ways, grabbed my empty beer mug, filled it quickly and then placed it in front of me. When I placed my hand inside my jacket to fetch my wallet he swatted his hand down in front of his face as if warding off late-summer insects indoors. This happened three to four times, the old man, noticing my goblet was empty, looking to see if his boss was watching him, before replacing the emptiness of my mug joyfully with suds.

Jovially I'm known in over half the bars of Peoria and I always tip at least 20 percent depending if the bartender has boobs and the only thing I have ever received gratis (outside of a few cool bars I won't name) has been a completely curable case of Chlamydia courtesy of Missy the bartender at Crusens on Farmington road.

That and a few severed hearts and the occasional hangover.

But I hardly ever get a free drink especially from a bar I just dipped inside of to escape the hoi-poloi materialistic redundancy of the streets. Especially from a Cubs bar.

A man goes into the earth to be reborn. To plant something into the arable womb of the globe. The Jesus I celebrated on easter Sunday when I was five fingers old goes into the soil of the planet a man and is reborn a diety. A basic meditation ritual of Shamanism is to mediatte on slinking into the earth, sprouting out of the crust of the planet with a very Jack and the bean stalk green-like stem in which to only ascend.

That I had somehow made a fraternal bond with these gentleman who probably have less than a decade of life left here on this planet. In this bar. In this city that continues to steamroll forward and continues to change.

That mythologically this bar was for me what the male initiation rights were at the caves of les trois freres. Going into the earth, being reborn and coming out and learning how to give through heartbreak and pain and the toppling dissipation of years. Learning how to give through old age, learning how to bring forth that metaphysical copper burrowed inside of us, learning how to look at the planet in awe and wonder, learning how to bathe in the joy of this plurality of time-space, this place of existence.

Learning how to fucking love and to enjoy and to create in the place we have found ourselves for the next year. And the year after that. And beyond. Before we enter the crust of the planet for good and are unable to return.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

After all as a good writer friend of mine who I see every day once told me in print damn near ten years ago, "My friend, as long as we are here, we are immortal."

"Human beings came and went" an epitaph of thanksgiving to my mentor the late David Foster Wallace

2008-11-14T13:44:00.001-08:00

In my late teens and early twenties Infinite Jest was my best friend. I lugged the glossy tome of erudition and narrative bravura with me everywhere I went. I ploughed through the continents of paragraphs, brandishing my pen like a scalpel as I chiseled annotations into each page. I loved how each individual sentence revved up and sputtered before driving the reader deeper into a neon Golgotha of an overtly subsidized, spiritually vacuous future. I loved the acronyms and the irony and the lack of punctuation—how everything fractl'd out of control with the subtle velocity of a mouse click and the startled sunrise of a new web page. I loved how from page one, Wallace allowed the reader to stumble and wade into a sea of characters in the book-- creatures who are seeking and yearning. Creatures who are fucked up yet fighting. The scene where Tiny Ewell is confessing his pubescent chicanery to a comatose Don Gately still to this day reverberates inside my chest with the resonance and flap of angel wings. Or the scene where beloved maladroit Mario asks the Moms how she can tell if someone is sad. Open to around page 200 in nearly any version of Infinite Jest and you will witness a miracle in print, the epistemic of a heart that wildly observes and blinks as well as pulsates with the aesthetic drive of all mankind as it lurks and scopes out a simple halfway house while detailing the errant souls that dwell within.

I annotated and re-read and pondered and dreamed. I talked about Wallace to anyone who would listen. I started carrying around a vial of Visine. I told them that Wallace was to a generation of writers what Cobain had been to a generation of lyricists. I told them that the linguistic mortar binding the jacket of this book together contained the ever-elusive "it" in which we as a collective human species were all somehow seeking. The book was marketed like the purported failed entertainment itself—glossy and gargantuan. Epic and exhausting. The blurbs of Moody and Vollmann and Franzen sprouted off the back cover with the intensity of fireworks blossoming above the tinted window showcasing the pensive author himself, looking as if he had just inhaled something green and potent while mulling over the outcome of a game of frisbee golf. He looked like what I thought a literary savior should look like: a wizened Spartan wordsmith. A feral wildman boasting about the glory of his fresh inky kill. He looked like someone who had been there, a washed up itinerant emotional Ishmael, who had not only survived the to tell the tale but one who wished to convey it in a fashion that had simply never before been conceived. That he wished to push the (porous) borders of the page as far as they would allow. Wish to amp up the volume of the contemporary state of American letters. That he wished simply to stretch out the possibility of the human experience and immortalize it in the tattooed hieroglyphics of language.

But more than anything what inspired me about David Foster Wallace was that he lived forty-five minutes away from the aching bluffs of the river town where I was born. For a formative teenage writer lodged in the genital wart of the Midwest nothing is more needed, more revered, more sacred then finding superman occupying the corner phone booth in the sometimes empty avenues of your artistic ambitions—and when that superhero looks like David Foster Wallace and writes like a wild-haired caged mad man howling at the harvest moon, you know you have found a true mentor of the soul indeed.

The summer of '97 I would drive down the cement arteries of I-74, lost in the emerald husks of corn, thinking to myself aloud that "This is David Foster Wallace, country" as I chained smoked Camel Turkish Golds thinking about Don Gately or Hal Incandenza or Himself pressing microwave integers or thinking about the ravishing, unforgettable Lenore Beadsman from Broom of the System (my favorite DFW protagonist of all time) wondering if I would spot him at the Denny's he was rumored to write at. Apparently he would put his television in his front lawn when he wished to log in some serious writing hours. My friends who had met him said that he always referred to writing as "work." That he smoked like a chimney at a nuclear facility. That he was apish in stature, hairy and uncouth and dipped even when he was in class. That he was brilliant. That he smelled. That he couldn't play tennis anymore because he had a sore knee. That he didn’t know how to shave. That all the girls loved him. That he would often enroll his creative writing students through two weeks of remedial grammar at the onset of every semester because they didn't know how to punctuate worth shit. That he would chew up your individualized slain over manuscripts and spit out the romantic residue of your tears. That he was going through writers block. That he had his own private study in Milner library. That he could sometimes be a real asshole. That he had gotten it on with fellow writer Mary Karr at Syracuse and had her initials tattooed somewhere on the hirsute boundaries of his flesh. That he looked like a hybrid between a court Jester or a samurai warrior in that ubiquitous bandanna he donned with the cagey assurance that he could either easily amuse you to death or simply fuck with everything you have ever believed in.

I never had a class with David Foster Wallace. After I discovered the blinding shield of linguistic light that is Infinite Jest I began to consume every writer and book David Foster Wallace recommended. For me personally, this was where David Foster Wallace, the image of a jaded hip insomnia-addled novelist chain smoking cigarettes at a local coffee bar comes to life--that image made me simply want to read and write books and sent younger writers a message that if you openly indulged in your literary fetishes you might also influence others in the process.

Everything David Foster Wallace recommended I devoured with the appetite of hunger strike riddled martyrs. When I first discovered Wallace I was lost in the mire of serpentine sentences brought on by an unyielding "beat and James Joyce phase" that compels so many young (esp. males) writers to forgo the piecemeal rudiments of punctuation, sandblasting a ditzy clang of syllables into the drywall of the page in hopes that a metaphor encapsulating the human condition might somehow be revealed in a dash of brilliance. While my education at that time was (to plagiarize Wallace again) "A few french fries short of an academic happy meal," I never received anything close to the edification and encouragement and the joy inside the classroom that Wallace offered me via his prose and his enthusiasm for contemporary state of letters. There were the writers on the back of the book cover, Sven Birketts urging us to "THINK" William Gaddis and William Gass and John Barth and (oh yes) Thomas Pynchon. I read William James' "Varieties of a religious Experience," I fell head over knee caps enamored with Wittgenstein's Tractatus-Logico Philosophicus based solely that Wallace's first novel Broom of the System had incubated inside the epistemological rungs of this philosophical ladder.

A sentence referencing eternity in respect to the vicissitudes of time culled from that positivism bulletin provides the title of this particular blog.

But then I also began to read his contemporaries. If Wallace was vaulted into the coveted dome of the literati spotlight, he was sharing his champagne and confetti with writers who struggled and wrote long side him. Younger writers. I read the writers whom he was compared to yet seemed to vehemently despise (McInerney and Leyner). I read the writers he adored. I read Susan Daitch and AM Homes. I read and re-read Galatea 2.2 and fucking wailed til their were tear drops on my testicles ("Richard Powers," Wallace applauded in an interview "Who lives all of 45 minutes away from me and whom I have met all of once.") I fell in madly love with the spritely wit and windex clear prose of Lorrie Moore. I slipped into the frigid late-70's ambiance of Rick Moody's icicle prose parading over the upholstery of Updike. I lauded the beautiful carnivalesque clan and narrative tomfooleries of Don Antrim's "100 brothers." I ordered a copy of 27th City and even submitted my name to Oprah's book club in hopes that I would be a guest panelist during the one week that Jonathan Franzen itchingly anticipated CORRECTIONS was chosen to be in the aborted media spotlight.

After all, I knew all about Franzen. David Foster Wallace had introduced me to his work years before.

I read more William T. Vollmann then could possibly be salubrious for my spiritual longevity. More than once I got laid plagiarizing the quote "Gave my heart an erection," a metaphor he quoted in an interview while talking about Carole Maso's ravishing novel "AVA."

Some of the books Wallace introduced me to have become my best friends. I can't imagine where I would go for emotional solace if I didn't have Delillo's WHITE NOISE or GREAT JONES STREET. During the IJ tour Wallace was quoted to having said something like, "The writer I'm most into right now is George Saunders Civil War Land in Bad Decline."--Saunders becoming a second literary avatar who I was honored to introduce in Chicago during his book tour for Pastoralia.

I read every DFW interview I could land my postmodern inflicted paws on. To this day I feel the Larry McCarffery Interview featured in the 1993 Summer issue of THE REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY FICTION has served as my emotional rod and staff--it is the one piece of exposition I have been going to like a confidant for over a decade to confirm my devotion to this craft.

In the interview (published when Jest was still in its second trimester)Wallace said things like "Fiction is what its like to be a fucking human being." He talked about Wittgenstein and about chasing what Yeats called "the click of a well made box " How he talked about the craft and loyalty to composing stories being an act of love. "And I've found the really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by by insecurity or vanity or ego. Showing the reader that you are smart or talented or whatever, trying to be liked, integrity issues aside, this stuff just doesn't have enough motivational calories to carry you in the long haul. You've got to discipline yourself that talk out the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you're working on. Maybe that just plain loves."

The interview with Larry McMurphy stewarded to my life what the New Testament proclaims to give to tithing Born again arms flailing Christians. It gave me orientation and encouragement and still to this day part of me feels set on fire every time I read it.

the author of this blog (right) endeavoring to emulate the attire of his mentor, circa 1998

The first creative writing seminar I attended at Bradley University I wore glasses and a bandanna to class. After the class period I chatted with my instructor, the great Thomas Palakeel, about post modernism and Wallace’s place in it. A year later I transferred to Illinois State to save money. Wallace was on sabbatical that semester but I remember jipping class and spending all day burrowed 400 meters from his office writing in the basement of Manchester. I had a crush on the scarlet-haired professor with the tight ass whose office was adjacent to Wallace's academic den. I would hang outside his office, my manuscript folded beneath my arms like an American flag configured after taps, waiting to be discovered. There was nothing remarkable about his office. I remember that he had a New Yorker cartoon posted on his office door (something about rogain, middle age and chest hair). He also had a quote stating how he would be on sabbatical followed by the phrase” FARETHEWELL FELLOW TRAVELER.

When I called his office just to hear the voice of my avatar on his office answering machine, hoping to introduce myself as an eager student and enthusiastic fan of contemporary fiction I was dismayed when the semi- nasal tone of his voice offered out a bitter caveat stating, "This number is for student and academic inquiries only."

I met a cool cafeteria worker at Illinois state who was a late-middle aged writer paying his dues like every other aspiring chronicler I know and who walked out of Wallace's classroom after a heated discussion where Wallace ripped his story apart.

"The one word to describe Dave Wallace is "intense." He said, after telling me about a recent rejection letter he had just received from Esquire.

We had a mutual friend named Nick who worked at Brewster Beans and who looked just like Tiny Ewell from Infinite Jest. Nick had met DFW in hallways of Stevenson one afternoon and knew him solely as a professor. Nick was also an English major and I remember feeling appalled when he confessed to me that he had no clue of DFW’s literary renown. Nick had never heard of Infinite Jest, was oblivious that his friend Dave Wallace was named to the New Yorkers "Top twenty writers for the New Millennium."

Nick was working on an adaption of Hamlet for class.

"He has a really cool set up for writing." Nick said. "When I was inside his house last week he told me that he was working on something very serious and that he trusted me not to look around too much."

Nick told me a story how DFW's home answering machine apaprently kept weekly updates of the Bears 2000-2001 sloven season.

"By the way," It would end, "The Bears are still oh and five."

I edited a copy of Nick's Hamlet manuscript. Later Nick work shopped the manuscript. Next to my scribbled comments were those of DFW's. His handwriting was a lot neater than mine.The closest to Dave Foster Wallace I would get that semester was having my handwriting on his writing desk, wondering if his lips offered a snicker of delight when he saw my request of "Needs to have more Alas Poor Yorricks."

I transferred back to Bradley to wade ad infinitum in a haunting quagmire of debt but still somehow determined as fuck to scribe out my heart on to the unblemished pasture of snow that is the beckoning freshness of a blank page. I fell in love with girl who was the most beautiful (visually stunning) and ebullient gifted writer I have ever met (for all you jest-heads out there, her smile alone would make Joellen PGOAT look like she belonged in a barnyard bargain book bin). When John Updike came to speak at Bradley University that fall, I inquired about the future of fiction. Updike mentioned the name of David Foster Wallace and the whole room visually turned in my direction. I made friends with Kris, a James Joyce scholar whose IQ may be soaring somewhere next to the hubble telescope. Together with the PGOAT we maxed out autumnal afternoons driving around Bloomington, leaving Babbit books with a pagoda of postmodern texts busheled in the basket of our arms. We visited Dalkey Archive press and Fiction Collective 2 in Fairchild Hall requesting back issues of The review of Contemporary Fiction. We tramped through Stevenson Hall in search of simply spotting the author. We made Wallace out to be an elusive sasquatch and even coined the term "Wallace droppings" whenever we came across a twinkie wrapper. We bought more books. We read more interviews. We listened to folk music (Dar Williams, Ani Difranco, Greg Brown) and smoked weed. Thanks to the mind blowing Hyperbolean philosophical orations of Dr. Greene we spent that autumn immersed in the incendiary soul poetry of Husserl, Levinas, Battaile and Blanchot. We loved life. We howled and screamed. We fucked and accused. We continued to pelt out the confusion of love and the love of confusion into the keyboard every night in forlorn hopes that a metaphor might somehow be conceived.

We dreamed.

Still Wallace had been the most influential writer in the last half-decade of my life--his prose and literary recommendations alone served as the impetus to my every creative craving and try as hard as I fucking may, I never saw him once.

the best writers of our generation destroyed by madness-- Pulitzer prize winner Junot Diaz, Rick Moody, edwidge danticat, DFW, George saunders, Pulitzer prize winner jeffrey eugenides, New yorker "top 20 writers under 40" June 1999.

I finally met David Foster Wallace at Borders Books store in downtown Chicago on Bloomsday 1999. He had just appeared in the New Yorker top 20 writers for the new millennium issue, standing next to George Saunders, doing what looks like a fist pump of joy.

He was large. With his bulk he looked like an offensive center hunched over on all fours about ready to hike a football shaped exactly, somehow, like the book which I felt was the greatest text in the English language. He wore a pink bandanna, shorts and purple socks. He looked nothing like the saint I had drooled over the past three years. I remember telling my girlfriend that I thought he looked like the energizer bunny clad in that pink bandanna lumbering across aisled of reduced bestsellers brandishing an empty Evian bottle like a scepter, using it solely for a tobacco spittoon, the jester taking court, center stage, waiting to tell us a story.

He looked like a poured hybrid of Hal Incandenza and Don Gately.

He gave a kick ass reading, his voice soft, a late spring breath rustling over the Midwestern prairie reeds. When the plenary Q and A section of the book signing convened and one gentlemen asked him what he was currently reading he answered, "Hannibal" followed by a pause followed by a, "like the rest of the nation" rejoinder. When a middle-aged lady asked him where his inspirations come from, he scratched his head in an apish fashion and confessed that he really didn't know.

After the Q. and A the audience configured into an exclamatory mark of anxious bodies standing in the direction where the author was seated. David Duchovnyof X-files renown cut my girlfriend ( the PGOAT) in line and stepped on my foot in the process in order to be the first to offer Wallace a congratulatory shake. Wallace seemed completely unphased by Duchovy's presence.

I had one copy signed for me and another addressed to Doc. Palakeel, my first creative writing prof at Bradley university. I began to get tense. I tittered. I tried to convey to him the gratitude I felt for everything he had given me. He brushed it off like he could care less about what his work had meant to the general populace at large. When the person behind me in line made a reference to the date of June sixteenth being Bloomsday I almost on cue broke out into a fulsome rendition of Joyce's "Ineluctable modality of the visible," warranting a scowl from my Waterhouse visgaed PGOAT girlfriend which strongly insinuated to quit being so pedantic in public, honey. DFW continued looking down as he autographed his, "with best possible wishes" bromide in the interior of each Hardcover book. When I asked him if I could shake his hand, he said I could but then commented in a very James Joyce May-I-kiss-the-hand-that-wrote-Ulysses-germane-to-Bloomsday-kind-0f-way that if he were me, then I should still wash it, preferably with soap. I kept on wanting to talk to him. I wanted to ask him the perfunctory interrogation of "What advice would he give young writers? Who do we need to sleep with to get published?" As he scribbled the rehearsed sentence into the collar of my book I tried to thank him again for every thing he has given me. Stuttering I mentioned how I had read his five, "Direly underappreciated American novels" appearing in a recent on-line issue of Salon and how I had read each of them and how this constituted my overall affection for himself as the author, that not only did he make me want to give up everything I was doing and write books he simultaneously made me want to give up everything I was doing and read books as well.

When I told him we were from Peoria and attended Bradley University he paused for a moment and said "You guys have a really good basketball team, though, right? That one white guy."

"That one white guy," I thought to myself as I held the porcelain handle of the PGOATs palm in mine and two autographed copies of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men between us like a newborn as we left the bookstore on Michigan Avenue, the late-afternoon tint of over head lego-stacked buildings adorning downtown Chicago like a spiking utilitarian nest of beauty falling all around us in fragments of shadows and in spangles of fresh light.

I don't think the author ever looked up at me once.

***

You could see it after Infinite Jest. You could see Wallace trying to change. You could see Wallace trying to stretch the perimeters of the page. You could see it in Adult World (II) and other more abstract selections of BIWHM. It was as if he wanted to perform electroshock therapy on his readers psyches. It was if he wanted to push the envelope of language past the shoreline of the page into the ocean of reality , the feeling of wading in a pond of consciousness, a feeling of what it means to be a pulsating, sentient human being alert at all times versus, as he quotes, “a very sophisticated mammal” or as Wallace elegantly espoused in his 2005 Kenyon graduation speech: “It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

This is the world we are all blessed to somehow an astonishing part of.

Wallace demanded that you look at a piece of fiction (or reality for that matter) with this sort of 24-7 metaphysical cognizance---to scrutinize the vessels and shapes of the alphabet in a new way, which in doing so, coerces the individualized reader to look at his world from a wider self-expanded periphery. You could see this in Tense Present Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage. You could see it most vividly in HOST with its cryptic interpolated urine stained continents of prose. It looked like witnessing a crop circle from an overhead bush plane. Linguistic alkaloids and metaphorical algorithms and a lot of avant-gardish where the fuck am I going with this—but mostly, I thought to myself as I leered into the foam of sentences ornamented into the page was that this looked like a lot of cryptic slop and I longed for a novel, an adopted Chinese sibling for Infinite Jest to cuddle up with for an eternity all for my own.

Still, in the last half decade of his life, Wallace wrote some astounding shit.

Less than a month after 9-11 A View from Mrs. Thompsons was published in Rolling Stone. Wallace recounts witnessing the tragedy and shock of that day on a neighbors couch. He was writing about 9-11, but he was writing what was transpiring on that day in my back yard. I felt every resident in central Illinois should buy five copies of the article and memorize it. Again I was seminally pissed that no one I knew in the community seemed to care that DFW was writing about the lens of global loss from the vantage point of our own backyard.

Wallace even published two nature poems in Triquarterly "Peoria," named after the city and the lush prairie environs where I have lived for the bulk of my life.

“ Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and sky line of canted rust and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to a place beyond the windbreak, where unfulfilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat…. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and wholrs of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite, Very old land. Look around you. The horizon, trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.”

Reading that poem, thinking about all the late nights I spent driving in the country, smoking cigarettes in David Foster Wallace’s zip code, chasing the peach blink of the sunset as it gradually dissipated in the autumnal vapors of the west, thinking about how I too, wanted just to be like this man who had inspired me, it seemed that Dave Wallace had composed these two poems somehow just for me. But I wanted novels. I wanted another 1000 page emotional lifeboat with labyrinthine plots and random minutia. I wanted another Lenore Beadsman and another Great Ohio Desert and a pub where all the bartenders dressed up like Gilligan and a sumo-shaped proprietor who simply wants to eat everything in sight. I wanted the scenes, banal and beautiful, Don Gately trying to rouse fellow residents at 2 am to prevent their vehicles from being towed or precocious Hal Incandenza trying to feel that he is more than just a corporeal version of the OED with a killer backhand—trying to feel that he is somehow a human being in a world where even the calendar days are corporate cavities of the heart.

I wanted another novel.

Candidly I began to give two shits about Wallace’s essays. I checked amazon dot com and the Howling Fantods religiously with the anticipation of seeing an upcoming Work in Progress. When the 2002 O.Henry awards came out I paid more attention Anthony Doeer's resplendent THE HUNTERS WIFE then I did to Wallace's GOOD OLD NEON, a story it seemed to me that was a run off sentence blistered from a previous bildungsroman. Not to bash G.O.N, a story which has meant much to many readers, it just seemed to me that it was nothing more than an extracted B-side raked from the galleys of Brief Encounter (read B.I. #20 12-96 and re-read it and re-read it and re-read it again).

All I could do was bitch that he didn’t write fiction the way he used to anymore.

By this time I was working at Bradley University library as a third shift access coordinator, still writing my ass off every opportunity I got. I turned in a single spaced very heavily David Foster Wallace induced 700 page novel to my creative writing professor at Bradley for my senior project (my other senior project was about the efficacy or lack thereof of MFA programs entitled, “Jack Kerouac never got an MFA.” ) I would periodically find myself back in Normal visiting my artist friend, going to Folk concerts at Illinois Wesleyan still finding gems inside Babbbits used books bin.

I would even traipse around the cigarette stained contours of Stevenson Hall wishing to talk with my mentor, wanting to share with him my nest of rejection letters or convey to him the jolt of electricity I felt every time I massaged the tips of my fingers on the welcome mat of the keyboard. I wanted to tell Foster Wallace how much inspiration his work and artist's purview continued to add joy to my life.

I again wanted to tell Wallace all this only I couldn’t-- Wallace had abandon his longest teaching gig at ISU, leaving the trigonometric back road plains of central Illinois for Pomona California where rich corporate demagogue awarded him 0ne million dollars to teach two classes a year.

****

In the apocryphal Book of Enoch a story is relayed about the fallen angel Penemue, exiled from the presence of God, jettisoned from eternity in heaven for being the first ever teacher of the craft of writing. Even an amateur etymologist could surmise that from name comes the origin for the writing instrument.

“And pointed out to them every secret of their wisdom. He taught men to understand writing, and the use of ink and paper. Therefore numerous have been those who have gone astray from every period of the world, even to this day. For men were not born for this, thus with pen and with ink to confirm their faith; Since they were not created, except that, like the angels, they might remain righteous and pure. Nor would death, which destroys everything, have effected them; But by this their knowledge they perish, and by this also its power consumes them. "

The pen is not only mightier than the sword, it is also the lance in which the damned author will slit his wrist .....

***

This is how I heard about the suicide of my mentor: I monopolized that entire September weekend blanketed in the late night din and fracas of a local bar, blatantly cursing at flat screen digitalized rectangle to see if my beloved White Sox would inch into the playoffs (note: they did). Sunday afternoon when I awoke I was pensive and inexplicably felt broken glass shards coating the interior of my lower stomach lining. My girlfriend kept inquiring what is wrong and I could not give her a valid answer. Ironically my girlfriend of two months was reading Broom of the System. When I arrived at work there was an e-mail. Fittingly, the news of his suicide came from Dr. Palakeel, my first creative writing prof. The heading to the missive simply read "Sad news." Before the New York Times link Dr. Palakeel wrote the sentence, “ I know he has tried this before.”

*****

For the over last decade I’ve been telling everyone that David Foster Wallace was to a generation of writers what Cobain was to a generation of musicians and now Wallace has joined that cadre of elite souls too brilliant and too misunderstood to cope with the book jacket binding that serevs as their own flesh. Wallace joins the extolled likes of Hemingway and Hart Crane and Sylvia Plath. Dying young cements that there will be a mystique around the narrative of your life—that scholars will probe into every facet of your tortured genius, that teenagers will attire themselves in black while locking themselves in the bedrooms of their parents suburban casa numerating ways that there life is sad and lonely just like that of their mentor. Dying young grants you the cool aura Fitzgerald and Jack London and Jack Kerouac and Dylan Thomas. Dying young grants you a romantic aura of Byron or Keats or Shelly. Wikipedia writers who have committed suicide. Vachel Lindsey drinking Lysol. Virginia Woolf’s grave being marked in an effervescent tombstone of expired bubbles. Jesrzy Kosinski leaving a suicide note that reads simply:

“I am going to put myself to sleep now for a bit longer than usual. Call it Eternity".

An essay from Denise Levertov published three decades ago discusses the suicide and death of so many young writers with fervor germane for today's literary community:

“My own sadness at the death of a fellow poet is compounded by the sense of how likely it is that Anne’s Sexton’s tragedy will not be without the influence of tragedy in others lives. She herself was obviously, too intensely troubled to be fully aware of her influence or to take on its responsibility. Therefore it seems to me that we who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction. The tendency to confuse the two has claimed too many victims. Anne Sexton herself seems to have suffered deeply from this confusion, and I surmise that her friendship with Sylvia Plath had in it an element of identification which added powerfully to her malaise. Across the country at different colleges I have heard many stories of attempted—and sometimes successful suicides by young students who love the poetry of Plath and who suppose that somehow, in order to become poets themselves, they had to act out in there own lives the vent of hers. Innumerable young poets have drunk themselves into stupidity and cirrhosis because they admired John Berryman or Dylan Thomas and came to think they must think like them to write like them.”

One doesn't much like to ponder the bleak possibility come a decade or two from now of a young writer in his late teens with so much potential hanging himself in the manner of his mentor, a bandanna clad around his limp neck like a fallen halo.

David Wallace becoming the Kurt Cobain for a generation of those who decided to read.

***

Part of me is pissed off and wounded. Part of me wants to buy him a beer and say funny anecdotes so that he can laugh. Part of me wants to give him the finger, tell him he's an overrated fuck up, tell him there are so many young writers, good writers working piss-ant jobs, struggling, impecunious, lonely, fucked-up who harbor knee-deep suicidal proclivities every time they try to explain the jaded nature of their vocation to their parents, to their girlfriends, to their peers-- see the deflated expression etched into the face of a writer who has scribed over a million words in the last decade and still can't find a publisher or make rent but refuses to yield to the chorus of his calling at all costs.

Part of me is learning (on the recommendation of a feathered spiritual friend) to seriously, like Don Gately in IJ get down on my knees and pray for his soul and in hushed reverence thank him for everything he has simply given. That his soul needs help. That it is in a confused state and that it needs fellow wayfarers and dreamers to assist him in his journey between the oscillating spectrum of light casting shadows and prisms between this realm of being and the inscrutable wonder of the world to come.

Part of me doesn't like to think about the method in which he died. Part of me can't imagine killing yourself in such a manner in which your surrogate soul mate or spouse walks in on you hung from the neck, swaying like the stem to some unknown pendulum, an octagon thatch of urine staining the infield of his crotch, his keen eye prodded free from his socket, duck tape manacled around his wrist like an identification bracelet from some Podunk country hospital, the smiley sick clowned faced emblem of Infinite Jest unable to find any more amusement by the simultaneous recurring wonder that is the failed entertainment cartridge of ones own shot at existence.

Part of what gives me the Howling Fantods is that someday, in the not so distant subsidized future that is subsidized academia, some grad student whose published academic drivel on writers include more footnotes than Wallace ever employed will one day quote the death of David Foster Wallace as being the death of postmodernism.

What gives me Howling fantods even more is that he may have had this whole shit planned for some time. When you think of stories such as "The Depressed person," or "Suicide as a sort of present." Or when you look at the time line linearity of Infinite Jest and begin to randomly ponder if Wallace had choreographed this shit: As a fellow Jest head notes:

Most of the action in the novel takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment, or Y.D.A.U., which is probably Gregorian 2009. Critic Stephen Burn, in his book on Infinite Jest, argues that Y.D.A.U. corresponds to 2009: the MIT Language Riots took place in 1997 (n. 24) and those riots occurred 12 years prior to Y.D.A.U. (n. 60). It is also possible that Y.D.A.U. is 2008---

YDAU equals autumn 2008.

That “Himself” was Foster Wallace himself. That he gave his readers an sos cryptogram of help and that, throughout the adulation and the praise and the grants and bandana wielding and the dip, there was a tortured soul veiled only as the letter Q. to the astute reader seemingly blinded by his brilliance--a soul who direly needed someone to see him and to hold him and just to pull a Marley and tell him that every little thing is gonnna be alright.

Later in that afternoon I would call Dr. Palakeel, only to hear his voice on the other end of the phone, saying that he knew it was me on the other end of the line the minute the phone rang.

***

Poets and writers drink more intensely. Smoke more intensely. Worship God more intensely. Poets and writers fuck more intensely. Poets and writers give more willingly-- spilling the alphabetical marrow of their souls out into the albino sonogram of hope that is the page, hoping some stranger whom he or she has never before met turns to his crafted syllables in time of dire need and somehow finds solace, finds laughter finds a friend. The best writers will gladly serve as damaged dantes to the romantic whims of their readers Beatrice-like longings. The best writers will be butchered by academics--the same academicians who use footnotes of another mans failed genius as stilts to publish anything at all. The best writers have their hearts turned into a maxi-pads day in and day out. The best writers will understand poverty. The best writers will be self-published. The best writers will watch as rich spoiled North shore brats who have been wiping their asses with two dollars bills their entire lives publish simply because they were able to spend two years on their fathers' yacht writing full time.

The best writers never make it during their lifetime.

The best writers fail.

Again and again and again.

The writer sees. He feels. He loves. And more than anything, he gives, even with the heartbeat and breath of everything that is lodged inside of him.

***

When Foster Wallace died I thought about a lot of things. I thought about his closing comments in the aforementioned Review of Contemporary Fiction interview, in which, when asked about the future of fiction he replies:

"For me, the last few years of the postmodern era have seemed a bit like the way you feel when you’re in high school and your parents go on a trip, and you throw a party. You get all your friends over and throw this wild disgusting fabulous party. For a while it’s great, free and freeing, parental authority gone and overthrown, a cat’s-away-let’s-play Dionysian revel. But then time passes and the party gets louder and louder, and you run out of drugs, and nobody’s got any money for more drugs, and things get broken and spilled, and there’s a cigarette burn on the couch, and you’re the host and it’s your house too, and you gradually start wishing your parents would come back and restore some fucking order in your house. It’s not a perfect analogy, but the sense I get of my generation of writers and intellectuals or whatever is that it’s 3:00 A.M. and the couch has several burn-holes and somebody’s thrown up in the umbrella stand and we’re wishing the revel would end. The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years. We’re kind of wishing some parents would come back. And of course we’re uneasy about the fact that we wish they’d come back—I mean, what’s wrong with us? Are we total pussies? Is there something about authority and limits we actually need? And then the uneasiest feeling of all, as we start gradually to realize that parents in fact aren’t ever coming back—which means we’re going to have to be the parents."

I thought about how so many writers fall pray to this maxim of Shakespeare , "On the ashes of his youth doth lie/ As the death-bed whereon it must expire/ Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by..."

I thought about how the ashes of too many writers fertilize their corpse buried deep in the soil of the page. I thought about good ol' Penume and how the writer is seemingly damned from the outset, perhaps even by a Deity for endeavoring to tell the truth.

Writing is the most lethal vocation I know. No one knows what indeed was concealed behind the bandana Wallace shielded around his skull like a turban or a helmet.

No one truly knows what emotional shit he was goin' through.

I also thought about this quote, by former poet Laureate Donald Hall, written shortly after the death of Dylan Thomas.

“The poet who survives is the poet to celebrate. The human who confronts darkness and defeats it is the most admirable human.”

Two weeks after his death I did the only thing I knew I could do-- I phoned up his office in Pomona and left a message for him. I had been trying to contact him for years. I wanted to convey to him everything he had meant to the discourse of my life. I wanted to tell him how he made me want to devote my life to the craft of fiction.

His voice on the answering machine identified himself as "Dave" Wallace followed simply by a high pitched electronic purr. In that moment, as I wallowed in the pause that followed the sound of his deceased monotone. I then told him what I had been waiting to tell him for nearly a decade. I thanked him for everything he had given me.

I quoted his Kenyon commencement address, parts of it verbatim. I told him how he said in his address speech that the "Capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death," and how his life, his prose, his astute observation about the world around him, his incessant curiosity towards the habits and vices of the human race impelled me to want to write books, made me want to read books, and made me want to convey his joy and beauty found in this beautiful pond of reality we all find ourselves skinny dipping through.

Thank you David Foster Wallace.

Bravo!!!!

For reasons I can't explain I even told him that I loved him.

Twice.

Quotes of enduring beauty that have inspired me to no known end from my fallen mentor

2008-09-15T20:00:00.001-07:00

"Fiction is what it is like to be a fucking human being." Interview with Larry McCaffery.

"--and then you're in serious trouble, very serious trouble, and you know it, finally, dead serious trouble, because this substance you thought was your one true friend, that you gave up all for, gladly, for so long gave you relief from your pain of the Losses you love of that relief caused, your mother and lover and God your compadre, has finally removed its smiley-faced mask to reveal centerless eyes and a raving maw , and canines down to here, its the Face In The Floor, the grinning root-white face of your own nightmares, and the face is your own face in the mirror , now, its you..." Infinite jest

"I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction's job is to comfort the disturb and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big serious part of serious fiction's purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a generalization of suffering. Does this make sense? We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy is impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with characters pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing and redemptive; we become less alone inside. It might just be that simple." Interview with Larry Mccaffery

"Fiction writers as a species tend to be oglers. They tend to lurk and to stare, The minute fiction writers stop moving, they start lurking, and stare. They are born watchers. they are viewers. They are the ones in the subway about whose nonchalant stare there is something creepy, somehow. Almost predatory. This is because human situations are writers' food. Fiction writers watch other human sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks; they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses."

-Supposedly fun thing I'll never do again.

DFW's 'millenium' comments from December 1999, Rolling Stone "Such as thing as truth":

"We're all-- especially those of us who are educated and have read a lot and have watched TV critically-- in a very self-conscious and sort of worldly and sophisticated time, but also a time when we seem terribly afraid of other people's reactions to us and very desperate to control how people interpret us. Everyone is extremely conscious of manipulating how they come off in the media; they want to structure what they say so that the reader or audience will interpret it in the way that is most favorable to them. What's interesting to me is that this isn't all that new. This was the project of the Sophists in Athens, and this is what Socrates and Plato thought was so completely evil. The Sophists had this idea: Forget this idea of what's true or not-- what you want to do is rhetoric; you want to be able to persuade the audience and have the audience think you're smart and cool. And Socrates and Plato, basically their whole idea is, 'Bullshit. There is such a thing as truth, and it's not all just how to say what you say so that you get a good job or get laid, or whatever it is people think they want.'"

What do you think is uniquely magical about fiction?

"Oh, Lordy, that could take a whole day! Well, the first line of attack for that question is that there is this existential loneliness in the real world. I don't know what you're thinking or what it's like inside you and you don't know what it's like inside me. In fiction I think we can leap over that wall itself in a certain way. But that's just the first level, because the idea of mental or emotional intimacy with a character is a delusion or a contrivance that's set up through art by the writer. There's another level that a piece of fiction is a conversation. There's a relationship set up between the reader and the writer that's very strange and very complicated and hard to talk about. A really great piece of fiction for me may or may not take me away and make me forget that I'm sitting in a chair. There's real commercial stuff can do that, and a riveting plot can do that, but it doesn't make me feel less lonely.

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone -- intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art."

Interview with Laura Miller

"Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!!!"

"'Don, I'm perfect. I'm so beautiful I drive anyone with a fucking nervous system out of their fucking mind.Once they've seen me they can't think of anything else and don't want to look at anything else and stop carrying out normal responsibilities and believe that if they can only have me right there with them at all times everything will be alright. Everything. Like I'm the solution to their deep slavering need to be jowl to cheek with perfection.'

'Now with the sarcasm.'

'I am so beautiful I am deformed.'"

-Infinte Jest

"So what I did was, I went home for a term, planning to play solitaire and stare out my window, whatever you do in a crisis and all of a sudden I found myself writing fiction. My only real experience with fun writing had been on a campus magazine with mark Costello, the guy I later wrote signifying rappers with. But I had experience chasing the click, from all the time spent with proofs. At some point in my reading and writing that fall I discovered the click existed in literature too. It was real lucky that just when I stopped being able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction. The first fictional clicks I discovered where in Donald Bartheleme's, "The Balloon" and in parts of the first story I ever wrote, which has been in my trunk since I finished it. I don't know whether I have much natural talent going for me fiction wise, but I know I can hear the click when there's a click. In Don Delillo's stuff, for example, almost line by line I can hear the click. It may be the only way to describe writers I love. I hear the click in most Nabokov. In Donne, Hopkins, Larkin. In Puig and Cortazar. Puig clicks like a fucking Geiger counter. And none of these people write prose as pretty as Updike, and yet I don't hear the click in Updike."

Interview with Larry McCaffery.

-brief interviews with hideous men

"THE MAN WHO KNOWS HIS LIMITATIONS HAS NONE."

--IJ

Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20 --the onion

"'Moms?'

'Yes?'

'Can I ask you a thing?'

'Please do. I am right here with my attention completely focused on you."

'How can you tell if somebody's sad?"

-IJ

"It felt like a sun in his head.....It occured to him that if he died everybody would still exist and go home and eat and X their wife and go to sleep."
--IJ

WAGGLING

"And I've found the really tricky discipline to writing is trying to play without getting overcome by by insecurity or vanity or ego. Showing the reader that you are smart or talented or whatever, trying to be liked, integrity issues aside, this stuff just doesn't have enough motivational calories to carry you in the long haul. You've got to discipline yourself that talk out the part of you that loves the thing, loves what you're working on. Maybe that just plain loves."

"'I'm not afraid of how this sounds to you. I'm not embarrassed now. But if you could understand, had I--could you see how there was no way I could let her go after this? Why I felt his apical sadness and fear at the thought of her getting her bag and sandals and new age blanket and leaving and laughing when I clutched the hem and begged her not to leave and said I loved her and closing the door gently and going off barefoot down the hall and never seeing her again? Why it didn't matter if she was fluffy or not terribly bright? Nothing else mattered. She had all my attention now. I'd fallen in love with her. I believed she could save me. I know how this sounds, trust me. I know your type and I know what you're bound to ask. Ask it now. This is your chance. I felt she could save me I said. Ask me now. Say it. I stand here naked before you. Judge me, you chilly cunt. You dyke, you bitch, cooze, slut, gash, Happy now? All borne out? Be happy. I don't care. I knew she could. I knew I loved. End of Story.'"
--Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

A shadowed swan song recollection of summer daze gone past

2008-09-04T09:59:00.000-07:00

This past Summer convened with the blossoming of bed bugs in lieu of May flowers. Since I took a somewhat bohemian vow when I embraced my vocation as a writer towards all things materialistic with the exception of certain East Coast microbreweries I always anticipate early May when affluent rich as fuck Bradley students in the process of seasonally abandoning campus jettison posh remnants of their living quarters in the back arms of nearby alleyways. And how I was clicking my heels together in a jig of good fortune the night I found a mattress the size of a small aircraft (don't ask where I was sleeping before) next to the dumpster behind St. Marks school as if God himself had sent down manna from mattress heaven in the form of a commodious comfortable cloud and how it took me (shit) what seemed like hours to lug the rectangular comforter up into the den of my apartment, boasting about my good fortune, feeling that it would be like fucking on a cloud only to wake up the next morning with my body coated in an itchy sea of pecked boils--rashes that would contaminate both my body and my apartment for the entire summer, coercing me into tossing three additional mattresses one love seat plus my couch overboard into the whistling desolation of the streets.

Again, now in the genesis of another golden autumn, please, don't ask where I'm sleeping.

It was the summer where my hair, after four year hiatus correlating exactly with the second BUSH reign of terror finally returned to me. The summer where I could feel the feral tendrils of my auburn dreads leaking down into the slope of my neck in a drizzling display of fibers and dyslexic bangs-- an unkempt shower curtain shrouding the mounds of my shoulders like a helmet. The summer where I woke up on the Indian shore lip of morning, exhausted from too many late night shifts. Summer is the season where the squint of light returns to me in alchemical shades of copper. Spangles of light stretching out in geometrical arms and translucent pillars of sunshine ricocheting in my morning apartment beckoning me into another day fraught with the possibility of dreams as the needle of daylight sews the fabric of reality together in clouds and shadows--the silhouette steeple of St. Marks church across the street bowing in noontime reverence like a shadowy baton, as if christening me into knightdom as I awake into the annex of another day of feeling and sight and experience on this planetary greenhouse harboring life.

It was the summer where I awoke the morning of the Preakness stakes and found Esmeralda pounding on my backdoor, her fists curved into the size of a primies head, pummeling like a gavel, finding her spirit next to me as we stalked the avenues of the Uplands, jouncing an errant tennis ball between us like a yo-yo serving as a makeshift metronome between the beat and cadences of our conversation; a sun culled from some other world.

It was the summer where my beloved WhiteSox monopolized the entire summer (with the exception of two days in August) in first place. The summer where I hit the old ball park-the ball park that visits me weekly in the nest of dreams-- again with my brother John. The game where Crede hit two home runs and Quentin and Dye continued to astound. The game where, watching the replay later on that night in the 'burbs, you could hear the gruff dynamics of my voice echoing through the concourse of Comiskey park every time Crede stepped up to the deciding shelter of that plate known as home, the mantra of my voice caroling out the chorus of "Go Jo-Jo!!!" amidst the din of the crowd. Nothing beats a day at the old ballpark, even if it is (shit) six-fifty for a beer.

The summer where I ran seven miles on my birthday--arching over the amplified hills of Bradley park, the xeroxed silhouette of my body sprouting into the banner of early July at dusk as I escaped the manicured security of the park, flailed my limbs down nostalgic arteries of Heading avenue (the emotional champs-elysses of formative mettle), sailing down the strip of Sterling avenue harnessing my body around Madison golf course, stampeding over the mossy dips of my former cross country course before I found myself down town, lost in the neon configuration of celebrational chandeliers strewn across the beauty of a mid summers electric orchestration of freedom.

The summer where I woke up with the purring feminine warmth of her body next to mine on my birthday with my cell phone wildly vibrating to hear my best friends voice, John (we share the same date of birth) informing me that he is in town and to rouse my hungover ass into consciousness and lets have breakfast at steak and shake, adhering to the immortal Dave and John HOD maxim of "Nothing beats takin' a shit inside Steak-n-Shake."

The summer where I went weeks emotionally engrossed by the film INTO THE WILD (could not stop fucking watching it for the life of me) the summer of the VOICE and and Odyssey 2012.

The summer where I again found myself living it up in the hip affluence of Des Moines with my Classy Bro david Thomspson, smoking cigars, sipping from a pricey bottle of 17 year old Belvanie sherry cask scotch which he salvaged uncorked for my arrival. Nothing like hanging out with a dear brother and reminiscing and projecting about the inscrutable joy and mystery that surely is to come in the dual resounding narratives of our twin lives.

The summer where I became addicted to weeds, chiming out the theme song like bad karaoke whenever we are out and the ticky-tacky girls with SUV's and credit cards and bleached teeth and blond highlights and a soul the size of a tampon who all dress all the same simply become too much to stomach.

The summer Of Barrack Obama (nuff said--if you choose not to vote try living in a third world country for a week with no toilet paper and contaminated water before realizing just how truly spoiled you are).

The summer of the Olympics where I fantasied making out with Nastia Lukin ("I want to get Nasty with Nastia", challenging Michael Phelps to a case race (8 gold medals my ass skinny boy drink up!!!) fantasizing about finding the Olympic champion facedown in a Kiddie pool littered with bobbing aluminum cylinders before making galvanizing shadow puppets with Usian Bolt.

The summer of the girl with the swaying red hair Charlie Brown--the woman whose eyes are so green they look as if the British isles surrendered its whimsical beauty and charm into the socket of a snow globe every time she blinks offering the planet an emerald orb of dizzying spring green. It was the same woman I ogled behind the Starbucks counter inside Barnes and Nobles five years ago. The woman who still remembered me ferrying my satchel fraught with manuscripts as I trounced into the cafe sometimes four times a day, requesting my Venti pick spilling trite witticisms through the trumpet of my lips in a simple endeavor to watch the wings of her lips ascend into smiley stratospheres of bliss. The woman whom I (inexplicably) gave a congratulatory bottle of wine to when I heard news of her engagement.

The woman who, exactly two months to this date I met once again. I was waiting at an ATM in campus town, pissed that the portly lady in front of me was taking what seemed like eons to make a simple deposit. As I was walking home I heard the carol of her voice beckoning me into shades of recognition.

The woman who thanked me for the bottle of wine, saying that she drank the entire bottle in one sitting the night her husband asked her for a divorce.

It is the summer of smoking cigarettes with this streaming red-haired mermaid one Miss Tara on my back porch, staring into the wild celestial pebbles of the stars overhead the two of us, naked, drinking our newly acquired favorite summer libation Pimms Cup ("Pimms you from behind, baby,"), as the inscrutable hazy eye-lided mystery of the earth tank-topped in the third season of the calendar year, the barometer of the planet aching into heavy streaks of horizontal lavender dissipating into the parallelogram of the west into the blanket of night.

Tara and I who are drinkers. Tara and I who every time we hit the town almost invariably find ourselves enveloped in a swirling vortex of voices and inspiration--recruiting a cavalcade of joyous flesh to accompany us into the laughter and openness of the night. The couple we met in the black bear lounge at Jumers who we partied with the entire night. The husband who remembered me from high school but I have no clue of having ever met before. The summer of hanging out in Bars that give you an empty beer can so that you can clandestinely ash out your smoke when the cops comb through. The old lady who own the bar that let us smoke cigarettes, telling us that "just have a can," as she leaves and tops reel up like drapes, debauchery, sadness, nostalgia, lost joy.

Smiles.

Tara who saw a ghost of a woman standing behind me in my apartment the morning we left for Turkey run.

Nights with tatenda. Jamie. Ut. Hanging out at Gormans until four in the morning with Gilbert on free pizza night. Meeting Josh with tara the night of the Allstar game and hearing that there was a writer in Peoria who was already Published in McSweeny's. Getting into an argument with the cool guy at Mike's tap because I can't fucking stand dave eggers.

Secluding myself in a computer lab for a week on campus and writing short stories about fat mermaids who are also lonely.

The two weeks i locked myself in my apartment and felt that I had some weird inexplicable bond with Jim Morrison watching Oliver Sones, THE DOORS incessantly, trying to wedge open some metaphysical portal via perusing the Theosophical medications of mankind, hoping to slop a verbal welcome matt on the entrance to a new day of philosophical panderings and motivational manna with the sole intention of feeding those minds who are hungry one sentence at a time.

The pyrotechnics of poetic passion exhibited at Will's once a month poetry reading. The pink-haired poet who read our runes while snorting a variety of crushed anti-depressants. Anna with the beautiful smile fraught with enough poetic potential to fuel an impending Pulitzer prize committee into forging a medal as luminous as her smile. Listening with resonating awe to the ocean of melodious light emanating in syncopated acapella from daniel Severance, singing about summer time and other folk music, wondering where the scope of his voice is derived from: like a portly patti Lebelle chutes down the red carpeting of his palette--a voice simply culled from some other world, maybe even channeled from a not to distant heaven.

The laughter. The craziness. Stanzi's birthday keg where we straddled around the keg of beer like a hearth in the bottom of college apartments and listened to the free styling crazy snaps of the street a boy Blaise B, always a pleasure brother.

The working class crowd at the Brass Bull: Wes who drowns vials of Jager all night and always dissipates into the early am hours without saying goodbye. Craig, whose humor is matched only by the size of his heart. "A tad shallow today," "Executive meeting troops--where's the Jager? Meeting adjourned." Emaciated Garreth who is hung like a black man and deaf in one ear so he always sounds irritable and loud. Jimbo the village drunk who spends his pension smoking weed and getting drunk all day. Jimbo who doesn't talk to anyone but came up to me immediately and struck a conversation.

Jimbo who had something happen to him in Nam he doesn't like to talk about.

Or the old man whose skin was the color of venison gravy and who wore a john deere cap and trousers that looked like they were purchased a few weeks prior to Watergate. The old man who drank cheap one dollar draught beer at the bar by himself adding a pinch of salt into the carbonated beverage stationed in front of his chin like a Eucharist waiting to be indulged. The old man who had been drinking too much since his wife got sick. The old man who smoked cheap Vanilla flavored cigarillos because with the other cigarettes, "you just can't taste the flavor." The old man who was all by himself and started talking to me in German. The old man who Tara grabbed and took out to the dance floor and began to lovingly dance with. The old man who smiled when he was on the dance floor with Tara, holding her close as if he was trying not to let go of something that was slipping away from him.

The old man who lost his wife two days later from the date Tara held him on the dance floor and made him happy.

The old man whose wife tara concedes, could have been the apparition she spotted in my bedroom.

The summer of coming home late (how I always manage to traipse around the arteries of this town with PBR in tow and not get pulled over I'll never know) and waking up early, pouring numerous vats of caffeine and tatters and eggs down our hatch at Zims, our new favorite haunt...but somehow still ambling under the illuminated planets of the street lamps dotting moss avenue, feeling like a rock star with my long tresses tickling the back of my shoulders, a beer in one hand, a beautiful girl in the other and all around me, eternity, eternity sliced into a sprinkle of seconds, the usurped confetti of minutes and hours, the realization that you are FUCKING here, that as long as you are here you are immortal (even in shitty times, even when you are naked and drunk and no one gives a fuck about you) the fact that we are here, on this planet, in this curtain of time, as one vibrating pulsating orb of consciousness, thinking these thoughts as you grasp the infield of her hand shouting at the symphony of overhead stars, singing to her the overture of summer as they hatch from your chest in chirps of elation, the soundtrack of time, telling her that you will love her two times baby, that you will love her simply twice today.

........................

2008-08-31T12:37:00.000-07:00

It was the summer where I found Uncle Mike again in early May--the story goes like this: Little David (exhausted as fuck, sick of working extra early morning hours at the university where he graduated from and not getting any sort of pay differential whatsoever other than an "attaboy") works a gruelling 8pm-til-5am shift, stays up and writes for five hours, gets a couple of beers in his system to rejuvenate his vitality then at ten he decides to traipse back to the Student center at the university where he graduated from (and is still currently employed) to check his e-mail and make a payment on his forever draining student loan bills. When he arrives at the student center he inadvertently saunters into a janitor whom he doesn't see, or rather, the janitor is windexing the window of the transparent door he is currently walking through and when the janitor (who in all fairness was probably having a hard day too, but who, in all fairness gets paid overtime for his menial labor and did not graduate from/or take out a shit ton of student loans to attend the university where the two of us are now employed).... As I am walking through the door the janitor snaps at me, tells me that I should have seen that he is windexing the door and that I could have used the other door. I politely apologize, tell him that I apologize, tell him that I didn't see him. tell him that I am sorry. The janitor then snaps at me, recycles my apology back into my face like an irascible minor league coach arguing balls and strikes with the home plate umpire before informing me that I should watch where I am going, informing me that this better be the last time I accidentally amble into him.

Something then happens and I snap back. I've always had difficulty snapping. I have always had difficulty allowing the pent-up oppressed emotional magma to erupt through the Vesuvius of my lips. But maybe it was because of lack of daylight or the migraine of the relationship I was in at that time or the feeling of having failed, something welled up inside of me coercing my entire anatomy to transition into a pissed of exclamatory mark. I tell him that I dished out a laboring forty-thousand in arrears and that he just can't go off on alumni's (albeit ones who are broke) like that. I tell him that he needs to treat people with respect and that he is not going to talk like that to students again. The janitor continues to verbally chisel out harangues into my face and the next thing I know I reach out and strip his name tag off his shirt, hurtling it to the ground in disgust before vacating the building only to find myself minutes later bent over smoking cigarettes with the dwarf size MFA student who doesn't have any arms (hands sprout out of his shoulders like butterfly wings) crying, wishing there was a way to, as I did with the flea-infested furniture in my apartment, jettison all the anger and heartache and the hurt swilling below my shoulders like a see through the torso and tummy of a dirty washing machine.

I then walked around in a daze, catching a glimpse of the beautiful soccer mom who I made love to last summer as she idled her minivan at a light en route to picking up her progeny. I see my friend Tracy who was a dear friend of my late fathers and beautiful eye-lidded Karen who works with my mother. I had been up for at least thirty-five hours and was emotionally enervated when eventually I found myself saddled on the door step of the house I had left two years before.

When he answered the door the first word I said to him was Allah-u-Abha.

The most beautiful word I have ever heard.

Homecoming Home (pt.1)

2008-06-23T19:11:00.000-07:00

It is a Sunday afternoon and I am all alone in my room reading Robert Frost. The day has a thick, blue melancholy feel to it. Church was earlier this morning where I helped Mike DeWitt tape the service. Europe was four months earlier. Occasionally I spot ‘Laina’ Wilson in the hallways, but it is never a contact greeting. I am all alone in my room, musing over poems, writing essays for Mrs. Mack, drinking very tepid coffee out of my purple coffee mug I purchased at Gloria jeans last year.

Beth comes to my door, the phone outstretched in her palm, telling me that it is for me.

“Hello,” I say. I have not dated anyone in over a year. There was snuggling and warmth with Jenn Wilson in Europe over the summer. There is the cute adoptive girl with shortly crisped bangs that smokes cigarettes at lunchtime. There is David Strickler and his girlfriend, Anne, who lives deep in the country in Brimfield, who I went to Brimfield’s Basketball homecoming with last year, where I was accused of pulling the fire alarm. There is Mark-Andrew, who has just returned back home form Prague, attending the University of Dallas. There is Harmony, in Spokane, scribbling me letters in cursive that looks like one continuous roller-coaster ride, telling me all about her pending collegiate experiences.

There is myself, alone in Peoria, with Paris becoming more and more of a memory everyday.

And there is a phone grappled in my palm right now. There is the moment the phone becomes a dormant object as I slowly hoist it up to my lips, suspecting it either any one of the Dave’s, but more than likely Hale or Strickler. As the words ‘Hello’, comes out of my mouth it is volleyed back with something soothing and feminine. A dulcet, high-pitched voice, whose lips I have touched before, when I was young, like a toddler performing botched balettic postures, trying to touch the slight half-rainbow of moisture that exudes form the top of a water fountain.

“Hi, Dave” The voice says, acknowledging me rather quickly. It is feminine but it is not that of Harmony.

“This is Renae Howard.” She says, identifying herself.

*

“Reane,” I say, very quickly. “Hey you crazy girl, how’s it going?”

Renae claims that it has been going good and well. For a moment I think that she is going to cuss me out for once again breaking up with her so abruptly two years ago. Fearing this, I try to institute more small talk, but her tongue leashes into a pair of scissors, snapping at me, informing me of the real reason she called.

“I have a question for you.” She says.

“Uh, yeah, sure, what’s up?” I respond, just a trite befuddled by the whole situation.

“Will you go to Homecoming with me?”

She spits out the question as if half-in-dread and half in panic. Her voice seems to rise up an octave at the end of her query. Having been squatting on the oak lip of my writers’ desk, I stand. My knees crack. Renae wanted absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with me a year and a half ago, when I tried to get her to pick me up and go driving around. Now, she has called me, out of the lachrymose melancholy blue of autumn, inviting me to escort her to her senior homecoming.

***

Two weeks earlier in late September, I drove past Manual, in the Prunemobile. Stopping in front of the school, slowly idling, I was still thinking about Lil’ Wilson inside, slowly dancing with John, a thawed corsage precariously dangling form both their collars. Two weeks ago, I was by myself, tears splashing down my cheek, staring pensively into the windshield blue in front of me, noticing how my reflection looked like a dejected clown whose unemployment check was printed on a rubber stamp and is therefore no longer valid.

Squinting through the ajar window, I see the crystal ball, the Home Coming chandelier oscillating overhead. Patches of pied lights; little variegated rotating squares casting pink and blue windows. I think about the outfit Little ‘Wil must be wearing. I wonder if her hair is down. I wonder what bitchy things she has found to moan about. Perhaps it is too cold in the foyer for her. Perhaps the meal wasn’t served at the right temperature. Perhaps she is afraid that maybe I might show up tonight and completely sully her first and only Freshman prom.

I press down on the gas, hearing the earnest snore of the engine as I automotively clamber up Ligonier, take a right and then a left, head down the dual strip of road that slices between Madison Golf course. I make sure that my blinker has been winking on the right hand side of the car for a good two minutes before I turn, on to Sherman, trying to sniff all the tears back into my sockets. Trying to clear my throat, trying to make it sound like I am not at all alone in the world. Trying to sound, after I put the car in P and verify that the headlights have been switched off, after I walk inside the house and doff my jacket, walking around the corner to my room, the place where I want to live; the place where I want to learn and want to write; after all this, I clear my throat and maybe blow a snot-loogie into my mother’s rock garden as I enter the house, trying to convince my parents that everything in the world is okay, as I brew another pot of coffee and listen to some Morrissey.

Everything in the World will forever be ok.

***

Renae has just presented her question to me. My whole body is stiff, erect with shock. Depeche Mode is slightly humming in the C.D. player. Mother is baking coffee cakes in the oven. The coffee I am sipping is Gevalia, given to me by grandma. The Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune lays scattered across my mattress. The Book section is open. The Nelson Algren awards were announced two weeks ago. I cannot believe the query Renae just presented me with. I pause. I take a deep breath. I thank God inside my chest.

“Sure,” I say, without hesitation “I’d love to.”

There is an awkward pause.

“Do you wanna get together first to see each other.” I say very quickly and then rephrase my statement, saying that perhaps maybe we should get together first to see each other.

“Sure,” Renae says.

“How about Monday. Maybe Monday we can go to One World and hang out or something.”

“That would be nice.” Renae says, before telling me that she is once again really busy this week.

I want to ask her what happened. I want to know where Lee is. I want to know when they broke up. I thought that they were still dating.

“We can go to One World.” I say. “I can pick you up and the two of us and go to One World, only we can’t sit in the smoking section because it’s Cross Country season.

Renae twists her lips in the same fashion as she did two years ago. Apparently the vice that has grabbed hear peers by their social labels has not baiting her yet.

“I know exactly what I’m going to have, too.” Renae says.

“What,” I say.

“I’m going to have a hot chocolate with lots and lots of whipped cream.” She says.

“Are you going to say it just like that?” I respond.

“Yes,” Renae says. “With lots and lots of whipped cream.”

“And a cherry, too.” I say, trying to paint a smile across her lips.

“No,” Renae says. “No cherry. Just cream.”

“The tomorrow night it is. Is six-thirty ok?”

“Yes.” Renae says, into the phone, my ear, immensely enjoying being massged by the warmth of her vocal resonance. “Six-thirty is fine.”

***

“You can go to the Doo-wop diner.” My dad says. I am seventeen and have only been driving independently for just under two months.

“The what?” I say, looking at my father as if he is trying to speak a dyslexic from of Sanskrit.

“The Doo-wop diner.” My father says. “It’s in Bartonville. It’s close to where she lives. You can just stop in and get a milkshake.

“No,” I tell my father. “I want to take her to One World. It’s where I hang out all the time anyway.”

My Dad continues to look at me. Every time he gives me advice about women I can tell that, although he is madly in love with his own wife, he is upset that he was not more of a ladies man back in his Varsity Tennis Jacket Big Daddy Arthur days. I splash cologne on both cheeks. Two years ago almost exactly Renae and I were playing the very King-and I version of Getting To Know You. It would be four-fifteen every night when our voices would coalesce over cyber optics like a DNA coil gradually shaped into a pulsating heart. My hair is still cut short, mowed very near to my skull in back. I slap on English Leather, the same cheap cologne I wore in Europe; the urine scented vial Hale gave me for eighth grade graduation, what seems like decades ago.

“I’m just saying David.” My Dad impedes his way into my room. “That if you go to the Doo-Wop diner and had a milkshake you wouldn’t have to criss-cross all over town.’

“Dad,” I say. “I’m going to One World. I won’t be gone for very long. Renae and I haven’t seen each other in a very long time and we need to catch up.”

I storm out on the porch, a wastebasket in one hand. I make sure that my car is impeccably clean. I drape an old afghan over the seat in the back to make it look both more comfortable and more intimate. I jettison old coffee cups and napkins both myself and my old man have left in the car. Around the neck of the rearview mirror, I place the necklace I bought at the LYE convention last year, at the Holiday Inn, in O’hare. I remember Mike DeWitt, asking the girls if they would like to dance.

“David.” Dad says my name, reprimanding me.

“Dad, I gotta go. I’ll see you in about two hours.”

“Take care.” Father waves his splayed hand in the air. I remember trying to compose the letter to my father two years ago, after he said that I couldn’t see Renae, partly fussed because Patrick left early with Amy and the car arrangements got all screwed up that night. That was two years and what seemed like decades ago. I remember Amy later calling me up and chewing me out, saying that the reason I broke up with Renae was because she didn’t have her drivers’ license, so as soon as she got it, in a matter of weeks, we would be able to see each other more. I remember calling Renae up and hearing her tears, her telling me that she didn’t want to talk to me right now.

The Prunemobile is nothing fancy. It was conceived in the late seventies, before I had even learned how to speak in complete sentences. The car is always in the shop. In the thick gusts of snow, and chiseled ice, the car takes approximately fifteen minutes to warm up and the often stalls when I am trying to make a right turn. Later this year, my junior year, in between multifarious visits to Doctor Breightmeyer and nights where I coddle the tears and wish that I was somewhere else, later this year, the aluminum stem, activating the blinker signals will fall off. Dad, in all his tackle box ingenuity would epoxy the blinker stem in, only to have it fall off every three days, leaving a wad of unattractive stale goo in its place.

I drive through the South End of Peoria. I drive past Manual, where I left practice two hours ago, having pushed my Acic’s through another Main Street Five. Third year at Manual busting my ass and still the neon rectangle monitoring time at the finish line has not lowered past Seventeen minutes. This wasn’t the way it was supposed to have been. I think to myself. I followed the rules. I prayed to God. I ran everyday. I was supposed to have already left my mark in the chlorine-stenched Hallway by the pool.

Driving near David’s Hale’s house, up Garfield, near Limestone. I find Lauder avenue. The pine tree still appropriates much of the neatly trimmed front lawn. In the window I see a stilt figure slashing past the window shades, a cordless object prodded into her left earlobe. From where I sit, inside the Oldsmobile, inside my car, I can tell that her blonde hair has been cut significantly shorter and now shortly abuts the lobed of her ears.

Looking at the slightly chipped cross dangling from my rearview mirror, I give the carved ivory a kiss, before thudding the door shut. I can make out Renae’s slender silhouette inside.

*****************************

The last time I saw Renae was either Monday or Tuesday, December 28th or 29th, 1992. It was at the Mall. On the upper level. Renae arrived with David Best, having both of their parents recently dropped them off. Laura Lane and Kristy Day were their as well. So was Patrick McReynolds, and, much to Renae’s chagrin, David Hale.

“Patrick I can stand.” Renae says, as Hale struts inside the door waring a Harely Davidson Bikers cap that looks like something a police officer singing for the Village people might Sport.

“He’s not that bad.” I say to Renae, slightly elbowing her, reminding her that, in the immortal sugar-coated words of Willy Wonka, a little non-sense now and then is relished by the wisest men.

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.” Renae says to me, her arms tightly braced across her breast as if she is cold.

Hale accosts us with his signature whoo-hoo, removing his cap as if tipping it at a ballgame to show us his surprise.

“Wow,” I say. Renae is still looking the opposite direction. Hale has completely sawed off any shred of hair that once attired the to of his head.

“Dave,” I say. “I’m impressed.” In a way Dave looks like a Pony League catcher who his teammates would call Moose.

Come on, I say to Renae, still wearing the Identification bracelet she got me. The bracelet that took me two days to figure out how to undo the clasp and put it on my wrist. I wear the Manual Jacket my mother made me, with the words 96 thickly stitched in the right hand corner in numbers the size of my splayed palm.

Our hands join. The last couple of times we have seen each other, our lips seemed simply to content in drilling our tongues deep into each others mouth. We walk, next to each other, gripping each other’s hand. Hale and Patrick talk about going down to KB Toys and scaring a bunch of little kids by firing fake guns at each other.

“Hey, Dave,” Hale says. “Are you going to be using the gift I gave you for Christmas today?”

On Christmas eve at Christ Lutheran Church, Hale gave me a thoroughly wrapped parcel, weighing in my palm at approximately five pounds. After using my father keys to sever the excessive amounts of tape, inside was a brass coin roughly the size of a Kennedy half. The front side of the coin showcased a very old and moribund woman who looked like she would have played bridge with Lydia Moss Bradley. On the back of the coin is a picture of an antique Coffee Grinder. The coin is a gift certificate, worth ten dollars at Gloria Jeans.

“Would you like something from Gloria Jeans, sweetie.” I know full well that Renae will say no, commenting that she can’t stand our fascination with cappuccino. Patrick will interject and say that before he seriously spills some hard-core imaginary guts in the toy store, would his close friend and soon to be former school mate mind treating him to a nice warm cappuccino, even though the boys always drink it cold.

Renae smiles, shooing the boys off. We hold hands again. Three times I have endeavored to staple her lips with my tongue and three times she has looked back at me and verbally insinuated that she does not feel at all comfortable making out with me while the two ogres Patrick and hale are around, but Patrick she can stand, mind you.

Everytime Hale gets a cappuccino he always takes two hearty swigs from it and then tells me to hold onto it for him, meaning finish the damn thing. I walk with two giant cap’s in each hand. Dave Hale ordered some sort of Extra-large Holiday eggnog induced peppermint syrup Carmel concoction. After having sipped it, I understand why it was that he only took two sips, yet, id cappuccino, and both Patrick and myself have tacit rules about wasting such a fine, delicacy.

“Let’s go in here.” Renae says, ogling the after holiday sale placards with giant percent signs on them. I walk into one store with her where Renae tries three outfits on. With a giant, extra-large cappuccino nursed in each hand (the holiday one, the longer it sits, looks more and more like Reindeer poop) I am asked by the store manager if this place looks like a food court. As I go outside the store to continue my hearty slurps, I can hear Renae’s voice from the dressing room, asking me if I will hold her purse for her. I accept, and, like a kiosk, stand in front of Dots, a large drink cupped in both palm, a leather purse from Wilson’s looped around the thrity-degree angles of my indented elbow.

Fifteen minutes later and I am still trying hard to finish the Santa Clause cappuccino Hale purchased on the gift certificate coin he gave me for Christmas and only took two swallows then abandoned. Renae comes out of Dots, kisses my cheek, addresses me as honey, tells me about this fabulous outfit she just found, commenting that her mom probably wouldn’t mind if she used her For-Emergencies-Only-Credit card just this once, even though she used it last week at Marshal Fields in Chicago.

I nod my head up and down. Reassure her that I’m happy because she’s happy honey. Prance my legs due to excessive caffeine in take.

“I’ll only be another minute.” Renae says, kissing the side of my cheek again. A guy walks past me and asks me if I just tied the knot, telling me that he used to be whupped like that before he learned how to put his foot down. Now the bitch knows who wears the pants in the family. I tell him that’s nice. He says that he has tapes at home he can loan to me. I tell him I’m not interested.

Below me, in the center Court, Santa’s contract insists that he stay till New Years day. There are kids cussing Santa out, claiming that they were too good this year, asking why they didn’t get the latest Video game. One kid even moons the camera when the obligatory contract oriented photograph is snapped. The Holiday tape is on a continual ninety-minute loop. I can swear that I’ve heard the first Noel already two or three times. The chipmunk song also reeks of squealed monotony. Renae exit dot’s wit three boxes she exchanged to me for her purse, slightly planting a pedal moisture again on my cheek.

If she was a year older and perhaps more experience, perhaps she’s say that the sole raison behind her shopping affliction is due in part to the fact that she dated David Best for a year and discovered that the only way to have a sustainable orgasm was through trying on close and monopolizing her father’s money.

Renae grasps my arm and begins to tell me all about this charming delightful object she just tried on. I nod my head and tell her that is nice. With my glasses off, the customers continue to shoot in every direction. Eric Bushman walks past me, with some girl from anther school, a girl who is not as cute as Renae. I nod my head in acknowledgement and he continues to walk, pretending he has never seen me.

“Oh Look,” Renae says, pointing to coliseum sign reading EXPRESS.” I nod my head as if agreeing with her at the name of the Store.

“Come on,” She says. “I’ll only be a minute.”

I agree and after thirty seconds I find myself being fiercely tapped on my shoulder by the store manager. Apparently they have some kind of policy where all the boxes and sac form other stores need to be X-rayed and checked. I say bosh to that and A minute latter, I am holding Reane’s stacked parcels, still sipping on Hale’s Santa Shittoccino. Renae comes back out, hooks her purse on my limb as if she is benignly placing a bulb on a Christmas tree, informing me that. Once again, she will only be a minute, claiming that they don’t call it Express for nothing.

***********

She opens the door before I knock. For nostalgia’s sake, I have the wrist band she gave me two Christmases ago handcuffed around my left wrist. If Renae has noticed it, she sure has shit isn’t saying anything.

“Hi,” I say. There is the customary embrace when old lovers see each other. The feeling of once, having shared some sort of inexplicable connection and, because of time and space and causality, because of greed and obsession, become sometimes, even when life throws us a curve ball and we hit it out of the park, it goes foul anyway. Sometimes, for no reason there is loss, but there is forever the embrace. We hold each other momentarily. I tell her that it is really good to see her smile again. She lets go of me with a shrug.

“So,” I ask her. “How’s life been treating you these days, Miss Howard?”

Renae lets go of another shrug indicative of mild-to-lukewarm. She is still tall and slender, a Virginia Slim with mascara. Her smile does not seem quite as luminous as it did two years earlier. As if the bulb behind her lips have been slightly dimmed.

“So,” I say. There is a pause. “I like your hair.”

“It’s short.” Renae says, lolling her head unconsciously like she is a rock star. “I love it short.” There is something phallic and almost disturbing in the way Reane says the word ‘short’ but I choose not to complement. Perhaps she is thinking about her ex-boyfriend.

“So,” Once again, I say, beginning my romantic interlude with the word ‘so’. “Where would you like to go tonight?”

Renae once again shrugs, making a grunting sound that is either I don’t know or I don’t care. Her house has a strange familiarity to it-I wonder if the giant black and white poster of James Dean is still displayed above her bed.

“Does One World sound okay for you?” I say.

Renae does the whole whiny grunting sound again, this time saying something like, yeah, I suppose.

“There’s the Doo-wop diner.” Renae says, a sourness forming to her lips. I nearly choke at the irony.

“Do you like the Doo-wop diner?” I inquire.” My dad kept insisting that we go there.”

Renae makes another fast gnarled grunt, saying that it’s okay, quavering her palm up and down near her covered navel.

“I used to work their, but only for a week.” She says.

“Didn’t like it..”

“Agggghhhhh.” Renae says, in another high pitched squeal. “Couldn’t stand the manager.”

“Right.” I say, before requesting that I borrow the phone real quick. Renae says the words ‘real quick’ to me, once again, as if she is expeceting a serious phone call at anytime. As was the truth two years ago, I imagine that she still does not have call waiting.

Not trying to be Jacob to his Isaac, I phone my dad, informing him, that I’m over at Renae’s right now and will go to One World, hanging up before he tells me that all that criss-crossing around town is totally unnecessary when there’s that blasted ill-named sock hop diner in Bartonville.

We leave her house. Renae locks the door behind me. We pass the giant needles of the pine. The leaves are slowly beginning to turn so that everything around us looks like the inside of a kaleidoscope. As we strut down the slight bump to the Prunemobile, I open the door for her, making sure that my TO DAVE: LOVE RENAE identification band is extremely visible. Still Renae doesn’t see it.

I slam the door behind her and rush to my side. After three motorized chokes, the engine comes to life. Renae is wearing very thick sunglasses. The expensive leather jacket she bought on sale and then was sullied by Hale’s cappuccino is worn. The stain hardly visible, thanks to the color of mocha.

I pull out of Lauder court driving. There is a tangible, stifled uneasiness to the silence that exists between the six inches that separates the passenger side form the Drivers side. Renae continues to warble out a string of syllables as if everything is really no big deal. She says a quick garbled ‘yes’ when I tell her that it sure is good to see her. She shrugs her shoulder’s like it is no big deal when I tell her that I feel extremely honored that she asked me to escort her to her senior Homecoming. Her shoulders jolt up and down, as if it is really no big deal. As if she could’ve gone with anyone, she just needed a date.

Inside One World, I keep on trying to make Renae smile.

“…with lots and lots of whipped cream.” Renae says again. I keep saying things to make her smile. Keep making remarks to make her blush.

“How’s the folks doing?” I inquire.

“Dad’s always drunk.” She says. “Mom kicked him out for two months. I don’t know why she continues to put up with his shit.”

“I always liked your dad.” I add. “I always enjoyed giving him shit.” I say, staring at the blue vase in the center of the table, and the slightly wilting Daisy with the bowed stem inside.

“He couldn’t stand you.” Renae says. “He always thought you were trying to get fresh with me. He always thought you were deliberately trying to pick a fight with him.”

“I was just being….jocular.” I say, utilizing an ACT voacb word of the week.

“Hemmm,” Renae shrugs her shoulders again.

“I think that’s the reason my mom liked you so much.”
“Really,” I say, a smile bending across my lips. Debbie was always a looker.

“Yeah,” Renae says. “The way that you always pissed my old man off, plus she always though you were cute.”

“Cute,” I say the word out loud and too myself. My last vivid partially blurred because of no glasses memory of Debbie Howard was her driving me home from HAMMERS at Renae’s father Christmas party. Debbie had her hair slightly puffed in front like foam gushing from the bottom of a waterfall. I remember staring at the back of her jeans, as she bent over, fastening Ian, Reane’s six year old cousin, into the front seat of the car.

“It’s a good thing you two are leaving now.” She says. “The only thing those boys are going to continue to do is to drink.” She says.

I reach out across the wooden strips of the table. Another pedal has slowly wilted and is falling down form the top of the daisy. A patron who skin is either covered with tattoos or metallic piercings sets our drinks down in front of us. I look at Renae.

“Is that enough whip cream for you?” I comment. She smiles. It was the similar smile when I groped her hand at SCHOOL TIES two years prior. It was the smile of recognition, the smile of somebody still seeming brand new to you even thought you have seen them in those boxer shorts over and over again; even though you know what color the carpet is underneath; you know what the pipes look like. Her burgundy blush was the color of love.

“Yes,” Renae says, as the smile slowly descends from the top of her forehead. “It is a lot of whip cream.”

***

On the ride home, I insist on dropping by my house to formally introduce Renae to my mother and father, once again. Renae seems to be rather in a hurry, but she capitulates to me request, saying let’s make it brief but sweet. Mom’s head lolled into her padded shoulder, he hands slightly clasped as she welcomes Renae into our house. Dad just seems to adjust his glasses several times and even (perhaps intentionally) drops his dinner napkin off of the table, garnering a good look at Renae’s tightly packaged denim ass before slowly exhaling. I show her my room, the room, downstairs, where the grand piano used to belong. The room I first composed the letter to my father when I was fifteen, telling him that I was in love with Renae. She smiles and nods.

“I need to get home.” She says.

****

In front of her house, on Lauder Court, there is no extended information to come inside and make out. I adjust the clutch and idle the Prunemobile, until I smell burning oil and then place the car permanently in Park.

“So,” I say, try to make chisel away the silence. “I’ll see you this Saturday.” I say.

Renae nods. “How ‘bout I pick you up.” She says.

“Okay,” I nod once again, stolidly with my chin, as if I am being mandating instructions for a dietary living at a Health Clinic.

“Don’t forget to pick up a corsage.” She says. “I’ll have your bouttinere, or whatever it’s called.”

I nod my head again, upset at the pulsating splinters I feel inside my chest every time we try to communicate.

“Okay,” I say, “Well, I’ll give you a buzz this week, making sure everything’s cool and all.” Renae nods, thanks me for the coffee. There is more awkwardness. More uncomfort.

“It was really good seeing you again, Renae.” I say. “I’ve thought about you a lot. This feels really good.”

Renae sort of sways her head back and forth. I tell her goodnight and she reaches for the side door just as my body gravitates towards her. Seeing that I mean to embrace her, she allows me to, but does not hug back.

“Renae,” I say, before she struts up the slight inclination of her front lawn alone.

“Yes,” She wails, once again, rather impatiently. I roll up my sleeve, push the fold of fabric to my elbow.

“Did you notice that I wore the bracelet you gave me tonight” I say.

“Yes,” Renae nods her head. “I noticed. I guess it meant something special at the time, didn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I say to myself, as she grants me goodnight again, informing me that she will call me later in the week to verify our plans.

“I guess indeed meant something at the time.” I say to myself, looking at my bluish reflection in the windshield, briefly wondering what Jenny Wilson is doing right now.

***

Every day after school I stretch out my limbs and run and every day I come home and brew a pot of coffee and lay on my bed, supine, with my hands cradled behind my nape in dyslexic prayer wondering if she will call. I listen to Tori Amos. I listen to Depeche Mode. I think about Europe last summer. I think about what my mother told me, about anticipating a sort of emotional low once I returned to the states, returned to my Junior year, return to the academic gutter; the genital wart I call Manual High School.

First hour is coerced smiles with manual singers. We still sound slightly off key. Billy Fortune sits next to me and tells me that we really need to get together sometime and meditate. I just look at him.

I think about Renae. I try calling her line once on Tuesday but hang-up when I realize that it is busy. Mother asks me if I am excited about homecoming. Like Renae, my supposed date, I offer a heartless, insouciant shrug. Because I am facing my mother, however, I smile and tell her that I am elated, proud of myself that I can recall another ACT vocab word.

Tuesday and Wednesday transpire without a buzz. I lay on my bed, trying to see if I can feel the world slightly tilt to the left, slightly rotating, orbiting around the mid-autumnal slashes of light that cut through my window sill at dusk. Finally, Friday afternoon, after practice, I arrive home with a note from my mother. A note, stuck on a post it on my bedroom door.

Call Renae. The note said.

*****

“Hey,” I say into the lower end of the phone. “How’s it going?” Renae lets out an exhausted sigh that sounds like she is practicing for her pending La Maze class.

“I just wanted to call and tell you that I’ll pick you up at five tomorrow night.” She says.

“Cool,” I say, before I inquire how her week was. She answers in the same monotonous drone, stating that it was all right but nothing special.

“I’ll pick you up, but we need to hurry. We need to be at Laura’s house. Her parents want to take photographs of all of us.”

“Totally cool.” I say, once again.

“We’re going out with Laura and Lonnie and Kristy and Timm. It should be a fun evening.”

Again, I nod my head, and tell her that I am looking forward to it.

There is another pause in our conversation.

“Did you remember to pick up the corsage?” Renae asks.

“Yes,” I respond. “My mother is going to pick it up at the Florists tomorrow.”

“I already picked up yours,” She said. “It’s a smooth peach color. I hope the two of ours matches.”

“I’m sure the two of ours will.” I say. “How about outfit. What should I wear?”

“Just wear a shirt and tie.” She says. “You’ll look fine.”

“I’m sure you will, too.” I add, realizing that it’s probably a good idea if I venture out tonight and pick out a shirt.

“So, tomorrow at five, I’ll be there.” Renae says, once again, in her fast monotone.

“I can’t wait.” I say, before hanging up the phone, but not before saying goodbye, before we even said hello.

****

That night I drive around by myself in the Prunemobile, wishing that I had something rolled and sweet between my lips to be sucking on. I slide my car in the parking lot of Northwoods, thirty dollars in my wallet, looking for a white shirt.

I walk inside the Penny’s and the first fifteen dollar shirt I see I pick up. The sale lady tells me that the shirt will not fit my neck. She measures my neck with a miniature ruler, as if preparing me for the guillotine. She then sells me a shirt that costs ten dollars more that the shirt I had originally planned on purchasing. I arrive home, standing in front of my full mirror. Two minutes later, after I have carefully removed all the pins from around the sleeves and collars like I am removing curses from a Voodoo doll, I realize that the neck is too tight and if worn with a tie, our homecoming photographs would turn out slightly blue, giving Renae the impression that she is dating a finely groomed smurf.

I tell my mother and she tells me not to worry. That we’ll go back to Penny’s tomorrow after my Cross-Country meet and exchange the shirt. I go back into my room and listen to Depeche Mode synthesized chimes and wonder heavily inside if the whole weekend will feel this tight, leaving it hard for me to swallow, afterwards.

******************

We exchange the shirt. Mother picks up and outfit for me to wear. That morning time seventeen minutes still flashed in implemented neon slashes at the end of the meet. As hard as I try to push myself, it seems as if I am still tumbling over my own foibles, it seems like I will never be able to live up to the times I have ordained for myself.

The outfit mother has coordinated herself and deemed that I wear is gray with a blue tie knotted around the bulb of my Adam’s Apple in posh literary Albatross fashion. I spend the afternoon lolling around the house, glancing at the time, waiting for her to arrive. Twice I pick up the phone and consider calling her, asking her if perhaps maybe we could just talk. Perhaps we could just like hangout and laugh and giggle and say stupid things that have no meaning to them whatsoever. But my ambitions stretch as far as the three digits and a numerical slash.

I dress. My contacts are steadily affixed in both lids. I blink several times. Dad comes in and helps me ties my tie, showing me how to tuck the loose silk non-visible end into my shirt like they used to do in the seventies. I nod and tell him thanks.

With my hair thoroughly gelled into a sprayed plateau. I look at the photographs on my wall. I look at the photographs form the music man, and look at myself, in the top row, bending over, trying to look at Ambra. I look at the autographed laminated Daivd Coperfield Aunt Jan gave me. I look at the Tori Amos and the Eric Johnson and the Harry Connick Jr. I look at the one photograph I have of Renae. The photograph that I used to ferry in my wallet. The photograph that I used to show people, pointing to the girl in the center of the photograph, saying that it was she who held my heart by the reins and kept saying giddy-up.

With corsage in paw I adjourn out to the cement steps, squatting, smiling, not knowing entirely what to expect. I wear Renae’s gold bracelet again, out of respect to the individual whom I am escorting. I think about what Renae said, about how it felt somewhat special at the time. I think about talking with Renae the summer after my first sojourn to Europe. I think about trying to cajole her into picking me up for a drive and how she was listening to Radio Head in the background. I think about how I asked her if she felt ‘so very special’ in accordance to the lyrics of the song.

“I am special.” Renae replied back to me. “I am special indeed.”

I abandon the steps and go back into my room, winking at the copy of Leaves of Grass reclining on the corner of my desk, hoping that maybe Uncle Walt can save me. For sentimental-as-fuck sake reasoning I have Depeche Mode’s SOMEBODY chiming in the cassette lips of my stereo. It is autumn and the planet is begin to transition into shades of copper and corduroy and the very next thing I realize my mother is stammering into my bedroom, a look of excitement squeezed into her lips, informing me that she thinks my date has just arrived.

(book o' Muses) October, 1994

Symphonic cycles and the sip of her forever smile

2008-06-19T19:00:00.001-07:00

It was four years ago and the author is seated twenty feet from where he is currently seated now at this precise moment in time space, pelting out the shapes and sounds that will form the anatomy of this blog--four years ago, when Barrack Obama was little known outside of the terra ferma of Illinois running for the United States senate. Four years ago when the United States populace as a whole, hungover from the heartache of 9-11, still believed that the purported possibility of weapons of mass destruction warranted the massive Invasion of Iraq by US troops which would later spawn innumerable causalities, international bruises bandied with emotional political welts on the global skin of this planet--a planet we still haven't learned as of yet how to share.

Four years ago when gas was, to put it mildly, cheap as fuck.

Four years ago when your avg. Ipod resembled the early NES pond scum-screened gameboy and was roughly the size of my outstretched palm. Four years ago when G-mail was sending out invites to recruit spam sullied yahoo accounts into the legion of frenzied googlized groupies. Four years ago when Brittney still wore her panties in public and the appellation Paris Hilton meant a five star resort you opted to stay at while touring France in lieu of a hostile. Four years ago when facebook and Myspace and Wikipedia were all cyber-embryos and Youtube had yet to be conceived.

Four years ago when nearly all of my daily literary rants were saved via hundreds of vestigial pre-school windowed shaped floppy drives and the (Shit, HOW pricey and how many scores of pages lost never to be recovered) Zip drives.

Before Katrina baptized the Big easy into a puddle of pain and loss. Four years ago, John Kerry was trying to lasso the political sway of the voting American cognoscenti. Four years ago to the day the quarter million lives snatched away from the the day after Christmas Tsunami were still living, still breathing, still here.

Four years of laughter. Four years of loss and failure. Four years of wondering who the fuck you are.

Four years ago when you were allowed to smoke inside bars. Four years ago when people recycled a lot less and the terminology "going green" meant that you were looking to score some pot. Four summers ago when I still busted my ass to make ends meet. Four summers ago when I just returned from a cursory tour of the highways of the Midwest, scurrying through the hallways of the prestigious Iowa's Writers Workshop, slipping autographed journals in which my work was showcased under the doors of esteemed faculty members and fellow writers I admired, before I found myself alone in St. Paul MN, looking at my literary mentor, Garrison Keillor, on stage.

Four years ago I was listening to the Yeah Yeah's and Liz Phair all the time.

Four years ago I was staying in the apartment with a aged Psychic who had told me three years earlier when I first entered his apartment for the first time to look around because I would be living there someday. Four years ago to the date when I blogged scribed the stanza's... "When the spotlight's illuminated cone captured her vibrato the entire audience (including her brother) fell in love. Is that why I left early and cried. Hoofing home, through the park late at night. So proud of her...wishing my father could have seen his daughter. Pissed off that the wound of death hasn't completely scabbed over. Raking up scattered leaves of family remorse sifting inside my chest, wishing I could set the crumpled heap ablaze and start new, which of course, will happen over time. Life isn't a unicycle (Thanks arya). Nor is it a motorcycle. Geez; my analogies are so lame and cheesy this morning that even my witticisms are subject to mold...."

It was four years ago when I started blogging, oblivious that this daily on-line dry erase board I chose one summer to employ as my creative kiosk would bless me with sprinkles of eternity, the feeling of oneness,the best moments of my life.

When you are kissed with comments of encouragement on a daily basis there is no end to what an individual will achieve. I can still see myself, four years ago, if I squint from where I am seated now. I can make out the back of my head, the pony tail (hair finally growing long again) like a honey-flavored handle sprouting out from the back of my skull--can discern the silhouette of my shoulders pivoting in exclamation and in joy as the fenestration of sentences spills open into a fellow bloggers pasture of words as my vision skis across a fresh paragraph authored by "lady Benz" or "mara-arya" where my lips, now as was the case four years ago, boomerangs into a smile.

Four years ago. The summer we swam with cycles, skinned lizards and doused demons with the narrative copper of our collected souls. The summer we danced in a single shared dream and were blessed enough to have the metaphysical skills of Ace to decipher them. The summer when growth was tangible and tinged with golden longing of all mankind.

Over the next week or so I'll try to resuscitate a few of the bloggs that I wrote four years ago but that were never posted. Writing (as a career, as a fiction writer) can be a lonely spiritual vocation at times. I look back at that summer four years ago not remembering a single blogg I wrote, but I remember with the gratitude of angels every reverberating vowel the twin hosts who invited me into this glorious gala fraught language and longing decided to share.

Four years. Shit!!!

Morning begins with her smile or

2008-06-10T14:08:00.000-07:00

the reflection of her face
into my face
a globe of handicapped
continents, land masses,
mountain ranges
vast prairies spilled
beneath the lunar-lit
arboretum of lips,
slight magnetic
shock of white
brimming over the
horizon of cheekbones,
brushing into the angular
slants of her chin
This is how morning
splashes its vision into
the winking copper
tint of dawn
The moment when
you find your body
outside of your body
bouyed into the
upsidedown pond of dreams
a suspedned chandelier
showcasing your
every failure and loss
a tear prism of her smile
and the promise of yet
one more day
alone

dvb07

2008-06-03T19:36:00.000-07:00

It was the perfect moment in time

Space when I saw you baby the moment when
I somehow found your fingers curled in my hand like
Some sort of bulb the moment I wanted more than
To be myself being more than myself
Sloughing out of the limp raincoat of flesh
The moment where I wanted to kiss dance skip
Seek flounder sprint off the discourse of the page
It was the moment when I was free
The moment where after all
This time I didn’t have to worry any more
The moment when I turned around
And you were somehow
Above my body
The ventilation of your lips
Giving birth to upside down
triangles and limp treble clefs

In the copper of autumn

It was that moment
You plucked from me
The moment I slipped
Inside the puddle of your eyes
A blink swatting everything I have ever wanted
on this continent of being in front of me
It was this moment here and now
that moment I swear to god

I’ll fucking get it back again

dvb07

2008-02-20T20:03:00.000-08:00

Watched the lunar eclipse tonight--the moon transitioning into a wild chestnut sphere, a brown leather orb lobbed in the high west of a frigid late February night as if the one-eyed moon itself were taking a moment simply to close its eye meditating in winter prayer admist a frosty chandelier of stars. Went back home during my break at work to observe the hour long lunar wink on my back porch while downstairs frat boys drank cheap beer and played poker and smoked grass, unaware of the silhouette their solar address was casting on the nearest galactic cue ball.

One, two, three, four, five, six, nine, or ten, Money can't buy you back the love that you had then

2008-02-19T23:25:00.000-08:00

Finish line....

2008-02-07T18:58:00.000-08:00

So I made it through the
end of the week only imbibing
six beers!!!! Three 12 ounces
(an IPA, Pale bock and Pale ale
respectively)one seasonal sumptuous
Samuel Smith festive winter ale
and two 24 ounce PBR's can, which
the liquor store conveniently
began to ferry for only 1.49....
sixty cents cheaper than my
daily starbucks venti pickme up....

Off to cartwheel into an alcoholic
cycle of oblivion this weekend
In all confessional candor six beers
between sunday and Thurs is about
20 less per week than I've been
consuming. The goal is to only
get blitz on the weekend and to
be more focused on my literary
pursuits and not use alcohol
as a panacea to life's
solitary problem....I'll keep you
posted.....

the kingdom will not come by expectation....

2008-02-05T16:59:00.000-08:00

There's something about the year 1844.
The Millerites believed
that 1844 would be the return of Christ circa
March 21st, 1844 ( nothin' beats a thief in the night)
The event was known throughout many sects of North
American Christianity as the "great disappointment"
The first telegram using Morse code would be sent
on May 24th of that year by Samuel Morse, the inaugural message being
that of "What hath God wrought" (numbers 23:23)....one day before
in Persia a messenger of the light revealed himself
as being a GATE to the metaphysical continuity
and spiritual evolution of mankind. The fact that
Morse's message was promulgated hours after the
heralding genesis of a new age
demarcating mankind’s spiritual odyssey
in the discourse of the net of time
serves as a modern day star of david
quietly looming over the
housing projects in a run-down
Bethlehem, a few shepherds familiar
with the noisome scent of sheep shit
pointing their question mark
shaped spears in astonishment at the
sight of a beaming orb
wondering just what all of this
could perhaps mean.

indeed, 1844, the German astronomer Bessel noted
that Sirius, the most ebullient star in the night
has a companion star next to it.

A month later Joseph Smith, founder
of the latter day saints, was lynched.

1844.

The date I notice
when my mid-day ambrosia
pick me up was christened
in a working class blue collar
stable in Milwaukee, breaking
my quest for five day
alcoholic celibacy.....

but hey, if you had to pick a year.....

Four fingers left to go...

2008-02-04T16:39:00.000-08:00

There were times in the last three years
when fleeting mystical serenity was obtained
employing the use of alcohol as my metaphysical
snorkel, upholding the amber baton of enlightenment
in grapple similar to that of a patriarch and a scepter
after a day of writing, looking out the nocturnal sockets
of my bedroom window, taking intermittent chugs and swigs
before abandoning the contents of the bottle into my body and
doffing the cap off another bottle, another 40, another IPA
another shot, another Guinness. My vision skips across
the inky continents of the novel I am currently treading through
and then high dives off the second story of my
apartment window, lost in an upside down umbrella of snow
showcased by the yawning spotlight of a streetlamp--
if I look straight ahead as I tilt back the
hue of my bottle lost in the evaporation of planetary
bubbles sledding into the area of my face just above my
chin before I swallow and watch (almost in slow motion)
as the crystal rocket reverses its trajectory from
the brim of my lips, the nectar splashing into every
abandoned cell hollowed out inside my chest as I smile
and look back on to the December white of a fresh page.....

"I wouldn't try going cold turkey all at once." My brother-in-law, who is a
doctor advises me. "With the amount of alcohol you consume on a daily basis
you'll start shaking and sweating every night."

There were times when I lived with the psychic on
Heading avenue when I would go out into the woods at two
in the morning, the sylvan fountain of trees attired
in a thin sheath of snow, the skies bejeweled with
a broken chandelier of thermonuclear pebbles
as I searched for Sirius and smiled, howling as
I floated into the shadows of the night
a Fosters special Bitter or Icehouse
cupped in my palm. During the day, often
spring and autumn, around the pinkish tint
of a pending dusk I would lower myself into
what I already immortalized in my book
as the "nuclear woods." The same woods
my best friend David Hale got stuck in
on Patrick McReynolds 13th birthday sleep over
and we had to get help....the woods I dreamt
about exploring when I was in jr.
high with the crimped bangs and late-80's
side ponytail
and numerical high school
digits stitched into the jacket of my girlfriend close by
feeling somehow the awakening of our bodies
mirrored the awakening of the planet
the newness of spring
the endurance of summer
the ash of a fall evening
and the splash of ovum baptismal white
of a winter melting into the continuous narrative that is nature
years later finding myself somehow living on the upper lip
of the woods I loved in my early youth
loafing on a the thick bark of a toppled tree
a bridge to some childhood innocence
loafing, smoking my pipe, pouring back
into the hovel of my mouths the
the taste of a sunset childhood

and the taste of what is to come

For Christmas my creative writing professor from college
presents me with t he largest bottle of Jack Daniels I
have ever seen. If placed horizontally it resembles a
southern crystallized blimp showcased at a late-eighteen
hundreds world fair of arabesque intrigue.

There's something about the hardcore image of A
writer being an alcoholic. Jack London died when he
was 40. Kerouac was 47. when Raymond carver
was 39 years old the doctor said that
if he didn't quit drinking he would be dead
in six months. He ended up dying young anyway
(fifty, of cancer) but he said that he was more
proud of staying off the sauce than anything else
he had ever accomplished in his life.

The quality of his prose and the manner in which
he feisty inhaled every molecule of the last
decade of his life attest to the poetry of his
sobriety.

But writers are addicted to truth
when your truth is sloshing around
the corners of your lips
one second and then

trying to find something to fill the void
left by something that you
once put inside the interior shafts of your flesh.

When I was at the store today I told Tiffany who scans barcodes
and swipes link cards for low income families that
somehow can afford better clothing and vehicles
than i ever could that I am giving up booze for the
upcoming week (she saw that my order was fraught with frozen
vegetables, plastic silos of Gatorade and rice and inquired.)

Tiffany is hard core working class, skinny as a virgnina slim
who loves cheap domestic long-necks and country music and dogs.
I can tell that she has been having a typical Monday in America
can tell like all the rest of us that she is struggling
to make sense out of all the shit--struggling to make ends meet
struggling to find companionship (she refers to her boyfriend
as "dad" whenever he calls) struggling.

"Why are you giving up booze?" She says.

I tell her that I am only giving up booze for a week
and that the ultimate goal is to cessation of all
alcoholic products during the work week.

Tiffany continues to check out my item.
When she bends over placing the items into the
stationary cart at Sav-o-lot I can make
out the color of her bra.

"But you seem happy." She says. "If it makes you
happy all the time it can't be all that bad."

I turn around and begin to pack my groceries in
a box once used for tuna fish before shooting
a smile back at my checkout friend, whose
place of employment is much worse than that of my own.

Trying to go five days...

2008-02-03T18:01:00.000-08:00

...Without orally ingesting the carbonated
copper liquid ambrosia of working
middle class americana
the elixir of youth harbinger of hopes
social lubricant of mankind, ingenious
marketer to the masses, liquid diploma
shaped entitlement gushing forth
icy froth of dreams vicariously
ferried into the snowy pasture
of mankind’s poetic longing
with each splash of the palette
QUASHING the existential shadow
of existence, the inevitable perils
of failure and loss
the ablution of possibility and being
a panacea for the integers found on pay-stubs
loan bills, credit card statements
a crutch to help the gnashed soul
continue through the world alone
a rod and a staff superseding
the image of God or the woman who
dumped your ass
a gauze for the broken-hearted
the amber pond of immortality
sluicing down the into the corporeal
enigine of the body
The feeling that you are here
forever and that you will never
die....

For this is why people get drunk or abuse various to substances
which may render lethal health imperatives come a decade time--
because more than anything else the substance is there for him
the substance is there to hold him,
is there to take him where he needs to go
is there to verify his virility and esteem
is there to make him laugh
is there to ameliorate his wit in public
is there to make him feel that he has accomplished something
is there make him feel that everything in his life has some sort of meaning

and the substance will do this in a way that no few Jesus's or
fuck friends
perhaps ever could because is does so with an intermingling
baptisim into the blood

while the substance is circulating
throughout the interstate arteries of his nervous system
there is no narrative too grand, no dream without reach

no story that cannot be spilled out into the gushing
current of language, much as my neighborhood
tap floods nectar out into pint glasses

After all, the raison d'etre of my alcoholism
is similar to why I come to writing
or why I come to fiction.
Why I want others to come to my miniature train cities
carved into the page in the shape of lower case shapes
being that I want to take the reader
somewhere they have never been before

and (maybe)
I want my story and my craft
to hold them when no one else on the
planet is there to do just that.

Over the last three years alcohol has been a part of my daily diet
Its the place i go to feel inspired, creative, alive
I wake up at weird hours and need a six pack to just
to crash for a few hours before heading off to work
anticipating the 24ounce cylinders I am to imbibe when I get
off eight hours later. Most weekends are a visual
cherry-oak haze of the interior of bars and ferrying
cube-shaped craft packs back to my apartment
from the liquer store, spending enough green
to send the Islamic owner on pilgrimage to Mecca....

five days..

over the last two years I've only ceased drinking
when I've been sick. Five days on my own volition.
Five days to try to bring forth that will
power, to sacrifice something significant
and to maybe, in the process
develop and grow into a human being
in a writer

something that has not even been imagine

Eight year old short story, found, along with the crinkled origami of her digits in an empty Doc Marten shoe box....circa 1998

2008-01-31T22:36:00.000-08:00

--It will come when it comes, she tells me, not a modicum before the moment is due.

It is intermission. The patter of palms taper off into golf claps as bustling men and women alight from rumpled seat cushions, elbowing toward the lobby. A serpentine line forms outside of the ladies room while men respectively smile and nod and stretch, popping knee-caps, loosening the knotted pentagon of their ties, grousing about the heat. Backstage you once again feel like a novice. You feel inept. You feel like no one in the house full understands what you were trying to say. There are the obligatory compliments and salutary sniggers from the company and cast who would swear on the Gideon bible that you are good. They say you are really good. They use the word verisimilitude in your review. They use the word superlative. They pat you on the back when you pass them by. They keep the ticket stubs from your performances thumbtacked on a bulletin board at home. People like you. Really, they do.

Backstage there is always warm Pepsi in Styrofoam cups and volunteers who look
like Keebler elves squeaking into the dressing rooms, holding up a splayed palm to indicate the dwindle of minutes, the lapse of time, the foil of your furlough. All around you the heads and necks of cast members hurtle in and out of costumes. Girls in bra's quibble over eyeliner and mascara. Males mired in a ring of collar sweat falter to put on their own makeup, unless, of course, they are gay which Dougie Shriner-the actor who portrays your best friend David Hale-obviously is. Every other Thurs day night at one am Doug doffs his boxers and dons his kleenex-chocked D-size brassiere and Lycra jumper to become Vanity, the Virgin Queen. Vanity rubs her taut ass and slouched surrogate tits in front of oglers— a bespectacled bevy of middle-age queers who fawn and foam at the mouth every time she lip's syncs anything by Macy Gray. Vanity once got arrested for peeing standing up in the girls bathroom stall at Perkins, an event which Dougie Shriner somehow regards as a personal violation on behalf of his own womanhood.

In the dressing room everything smells like hairspray, you think, as Vannie Hallmark,your on-stage romantic lead, swaggers past you trying hard to be noticed; arching her shoulders and curving her back like she an underwear model. Vannie Hallmark is very intelligent and very beautiful. She is a spume of blonde tresses and an oracle of intrigue. Her lips look like a Clinique hyphen and her angular features are origami delicate. Off stage she tells those who tip their hats and query that yes, it really was her on page twenty-two of the September Victoria Secret catalogue modeling the petite bra's that unbuckle from the front and are such a bitch for most males to get undone. Vannie's pallid countenance is highly reminiscent of a diminutive espresso shot-glass. Her nose is configured like a light-switch, beseeching Vannie with an eternal aura of unbidden arrogance and uppity pride.

In Act one, scene seven, your first tete-a-tete with Vannie, whose stage name is just V.,as in the Pynchon novel. The scene takes place in a rather lethargic looking college classroom at a private college located somewhere in the Midwest burrowed like a mole in a middle-sized town which houses minor league franchises and smells like pee. Both of you are falling madly-kicking-and-screaming-clicking your heals together-in love, which is rather unfortunate because the two of you study English at a school built for budding Engineer students and rich kids from Chicago who drive $20,000 cars, have short haircuts and wear Greek emblems on their chest.

You first descry her rapturous beauty in a writing class. She was Midas with a
ballpoint pen, turning ink into golden paragraphs strewn with bucolic beauty, ushering forth stories of her rustic upbringing and the perpetual loss of being both, alas, miserably beautiful and miserably gifted at the same time.

On stage you tell her that her prose is so beautiful that reading it gave your heart an erection. Off stage you endeavor to cozen a kiss, but she just sighs audibly as if expected, turns the other cheek and truckles to the vagaries of the director, whom you revile. On stage the Professor, who in this production is from India with a pearly smile, laughs at your erection witticism, commenting that it was duly-appropriate for his class session that her incendiary prose only made your heart erect and nothing else. The heads in the class room hop forward in laughter like kernels in an air popper. The audience is on the floor.

The first onstage kiss is performed in front of the backdrop known as the Silver
Vagina. The Silver Vagina is a ubiquitous stage backdrop since it towers directly in front of the C.D.library. Somewhere in his cliff notes on the origin of your script, the director has written that once a year, preferably between the months of November through February, a gaudy frat boy with short hair and sideburns ends up getting his tongue stuck to the metallic contours of the monument. The library staff always snaps a Polaroid before calling the fire trucks.

You should have told the director from the outset that there was just no way in hell
that this rapport would work out, even though by act two, scene '3 Vannie and you are
biting into each other like twinkles, groping beneath restaurant tablecloths, and yes, even talking about rings and receptions. The audience loves this- salivating like a Pavlovian Chihuahua at even the notion that sex would be performed onstage, publicly, in front of an audience whose programs tell them the real names of the cast members and what their hobbies are.

As the elfkin-pygmy holds up a peace sign in front of you, you wonder, just for a
moment, if any or all of this is real.

Backstage you amble through the curtains of mangy costumes searching for a moment of solitude, seclusion, and possibly a few puffs on a cigarette before the actress who portrays your on- stage Mother clumps into your shadow and charmingly chides your vice with maternal detriment. Your stage Mom is built like a milkjug. You stamp out your smoke and surreptitiously slush warm Pepsi around the inside your lips, swallowing when the penisu1a shaped dungarees of the director eclipses your imminent view. His gruffness is apparent and he verbally berates that on stage you were opaque and that your whole body delved into an asphyxiated stutter whenever the spotlight landed on top of you.

“It was as if the spotlight end-capsualated you rather than emancipated you, Da-vid"
He reams, once again exhibiting his proclivity toward double-entendres when he
pronounces your first name. The directors last name should be Lambaste. He says that you fucked up again. That your knee's knocked together like abacus beads. That your voice was reticent. Your solo, sour. He asks you if you are coy? Are you fucking coy? Did you know what you are, he inquires. Do you even know what role YOU are suppose to be playing?

Do you boy?

As Vannie's right-triangular nose struts past you on her way to stage left the Director tilts his neck to check out her ass and then smiles to himself shaking his head left to right once and makes an 'ummmm' sound. The pending act out Herod's Harrod when it comes to tumult. In this act Vannie will leave you and then come back. Then you will leave Vannie and then come back. Then eventually both of you will leave and you will get in a car wreck and almost die.

You remember once getting broadsided by a cement truck. You had monopolized the
semester slathered in a rueful dither, working third shift. You were an exhaust pipe of enervation. Your tank was always on E your debilitated and stressed vision was the color of a stoplight from fatigue and scholastic duress. You felt blessed beyond a collegiate measure if you got four hours a sleep a night. Crashing at Four a.m. and car pooling back to campus with your Mom at seven thirty. You remember lying supine in the stretcher while the ambulance attendant said the word extricate into his shoulder 'radio over and over again. You remember feeling manacled and marred by images of yourself wanting not to be yourself anymore. You remember wanting to unstrap yourself and leave. Just to leave. Your eyes drape shut and then sprout open. Your brain feels like a slot machine
whose eyeballs keep reeling blurred images of fruits into the back of its head. You wish you were situated in an antipodal location. In fact, maybe you are.

* * * * * * * * *

"When it comes, if it ever comes, I want to feel real. Mostly I just feel like a bladder most of the time. That's why I did it. I had to prove to myself that I was more than just a urinary emission. More than just a faucet. I wanted all the pain and loneliness to be accounted for something. I wanted to watch it drip out of me. I didn't think prozac was an opportune plumber. And going to school counseling and adolescent therapy on Wednesday evenings during Lent sure as fuck did nothing to cloy or clog my vacuity. I was nothing but a bladder. A hot water bottle. That's all."

"So this is why you did it?" Her voice is inquisitive, straightforward and sounds like ahandbell Your shrink has this annoying proclivity of raising her vocal resonance at the end of every sentence. She is trying to sound professional. This is what they taught her to do in grad school. They taught her to sound professional They taught her to sound fake. As if it were really somehow a possibility for her to empathized with you. To commiserate with your trauma. To just understand where you are coming from. You think that true empathy is impossible.

"I wanted my depression to be accountable for something," You tell her, not looking
into her eyes, "I needed a receipt for my sack of sadness. I wanted to see just what it was I had purchased and why the product wasn't working. I wanted to lash into my own investigation. I needed to unplug my item and look for impediments. With each
welt I was probing myself for errors. I wanted to be like every other product. I wanted to have a function. To have a purpose. I didn't want to be saddled down in my own deluded dystopia."

"David, what would you say championed your march into masochism?" she says
again, gesticulating with her arms, trying-to sound like she is on an afternoon talk show. You decide it best to humor her, after all she graduated from a prestigious University and dates a man who has one of those simple, forgettable one-syllable names and who flippantly peruses through every section of the paper except the Sports: and the funnies.

She knows every drug you have ever done and the name of every girl you have ever
written poetry for. She knows all about you. About your dyslexia. She knows how words
swim on the page and scatter like guppies in a fish tank when you try to :make sense out of them. She knows how, for you, reading is a quote 'motherfucker' -yet reading and writing is the one predilection you love above all else. How every word you encounter you bleed over, in one sense or another. She knows how books are your best friends. She knows that when you were sixteen you used to trundle beneath the glowering street globes which align Moss Avenue nursing a cigar and quoting 'The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock' by heart. She knows that in highschool you did more 'shrooms than a Mario Brother. She recalls the warmth in which you told her that, in high school every Saturday afternoon you would make it a point to lay on your bed and listen to the Texaco Opera live broadcasts from the Met. She remembers you telling her how you would fall asleep with the radio on and wake up harboring wet dreams of Cecilia Bartoli's succuelnt soporano-thinking that she may be the closest Dante-inflamed vision of the Beatrice you could ever experience. She knows that you lost your virginity on Bloomsday, 1997,on a rest stop off of 1-74 to a girl whose name was ironically Molly. She remembers the way you described. Molly to her. Molly was a bluestocking bandanna granola cruncher who wore ankle-length khaki skirts, sandals and studied philosophy in Urbana. She knew all about Derrida and Levinas and kissed with her entire face entering yours. She remembers the way you tersely recounted loosing your virginity. Not the act in itself, but what followed: How Molly closed her eyes and untucked her bottom lip and wailed O MYGOD O MYGOD O MY GOD three times in a row without a comma—her eyelids opening and closing the way a garage door opens and then closes. And how afterwards you held each other like how lovers in Rodin statues clasp each other ad infinitum. Then, chain smoking a clove cigarette, Molly told David that out of every human mating, every time a ovum is germinated by a sperm and fertilization occurs, that there were 53,000,000,000,000succinctly diverse possible fetus ramifications and that all of us are one out of 53 trillion (that night she drew the twelve zero's on his naked chest) different possible ferrotypes of what is possible.

All this the shrink knows and still she does not know much.

"When I was 16 I carved the word POET into my chest with the severed glass neck of
the Jack Daniels bottle I had recently smashed., like a captain christening a ship's maiden
voyage, on the lip of the porcelain sink in the bathroom. "

She says the word yes three times in a row and then asks me how it felt at the time.

"Actually, it felt good. It felt like I was letting something out of me that I had kept
cached in me for so long. It was not mawkish or maudlin-like how in high school I would
attire myself in black raiments, telling my teachers that I wore black on the outside because black was how I felt within. No, itwas more like-here, try this analogy. The mother in labor who suffers exorbitantly to deliver. She frees hersel£ in other words, so that her child, intrinsically part of her-will be severed yet nursed. Kept inside it will kill them both.

The silence in the room impels your lips to continue.

"I had felt like a thing for so long. Not a person but a thing. There's a difference. I
didn't know how a human being was suppose to feel. I knew how loneliness felt. Loneliness was being all the same and yet not. I knew what it felt like to feel-all alone. I remember in fourth grade cowering in the back of my closet hoping I would find my Cair Paraval But it was all the same. Like Narnia before Aslan. It was always winter and never Christmas.

"So I ripped into my own flesh with Prufrock Claws. I wanted to verify my validity as
a human being. I cut deep to assuage the loneliness-to assuage the fuckin' ennui. I cut to prove to my own self that my loneliness was different than the loneliness promulgated by producers and brought to you by yearly automotives and household provisions. I needed to unplug, rewire, and then plug myself back in with so much electrical force and frisson that there wouldn't be a doubt left in my mind about who I was or what I was. Just that I was. It's pretty profound if you stop and think about it."

“What else?” She interrogates.

She wants to know. Everybody wants to know. David, will you tell her? Will you be a big boy for once? Do you have the fucking balls?

Your chest is now a helium balloon that has lifted far from its stratosphere and is about ready to….

"When I was either six or eight, old enough to toddle down to the 7-11by myself and watch older boys play pac-man, I was sexually abused. His name was Frank. He was friends with Dad. Dad wanted us to call him Uncle Frank All of us did. Uncle Frank shaved big head every other day so it was bowling ball smooth. He had an earring and talked like he was black. Mom used to say he looked like Mr. Clean. Mister he was, Clean was debatable."

She nods her head like a hand puppet and gestures you to continue.

"He and Dad worked during the week at a factory North of town putting together
tractor parts and smoking dope in the break room. On weekends, when my sister Beverly
would relentlessly chase me around the house with naked Barbie dolls, Dad and Uncle
Frank would hunker in front of the RCA in their undershirts yelling at us to shut the fuck up, adjusting the Y-shaped antenna and guzzling case after case of Strolls Lager which they called ‘Regal Shorts' always snorting out a wheeze as if astounded by their sozzled ingenuity. Oh, and by the way, my parents still don't have a fucking clue about what spawn my lachrymose. So don't tell.

'Frank and I and Dad were all buddies. We were all pals. We were the guys. Men. We
would all watch football games together. We would an say the words' Aw shit' in unison when the quarter back was sac'd. Some days we would wrestle on the front lawn and on other days Frank would place me on his shoulders augmenting my height, enabling me to toss the ball over the brim of the hoop. Frank and I would arm wrestle on the coffee table and Frank would always let me win. Clutching his wrist in feigned pain as t discarded my
shirt, distended my biceps like Hulk Hogan and asked everybody in the house "What's ya
Gonna do?" doing my damndest to emulate Hulk's throaty inflection. I remember Frank
trying not to laugh when Dad called Mom a Pussy and said she had a Watermelon for an
Ass. Mom was attired in her mauve leotard and strawberry legwarmers counting to four and doing jumping jacks in front of Jane Fonda. Dad said that Mom looked like she was treading water when she exercised and Mom after Dad had passed out, went outside and emptied the air out of Dad's tires, blaming it on the Vice Lords down the street."

Good stories too often have no beginning and no endings….

“One Autumn afternoon-and I succinctly recall it being Autumn -Dad had long since
succumbed to his inebriated snore and Mom was showing Bev and Emily Zubar down the
street pictures of her homecoming dress and her high school sweet heart, who looked like
Ted Koeppel—I can't recall the year exactly but soda pop still came in the glass bottles with long translucent necks and Resees Pieces were the posh juvenile sugar rush . It was around the time my Uncle Larry got his arm caught in the elevator door at Sears. Around the time I overheard my Aunt Vera, who had a moustache and a birds nest perm, tell my Mom that she wouldn't mind giving Reverend Kopenski a blowjob during the epistle reading on Sunday. It was somewhere around the time Dad and Uncle Frank stopped drinking Strohs and started gulping Budweiser—giving me the moniker Bud Light Around this time, the year my Dad couldn't afford to get me an Atari for Christmas even though Santa said I would—the year Mom taught Bev to keep her legs crossed when she sat with Aunt Vera in church this was the year Uncle Frank would invite me into the bathroom to watch him pee."

“…..”

'It was what men who were Buddies did together. he said. I remember the way he
held his out in front of me. I remember not knowing what to think. He made a sordid and sick analogy about Gepatto and Pinocchio, which I'llomit here because even now, close to a decade later, I am still haunted by his advances. Can still vividly recall how his fingers felt like icicles beneath the button of my pants. How he would snap the elastic band on my underwear leaving rosemary patches on my skin. How he would smile a sandpaper smile when he did this. I can still remember him asking me sick questions about it. I remember wondering why his had a moustache and mine didn’t. I remember him asking me to pet his like Donna Lapis invited me to pet her hamster, Alfonso, who bit me. I remembered feeling scared after the first time this happened. I remember feeling dirty about out secret. I remember wanting to tell mom and dad but instead I hid in the closet with Bev’s naked Barbie clinging to it like a rosary. I remember crying. I remember feeling like it was somehow all my fault.”

She pushes out a breath and inquires how long it lasted.

“Years,” You say. “It lasted for years.”

The day my best friend lil’ Robbie Coover from west Moreland got hit by a Schwann’s truck while trying to cross the street on his pogo ball, Frank took me out for ice cream and then touched me. The day I set the school record for most accelerated reader points in the month of March, Frank stuck my finger so far up my ass that I bled. The day mommy and Dad came home from the bible retreat with shorter haircuts, cleaning out their liqueur cabinets in the name of Christ, Uncle Frank picked me up from Boy Scouts and took the long way home.

“On and off for five or six years, I would come home from Uncle Frank’s house with cum-stains the size of Kennedy-halves on my corduroys. I would cry. The world didn’t make sense. I didn’t want to have his phallic in my face. I didn’t want to have my squeezed like it was some kind of stress relief putty. I didn’t want to ask if I could take off my clothes while frank flashed shots at me. I didn’t want to be myself anymore. Eventually, I didn’t even want to be and after a while I simply wasn’t.

Somewhere else a Keebler elf flips you the bird without being vindictive in anyway, shape or form.

You ask her if she mind if you cry in front of her, just for a moment.

“It’s not that I’m weak, just tender,” you amend….

When I was 17 I got a job tutoring phonics at Common Place to little black boys with very white eyes who sang songs about black Jesus and wore one hundred dollar Jordans.
One day at lunch I went for a walk. The wooden telephone polls seemed to be a continuous stream of cyper-optical crucifixes. I saw him shadowed beneath the hung head of a hollow street lamp. He was withered and wore make-up. He was sitting on a bug stop whose placard was the color of a finger nail and flouted Dukakis and Benson in '88. He was drinking what I could only imagine to be a 40 of either Strohs or Budweiser wrapped in a brown paper bag. He looked off in one direction at nothing in particular. His limbs looked like a dead tree in Autumn. His eggshell eyebal1s blinked into the vacant avenues of the South Side. A GLAD trash bag stuffed with prodigal aluminum sat next to him. He looked exactly like how I felt for so many years. He looked all alone.

It will comes when it comes, she said to me. It will come when it comes.

And as I walked up next to him and sat down on the bench ( he didn't seem to recognize me-it had been nearly six year since the Union strike and Dad's Christianity) I wanted to tell him that I too was a Christian. As I put my arm around him. my palm on the shoulder of big tattered jacket, I wanted to tell him that all of big come-stains had been washed clean in blood of the Lamb. I wanted to tell him that what he did to me didn't matter because sin blinds everyone from the truth. As I marshaled my right arm around big waist reeling him now into my chest. I wanted to tell him that I had forgiven big icy gropes, forgiven the way he touched and tangled my formative body. Wanted to tell him that it was over. That it was all in the past. That I had grown out of it like the underwear I grew out of whose elastic he snapped.

As my arms now fully extended big cane-like semblance, I wanted to tell him that all
was right in the world and that I even loved him.

If only that was what I told him.

Snow can wait I forgot my sweater....

2008-01-24T16:19:00.001-08:00

Christmas morning at grandma's....

....and never brought to mind: a tear smudged induced fugue of joy reflecting the puddle of a year gone lapse

2008-01-13T17:54:00.000-08:00

It is the morning pink eye-lidded yawn of 2008, the green g-mail chat bullet of the planet still galatcically tethered and cosmically buoyed around a winking bulb of the nearest day star socketed inside the inscrutable fabric of the universe itself. The genesis of a new slate of January snow melting in tandem following the platter of stale new years eve confetti and exclamatory countdowns en masse that would make even the stoic collective chins of NASA salute in anticipation over the toppling descent of integers pregnant with the pocked sound of champagne hiccupping free from its emerald esophagus followed by a ricochet of corks followed by dry kisses and embraces and a round of old acquaintances being forgotten followed by the (interior writhing) realization of age and the encroachment of death, the cathartic gut-dripping insight that the allotted dash of seconds granted to us as a gift to thrive and create and love and give all on the fallow scalp of this planet--this viable arboretum of intelligence and life--and that you are here optically indulging in the phonetics of this experiment of pulse and breath--that you are here, wading knee-high through this experience of existence, this time, this place, the joy, the sorrow---somehow you are (for however tersely) a part of this global collective waltz--that you are part of this tear drop trickling down the cheekbones of the planet called humanity and that your voice, your persona, your song, indeed, carries with it the most fragrant chorus sprinkled with significance and wonder.

A ritual that my family has devoutly enacted since I was about the size of an errant good year tire was that, on New Years eve, after church we would host a new years eve gala where my aunts and uncles and cousins and friends would congregate around the oak mahogany of our childhood living room; week old needles on our Christmas tree still clad in a stuttering holiday phosphorescent glow. My family would configure into a circle of elbows and limbs, not unlike those found in creative writing classes in the upper echelons of liberal education while my mother would distribute candles to each inhabitant circled in the island of bodies. One by one, each member would light his or her respective candle and talk about how God had blessed them in the last year and what their hopes and individual ambitions were for the following year. With the house still garnished in a bright holiday hue festooned with cranberry ribbons, the pine heavy scent of emerald orchards nasally associated with the last week of the year glazed with icicles, tufts of froth, darkness sputtering across the horizontal windshield of the west, caking the planet with a dazed mid-afternoon tint--in our house on new years eve there were candles, each individual very simply espousing their gratitude for yet another year of life on this planet holding the white stem of the candle chin-high as if it were some sort of microphone. After each narrative the person would swivel clock-right alighting the wick of the person next to them until the room was aglow in a halo of candle light and spilled stories--the ritual often ending with a prayer of peace, a hymn for tomorrow, a wished-for song for the world to come.

So, with lighter and candle stalk in paw, allow me to illuminate the unsinged tassel of the wick and spill out the overturned jigsaw narrative of my heart reminiscing over just what the fuck happened these last twelve months:

It was the year in which my rattled third shift eyesight would optically snap out a poloroid of my Uncle Larry escorting my youngest sister Jenn down the slim carpeted arteries of the aisle. The year in which the integer of the trinity now heralds the numerical parking meter of my existence. The year in which I stenciled the number of pages composed everyday with a different colored marker into the white Gregorian decimal cube of the calendar above my desk at work.

The year I tell everyone that my heart is occluded in metaphorical tupperware as if awaiting a transplant from the broken cogs inside my chest to the inky footprints of a page seeded in pasture of emotional exposition such is the nature of my craft.

A year when I added nearly four hundred single space pages to a novel that is simply long enough.

The year of partying every Friday night with my dear friend Scarlet. Being snowbound the weekend of Valentines day and posting a thirty foot self-engendered mural entitled "INVOCATION TO THE MUSE" on the east side of my apartment wall. The mural consisting of app. sixty playboy centerfolds, flitted together like semi-glossy pornographic Lego's. Over the discourse of a snow-occluding weekend I would scribe the name of a different ex-girlfriend or transient lovers across the sheen of the paper. Watching the name of the woman I once proposed to, the proverbial one who got away; the high school sweetheart who now has a mortgage and an SUV and three progeny; the woman who broke my heart before I found myself nearly dead in an automobile accident the next day; the ravishing song of my spiritual companion, the pulse and color and fragrant hieroglyphs of her name, now collated in a glossy fresco--a thirty foot quilt bannered on the far side of my wall during the week of Valentines day.

By the end of the week long project I was lounging in my apartment, smoking an ONYX cigar when I witnessed my mural topple like maladroit stage curtains falling down at the end of a highschool thespian production of YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU.

It was the year of watching Devin Hester sprint and dance into the endzone in the opening return drive of a sodden Miami superbowl, calling up my friend minutes later and bating him to perform his signature disgustingly divine heterosexual male oriented Ric Flair WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

The year of hearing the radiant verbal chimes of Greta Enzer--a Unitarian, a healer, writer, actress, teacher of theatre and beauty to LA's inner-city wayward teenage age souls; a fellow wayfarer who (fuck) 14 years earlier I sat across from at a dinner-dance in Stratford-upon-Avon, the town of Shakespeare and listened acutely as she told me about her sister, who later, I would learn, would die in a car accident--the chorus of souls spilling out their every story in streams of wished for slants of winter sun.

Greta showing me her brilliant script about a woman who fucks her boyfriend while she is one her period before slathering the blood of her own body on her lovers face in post-coital feminist delight.

The year of Harold and Maud.

The year of 11 percent IPA's. Samuel Adams Brewmasters collection, Dogfishhead, JW Dundee craftpack, Hobgoblin, Deleirum, North West Microbrews, extreme beers catered from a Scottish Dean of alcohol at Rhodells, bitter, hoppy, stouty, eternal, lathering the box seats of my palette in a liquid coat of joy.

It was the year of WHEELS OF LIGHT and VIEW FROM THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE and Juice diets. Kabbalah. Hard core meditation with emphasis on the frontal lobe. Dream symbiosis. Deepak Chopera. Yoga. Getting off from work at three in the morning and running my fucking ass off across the arteries of the west bluff. The psychology of Carl Jung. The year of dalliances in shamanism and devotions in quantum physics--watching the metaphysical realization manifest itself in the appellation of her name perching like a half-open window sill or whimsical wardrobe in front of me, every stitch of her handwriting splashing into the shore of my poetic desire, her name, little waves, foaming and cresting across the sand barge deep within the swells of my soul.

The year of BORAT and RAMTHA and wondering what it would be like if they were both stalled downriver in a canoe.

It was the year I was humbly asked to be a visiting writer at the University I still owe thirty-thousand dollars to. The University I graduated Cum Laude from and have never opened up the manila envelope in which my diploma arrived. The university I know work third shift for--the university that (unbeknownst to them, but love the distorted irony) called up the house five hours after my fathers death and innocuously inquired for a Financial donation to augment their sordid trust fund.

A failed campaign.

My cousin Larry, the rock star, the brilliant beer-addled fellow black sheep of the wayward Bozec bloodline. Larry who was living out of his SUV and battling substance abuse. Larry who ran off over 2000 flyers to in early April protesting the (now intact) Illinois smoking ban: THIS IS NOT AFGHANISTAN:SAY NO TO THE SMOKING BAN!!!

Waking up in an aluminum nest of beer cans and cigarette butts in the peach-lining light of an early spring, sitting on my back porch with his guitar singing songs from ten years ago, breaking into a chorus of Jonny Cash tunes:

"Well I woke up Sunday morning with no place
to hold my head that didn't hurt
...And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad
So I had one more for dessert"

The year I was supposed to see Michelle again, at a wine tasting in Des Moines, but we failed to somehow find each other in the field of SUV's and license plates.

The year of chronicling dreams. The dream where I endured in the guest room of my mothers abode where I am watching my father die and asking Abdul'baha to save him, to which he stoically refused. The dream where I am attacked by a dog-like creature
in a county house by my girlfriends very Harry Potter Mrs. Weasleyesque matriarch--the country house I later was invited to move into with my brother Hale six months later.

The year in which I found myself wading inside the torso of a woman I blogged about two years earlier, a woman who is a breast cancer survivor, making love in the under a pocketed sprinkle of July stars, the pilsner moon and slashes of heat lighting accompanying us as if in applause.

There's no sort of sex like sex with a woman who inspires you and who has grappled death by the labels and told him to fuck off for a few more decades.

And trust me, nothing is fucking sexier than a woman who has trounced her fears and now cannot stop smiling and laughing at everything around her.

The same woman who pretended she didn't know me the night of her sisters bachelorette party. The woman who now wants nothing to do with me at all.

The out of body mediation where I find myself in reverence in a throne room telling an escort of God that I cannot bow before him alone if the person I feel one with at all times is not saddled next to me, bowing, worshiping, smiling in spiritual deference as well.

The year where my cool sister and Brother-in-law hosted a thirtieth birthday party and almost every relative showed up with a different microbrew or imported six pack in paw. My Uncle Larry giving me two glass steins and a 12 pack of sumptuous SPATEN, which I jested to his chagrin that he probably purchased at Aldis.

The dream where I go into the earth and find my father alive and crying and tears and where we embrace--the gruff scent of his chin and cheekbones pressing against the right side of my tear saturated face and simply hold him.

The year of opening day at Comiskey, casting incantations of peremnial impotency all season long as the White Sox bullpen continue to act like a Bengali whore on an american military base and "blow another one." Watching Peoria-blood and all American class act Jim Thome belt his 500th homer in indelible fashion before circling the slants of the south side diamond, fist clutched, arm alighted, circling in spumes of cheer.

My dearest Esme--the eyelashes that launched more poems than Helen did ships to Troy over a two week period in the early haze of summer, the lavender dusk of a June evening over the eye-liner of the west replete with (seasonal) seventeen year cicadas chirping out own anthropodal oratorios in the background. Esmeralda who met me at the bus station in Joliet with her hair pinned back and a kick ass green dress that slid over her cinnamon skin-limbs of her petite poetic frame like quarter notes skimming across a the lithe rungs of classical sheet music. The rich chestnut tint of her eyes blinking in unflinching curiosity, as if trying to sop up every quark of her experience on this vessel deemed earth one astonishing blink at a time.

Esme who knew more about me than I did her when she arrived suitcase clasped in the slender tips of her fingers on the steps of my apartment early last June, her last night in P-town, en route to demolish the social hierarchal configuration of the planet in South Africa. Esmeralda who told me she has a surprise for me, mandating that I idle in the marijuana-incensed hallways of Motel six while she took a minute to "get ready," and as I waited before I entered the hotel room with thirty candles and the B'52's blaring out of a laptop--the spilled hiccup of her smile wishing me a happy birthday. Still I remember sitting in the bathtub with our clothes on (our Garden State moment), resting with her head in the center of my chest, the arteries of my heart catching dreams as they nocturnally dripped from her forehead like metaphysical ambrosia.

The year I nearly (remorsefully riddled now in retrospect) gave a copy of IRON JOHN to a bum at a bus station who was drinking water out of a dirty 2 litre bottle of Mellow Yellow, clad in an old tattered military coat, living all hours at the greyhound depot, hoping that he would look up into the gaseous wing of the bus as it hushes open to espy the limbs of a woman who mysteriously echoed into the night two years prior. Every night, he shows up at the Bus Station, waiitng for her to perhaps return.

The year of multifarious can't-enough-optical-fucking-viewings of WHAT THE BLEEP:DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE. Two copies arriving as if from disparate quantum realms on my door matt (even though I only ordered one)--the author intuiting these dual metaphysical tablets as gifts, giving them to the two wayfarer he feels most would most benefit from their insight and glow.

The year when my best friend from first grade was found murdered in his SUV, a bullet
planted in his abdomen, his eyes stalled in unblinking trance.

The year of God bless the eternal soul Danny Dalquist!!! Watching the casket containing his earthly coat sail through the mouth of St. Marks cathedral, a wooden vessel levitating on the bony pillars of fellow pallbearers. The crimson clad shirts of the soccer team lined up in a plank of lower-chinned bodies as if playing zone defense against the inevitability of an ill-timed death--the sorrow of pain of the loss of a fellow brother. The six-figured university president doing her best ersatz Jackie O. imitation. The sight of my brother Drew wreathing the thick athletic slant of his arm around a teammates neck in a dire time of sober need and loss.

The year where a former student of mine was shot and killed, probably because of his sexual orientation.

The year where I was more or less drunk all the fucking time. A weekend past naught
where I failed to ferry a 12-pack cube of liquid scepters on the blades of my shoulders (sometimes two or three), as if the alcoholic Pharaoh of my psyche were instructing me to erect a great pyramid of hedonism while my life organs whittled and hardened into sand.

"If eternity is understood by endless temporal duration

The year of youtube: staying after work and watching lectures by Joseph campbell and Richard Feynman. Laughing my ass off to vintage all in the family. Dancing around my cubicle to the popped-syncopation of late-80 bowed out power ballads.

"But by timelessness."

The year where Doctor Wynn said that the results from my MRI came make negative and that I was a healthy young man and if there was something I was hanging on to from my past that was coercing me to spend all day worshiping Bacchus by pouring insidious amounts alcoholic libations through the hatch of my lips then I should really think seriously about seeking a psychological crutch.

The year of my brothers.

The brothers who always got my back. Year in year out, what a blessing to have healthy male creative coevals, semi-hedonists and fellow virile sports saturated lovers of life. Helping my brother John move to a posh Naperville apartment one late spring afternoon and endless male-oriented discourse over the wayward pursuit of sports in the city of Chicago. Throwing back amber gauntlets of PBR with Nick the writer, brother in the pursuit of all things literary and truthful in the swelter of early august. The year of dapper David Thompson, hearing his insight and pursuit of the aesthetic, the bacchanalian, the beautiful, the culinary, the eternal.

The year of Dave Hale always having my back. Picking me up when the skinned-knee of my spirits are low.

The year of fuck the chicago cubs going to the playoffs!!!

Through the tides of light combing into the shoreline of the planet in waves--the sight of a heavy sun in winter stranded in a sea of moonlit serenity.

All this and I still don't know what a fucking kiln looks like, Sarah.

"If you wanna sing out, sing...."

Though the highlight of December was watching your eyes close as I kissed
the light snow of your winter cheek and then wished you a Merry Christmas.

"then he who lives in the moment.."

"there's a million places to go just know who you..."

"Lives eternally."

This is my torch from the eclipsed 12 months passed to you dear reader. I extend the pangs and perils, my sin and my savior, to your outstreched wick. My request for your new year is simply: Make the life you are currently leading the life you feel compelled as fuck to live. Give it all and ask for no return. Pour everything of yourself out in an effort to strecth the lips of a perfect stranger out in a meadow of smiles. Dance as if there is no tomorrow.

And if you find yourself holding her in your arms. Never fucking let go.

Happy new year, my faithful readers. Make your life joyful and unique. Cause there's a million ways to go.

You know that there are.

That time of year thou mayest in me behold.....

2007-12-10T18:56:00.000-08:00

There is something about the morose overcoat attire of a rainy autumnal day that is lulling and serene and perfect--the sort of day that makes you pause as you internally ponder the beauty and mystery and overall inscrutable lost joy of existence. The sort of day where you look out into the wet cement lining the front of your building and find leaves shaped like variegated blotched palms smashed into the ground as you note the whistle and zip and syncopated tap of precipitation, light sheets of rain drizzling in invisible treble clefs of moisture wreathed around the back of your neck, temperature buoyed in the mid-fifties, the earth ready to nod its chin as if bracing for the inevitable goatee of frost found in the first week of November, when the sun begins its brisk topple from the steeple of noon to the silhouette and tint of a four-thirty pm dusk--the jaundice domes of traffic lights skirting across the planet peering into the elongated stretch of night as if searching for something irreparably lost--something that will never be retained.

A rainy day in autumn.

In the morning or in the late afternoon before work I sit at my computer furiously banging out sentences as if trying to make the alphabet come. As if trying to feel the quick splash and release of sound and motion of human narrative scratch into my flesh before hollering out my first name and then falling limp from exhaustion.

I wear tattered jeans and my white-sox cap (backwards). Some mornings I get back from work at 3 am, crash for three hours on my makeshift futon nest (don't ask), rise at six and attack the screen. Some mornings the oak top of my desk is littered with the amber esophagus necks of beer bottles and dirty coffee cups. For some reason I started smoking like a mother fucker over the last month--the vagabond author encroaching the coast of middle-age (NEVER!!!) trying to tame and harness his dreams. If I look into the brow of the monitor I can see the letters of her name finger scribed into the settled dust of the computer screen, like a castaway mapping out gargantuan alphabetical shapes on the shoreline with his feet hoping an overhead aerial vessel will find him before the yawn of the nocturnal tide effaces everything he has ever wanted in this world.

I realize earlier in the week my incentive for writing now stems from the tautology of perennial hope that I want to wear jeans to work when I'm thirty-five. The first two months of classes is always arduous on my body--a spill of late night hours, a series of student lectures, I become almost completely nocturnal, going to bed in the insufferable heat-nauseating swelter of mid-august and then waking up in the last week of October, an indentation to the glass frost of winter, wondering what the fuck happened. Wondering where the fuck I am. The first week of classes I barter my bohemian blood-line and become some sort of suit-toting corporate genuflecting power-point presenting toady--a charlatan with gelled hair and a dry cleaning bill.

My father would have celebrated his 60th elliptical skip around the nearest solar orb deemed the sun this last November 15th. November with its sheets of stalactite rain and day lights savings. November with its hard tufts of frost found in patches in my mothers lawn as her wayward son perpendicularly sets the skeletal rungs of a ladder against the brick side of her kiln-shaped abode, fishing the gloved tips of his fingers into the overhead lips of the gutter, removing a confetti hand full of leafy bouquet foliage, watching as it sprinkles into the pond of forgotten green below.

The first week of classes I give power point presentations (replete with Twinkies!!! Everybody loves Twinkies) to emotionally overtly over-taxed college students. I attire my limbs in chic raiments, a barter from my spiritual brother who lives in Des Moines. It's the closest dalliance I get to achieving a two-step tax-bracket increase tango with corporate America. The life I surely would have performed a kamikaze nose-dive into had I grown up five miles differ in any navigational direction and had not a tattered and fortuitous copy of Leaves of Grass snap at the tips of my fingers junior year as if the yawp and cidery beard of the bard himself were trying to teeth into the sickly white interior of my palms before scribing out what appears to be a sonnet, a tear, a half-breath, a distilled moment, all inked in the crimson jelly of my own blood.

At the incipience of each new year I forget who I am. Forget what the eddies of a fresh paragraph looks like as it is steam rolled off the paddles of my wrist and massaged into the footprints the page. I trade in the frissoned jolt and linguistic live stock of my chest for duties in the office, a change in sleep patterns. I monopolize more time worrying about bills. I phone my student loan shylocks and joust for a lower monthly payment--realizing that higher echelons of education is a commodity, a business, a fuck you up the ass with a corporate carrot for a couple of years, making me feel that paying for a purported education you busted your ass working full-time on the side to receive (while still feeling vacuous and Hungry inside) is equivalent to excavating my fathers casket, only to glaze it with a few drops of windex for lustre before incurring the tomb into the planet once again.

....But those weeks I don't know who I am but pretend that I do. Nodding my head as I watch my summer fling dissipate into the heather of autumn, commiserating with my chin, that yes, we are different people. Yes, we are good at sex but not good at dating. Yes, you are going through a divorce and need world enough and time just to inhale. With my albatross-assenting tie curtailing the circulation of my neck like a noose, I march into work, staring at my dusk reflection in tint of the door, unaware of the paunchy eyelided rubicund hummel-cheeked janitor outside on his smoke break. Refusing to make eye contact with this man who dresses in flannel, whose beer belly
bowed over his torso as if saying grace at an all you can eat truckers buffet. His hair was the color of an overturned ash tray and he proudly stowed a pack of cigarettes in his left chest pocket as if they were pack of playing cards.

As I waltzed into my palace of employment he says hello to me with a rough nod of his head. When he sees me he looks as if his face is going to treacle out into a triangle of tears. I'm selfish and solipsistic and don't want his shit. Don't want his flannel and bucket of disinfectants and mock-light sabre mop. I don't want his shit. His bowling trophies next to his framed GED in a basement apartment in the county, a taxidermied deer proudly arched above a fake fireplace where everything he has ever accomplished is displayed.

I don't want his shit, me, with my suit and my dossier and my business satchel. Don't want to hear his story. Don't want to juggle his psychological pangs. Myself, a would be writer, to engrossed in the corporate grind of my presentations to even look him in the brow and listen to this old mans story.

***

His face was the color of a pencil eraser as he approached me later in that afternoon, back at my desk. He walked with a slight limp. There were a sprinkle of
what appears to be tears dotted below his own sockets.

"I saw you in the office at your mailbox." He said. "You wouldn't by chance happen to be related to an Arthur Von Behren?"

I look back into the furrowed cardboard brow of the janitor I had deemed myself to proud to chat with before my shift.

"Yes," I say. Telling him that my name is David and that Arthur was my late father, reaching emerging my arm out like a lever from a slot machine into his direction hoping to make the acquaintance of the man I had earlier coroanted myself unworthy to associate with. As my hand remains momentarily lanced into his flannel shirt and beer belly torso, waiting with anticipation a first name and a handshake by association the man looks at me and slowly grapples my outstretched arm with both of his hands. He then begins to cry.

His name is Bob and it turns out he was worked as a janitor at the gradeschool my father taught at for thirty years, encouraging third and fourth graders to read and write up to two weeks before his death.

Bob is still holding my hand like a white homecoming rose as he tells me that my father was one of the most beautiful, caring men he had ever met. He called my father a prince and then tells me that he is honor to meet me.

My dad was the meekest individual I've ever known. He was the social antithesis of every hedonistic verity his son espouses. He never drank. Did not smoke. Lived his life with one feminine partner who completed him. He drove used shit cars. Helped anyone who needed assistance. Gave everything he could for the spiritual pulse which guided him somehow since birth.

He tithed. Taught Sunday school. Never question the belief in his faith.

He prayed.

...and yet he never judged. He was never above listening to a janitor and encouraging him. He placed a value and merit to every human life he encountered.

I think about my father, how we would have been sixty this past November. IN the nearly six years since the garment of the earthly flesh abandoned the refulgent skeleton of his spirit, he has missed the honor of escourting both of his daughters skirt down the aisle clad in winteresque sheets of white. As I walk into the bruised purple sky of the east correlating perfectly with the spattered yolk of sun, peach in hue and burning incessantly, a thermonuclear galactic hearth, snapping out branches of light to a watery bulb 90 million miles away, wondering just where the fuck the sprinkled stain glass light of autumn will shine like the dome to a stage light next--wondering, as I pad my pockets down for a smoke, as I buy another round of alcoholic nectar for every one, as I loose myself in the transient bliss of a moment with an individual whose smile reminds me of something I lost a long time ago-as her eyes fall into the pasture of her cheekbones-wondering where all this will lead me next, smiling even through my exhaustion at the possibility of change and growth and love, thinking about my father as I walk into the electric uncertainty and wished for joy of another autumn.

The next time I saw Bob, outside on his smoke break, I smiled and asked him how life was treating him.

His face seemed to light up as he tapered an ash off his cigarette and smiled.

God I love this shit!!!

2007-12-05T02:53:00.000-08:00

http://www.bleepingherald.com/nov2007/hubble

A cantata for the season

2007-10-22T21:35:00.000-07:00

It is autumn. The hard breath of the planet daintily skirts across the quad at the university where I work whistling out a swath of leaves the color of broken stain glass across the cement lip of buildings and the sides of stationed vehicles, autumn offering it's raked seasonal tithe via incinerated back yard bushels alighted at dusk, autumn coating the west in elongated streaks of light rippling overhead into cranberry and copper sunsets before winking out, pinning the planet beneath a brisk tent of northern stars, the temperature of the earth free falling into a whisked frost of late October.

It is autumn.

The arrival of leaves littered in entrance ways to buildings like stale confetti--the orchestration of the earth christening the success of summer, the wayward maturity from last spring and the free for all fall of the atmosphere into a frozen tundra of glass and ice, the cold December morning where the earth is the color of a doffed wedding dress and your limbs wade in the raft of dreams looking for warmth and flesh to hold in the hush of night and, if you are lucky, the sight of her eyes and the morning static of her smile

It is autumn. The televised din of HD fireplace offering a muffled roar of the masses while thickly geared titans endeavor to shuffle the oblated geometry of a football over a metric configuration of lines and inches. The flaring orb of a pumpkin jeering back at you in a chiseled smile. The stolid crunch of scarlet leaves the color of rich menstrual blood. Cardboard colored leaves staining the planet in an alchemical refulgence of joy.

At night I walk, often nursing a cheap cigarillo, ambling beneath the illuminated globes of the same street lights my shadow first flanked across a decade earlier. Thinking about my writing. Entertaining my crushes--the woman with the wild hair and boots whose been gyrating around the tip rail of intrigue, whose face lit up as if with halogen pores when I gave her my shopping bag at save-o-lot so she didn't have to endure the train wreck line of patrons (she's religious and I wonder what she thought with my cubes of stacked beer and discs of frozen pizza and carafes of gatorade, all piled in my arms as if I were participating in some sort of corporeal game of Jenga). Thinking about the woman whose lushest curtain of gray hair (induced from an infinite spill of hours lodged in the ceramic studio) inspires me to no end. Whose forehead and cheekbones look like an unblemished thatch of country snow on Christmas morning as I try not to blush while musing over our botched
verbal dalliances.

Another autumn.The skeletal rib cages and sylvan rungs of the naked tree limbs marches across every meandering distillation of your thoughts reflecting back to previous autumns--the autumn you witnessed the reflection of your short hair in a square of tint of an airplane passenger window as the aerial vehicle lowered itself into the gravity of the planet and you gazed past your reflection waiting for her to meet you at the terminal. The autumn before your fathers death where after church and Sunday dinner you would watch the first quarter of the Bears game with your father before going outside in the center of the manner and volleying the football back and forth, your father, only 53 years old and in purportedly good health, oblivious of the cancer rollercoastering through his cells, oblivious that this particular autumn will be his last.

Thinking about the autumn where, the Saturday morning after thanksgiving I turned around and saw everything I have ever wanted in this planet traipse through the doors of my local Starbucks--the morning light splash of her smile spiritually complimenting my longings, escorting my every wild pulse and wayward wanderings--the impetus of my every late-night literary binge. The blessings. The joy. The eternity.

The earth clad in the attire of autumn.

I continue to walk across a canopy of autumn, spraying my thoughts into nocturnal tint of my thirtieth autumn, the planet two-stepping with the nearest day star 90 million miles away, still dancing nonetheless, in a familiar elliptical pattern and slope.

I strut past the house where I grew up. The house where a woman who one terse spring day emptied the breath out from the hydrants of my lungs now lives inhabiting perhaps the very bedroom where i encountered Whitman and scribed sophomoric stanza into battered notebooks every afternoon at the helm of a oak desk. Snatching a green leaf from the sweet gum tree my grandfather planted in the front Yard in the house that raised me. The tree he planted in the Autumn before he died when I was only six months old. My grandfather, lover of nature and himself a painter, who worked shit jobs after the second war, who loved Jesus and trees and struggled with debt. The tree on Sherman avenue is always the last tree on the block to turn any hint of copper. It remains green and rich usually into the dead end tea-bag gray of late November. The leaves, still emerald and rich on Halloween. A miracle sweet gum tree with spiritual bark. The tree which heard my moms morning prayers and supplications for twenty-five years. The tree that refuses to wilt and turn to gold until the last possible moment before a sea of white blankets the avenues of the planet.

The tree of life.

There is a Light that Never Goes Out: A Blogg for Mark-Andrew Feaster (pt.1)

2007-07-23T14:18:00.000-07:00

Still bloggin' out a hymn to the ten individuals who have changed my life. The following was originally composed via blogger 6-2-04 (less than 24 hours after jasna's AVA was scribed three years ago) yet was never published on blogger. That's one of the cool things about being a writer (ain't it esme??) is that, you write something you think is total shit, then via the emotional tumult and addled-alchemy of life, realize that it's not that bad.

Here's the first part for a lad whose love and encouragement and overall joy of being has given me quite a lot over the years.....

...and there is music. The pervasive shaft of stringed intonation that rises above the tempo of the page and hurdles into the dimmed corona of night. There is music; feminine octaves flirtatiously flapping away from their lower-clefted counterpoints before momentarily melting into one harmonious vessel. The conductors arms continue to flutter and sway, heaving the orchestral barge from the necks of groped instruments. He is pulling away. He is crescendoing. He is biting his lip for affect. For perhaps he knows, that after the sound has been culled from the soil of the stage, a bitter silence shall then ensue, painfully outstretching the limbs of time.

On stage there is London in the spring. A lavender sunset drips over the Thames river, smearing the clouds with a sweet plum cobbled aura. Music sprouts in perfectly branched passages, smooth, the way her body is smooth, the way the Thames is smooth, the way youth opens up and unfolds into adolescence; the way adolescence pecks its way into maturity; into reality, into a world that had always been, a world that is incessantly shifting, orbiting, dancing, bobbing a galactic nod, swiveling into the opposite direction of the nearest star.

And there is London in the spring.

Mark-Andrew is the protagonist of my youth. He bears angular-Versace features, nonchalant thick lips, gaunt chin that slightly protrudes from his visage like a ski handle, eyes that hide in them a fleck of emerald. He has blonde hair that was fashionably unkempt when first we met in 93; hair that faded into a singular dish-water ponytail in '97; hair that was trimmed shoulder length when last we said goodbye, January 2, 2000. He is three years older than me, which means that he'll be thirty (!) in October but at the time we met, when I was fifteen and he was eighteen, he seemed to be humbly awaiting coronation by James Dean as the coolest mammal ever to be called a human being.

We first met April, 13th, 1993, in Newark, NJ. We were the recipients of a contest sponsored by a swanky New York magazine called Young Columbus--a program which takes around 120 hormonally addled 12-18 year olds from across the United states, clusters them in New York City for a day, shepherds them with Ivory league counselors, wraps them on a 747 and gives them a full-out two week crash course in European culture before sending them back to their 120 respective US residencies to (hopefully) finish school; encouraging them to make a positive impact on society, labeling them as both Young ambassadors and global citizens.

The contest was a big deal and I had tried to win it the previous two years, working very hard on my speech and presentation, praying very fervidly that perhaps, my own self-centered guilt-ridden variation of a heavenly monarch would allow me to win, just this once, win this special trip. I worked on my oration, I feigned intellect. I learned how to tie a tie (sort of) and used manners. I pretended my nose was a kazoo and allowed sloppy french sentences to slip out of it and when the day of the contest arrived; when I would leave junior high mid-morning clad in a Sunday School suit and arrive at the banquet and shudder and engage in small talk with the judges and latter, give my speech--only to find out at the reception afterwards that I had, once again, struck out ignominiously. Had perhaps swung at an errant pitch when I should've been more patient. Only three kids from different vectors of Illinois were elected. The trip in '91 and '92 was to Paris. The furthest I had been preceding the trip was probably Wisconsin Dells. I couldn't tell you what constituted turbulence if a jet thruster fell in the dilapidated football field behind my highschool.

But in '93 I somehow won. I connected with the judges. I wrote a speech that seethed with alliteration and unalloyed cheesiness. "England, mythical land of pageantry and princes, Castles and Courtly conduct...yadayadayada." I made my speech about England sound more or less like a travel brochure for a B-rated Cruise line. But I won. After all this time of dreaming, I was finally leaving, I was packing up a suitcase larger than my desk at school. I was posing for a passport square down at the post office. I was traversing to that place that had always been promulgated on television (mostly on late night PBS hoity-toity masterpiece theatrical histrionics); that place I had never been to.

And there was Mark-Andrew.

He was seated behind me on the charter van outside of the terminal at Newark. I was fifteen and was almost obsequiously self-conscious of my appearance. Every morning--in an effort to emulate the heart-throb semblance of Jason Presley and Parker Lewis-- I fogged up the vanity frame in my parents bathroom frosting copious amounts of Aqua Net on my lathered skull, drilling an aerial hole in the O-zone layer directly above my head--like a sliced through nimbus. He was behind me in the charter van. Older boys. The kid from Texas with the baseball cap and the stern-mule countenance and leather cowboy boots. Preppy short haired polo-shirted Cinnamon toasted tan lads form the east coast towing luggage by Coach and Louis Vuitton. He sat on the back of the van, comfortably clad in a Suzanne Vegan 99.9 Fahrenheit degrees t-shirt, an expensive camera noosed from his neck, dangling like an infant suicide in the center of his chest. He looked so much like someone I had seen before; someone I had known before. His blonde hair slightly crept and spidered off his head.

Perhaps all true mysticism/spiritual recognition really is is that, when you look at someone for the first time you know everything about them. You feel the juddering magnetism that emanates from the sockets of their eyes, the allure of their persona, actuating the Schopenhauer maxim that you and the other are somehow one.

Requiem for a Coach (pt 2)

2007-07-22T14:48:00.000-07:00

Coach Ricca was hollow-cheeked gaunt-eyed with a searing look of a gladiator stowed in the pockets of his eyelids. A buzzed shock of red hair adorned his scalp like a skullcap. He was a vessel of optimal health and a dominating competitor. While in his late-30's he could easily average five minutes per mile over the discourse of a 15k. I had spotted this athletic titan twice, pedaling his arms and legs in inimitable stance, the chug of his elbows in metric tandem with the smooth lapping rhythmic sway of each foot gave him the appearance of a spiky-haired human sail gliding into a dazzled sprint across a cement pond of the earth leading a herd of numerical tank-top frenzied long distant road runners through the shuttle of the finish line. He taught geometry and calculus at the south side high school I was to attend and he coached the sport in which I was expected to excel.

He was Coach.

That summer I continued to push myself into an envelope of sweat and grind. When I formally met Coach (at a cross country picnic in the park that will forever be branded "the woods between the worlds" in the ardor of my poetic psyche) his hand extended in my direction like a military salute. Thin-lipped and sincere. A man of his word and stature, he welcomed me into the cadre of athletes sporting crew cuts and knee-length shorts. There was all-state swimmer and ripped abdomen Joe Lontelli. There was straw-headed lanky strut of Hans Peacock, Gabino Andretti, his Spanish hair matted back a la pompadour sans the resurgence of a scarlet cape or bull as we kicked it before practice in his pimped out ghetto-crafted late seventies Buick, the front of which was rigged so that the hood would nod in thumped syncopation with the massive sub-woofers potted in the trunk. Together we kicked it, blaring the street soliloquies of House of Pain and Cypress Hill, waiting for our fellow teammates to arrive in the copper-haze of dawn when the athletes would form a circle of bodies and perform rote calve and thigh stretches, massaging out the aches and swells of our legs before breaking out into a lithe cantor and then strutting our limbs into a working steady pace, our heads bobbing with sweat and motion like human-sized pistons as we scaled the perimeter of Madison golf course.

There was demure-eyed Jose Martinez, the needled hair Mexican senior captain on the varsity squad whose countenance availed a gentle smile and reassuring nod at the fledgling underclassman pushing themselves through the swelter of a mid-august fifteen K, where Coach Ricca could oft be found running stride per stride with the leaders of our corporeal train of accelerating hoofs and akimbo limbs, glancing down in to the whiteness of his wrist feeding us our mile split, offering insight into the posture of our arms, correcting the rhythmic intonation of our breath, telling us when to conserve our energy and when to kick deep, mining the dregs of tenacity and endurance left inside of your flesh, as both your upper and lower apparatus spume into a windmill accelerating yourself over the wet morning dew of the earth, in search of nothing short of a finish line and a few deep swallowed breaths of stilted air thereafter.

More than any other high school sport, cross-country focuses acutely both on the individual's sole performance as well as the performance of the team overall. Untanned limbs of flesh lined up across the white hyphen of the starting line like a sentence of bodies about ready disarm it’s formation of meaning, splitting into a sprint of individual shaped letters at the sound of the starting gun. The better the performance of the higher ranking of the team, yet of the eight man varsity squad, if one runner has a bad race or is lagging behind, the team as a functioning unit suffers a deduction in points.

Half my lifetime ago, in the late July, early august sweltering heat of 1992, cross country was my whole life. I sat on the oak canvas of what would two years later serve as the desk where I would compose my first poems looking out the white square of my bedroom window absorbed by the aching shades of copper dwindling into light lavender sprinkled with autumn dusk, contemplating my future, contemplating what lay ahead, listening to the Cure's WISH (wishing impossible things), reflecting on the interior wetness a first kiss yields on the anatomy of an adolescence when your body bends behind the tinty shells of your eyelids as you experience the awkward cut opening of your mouth in hers--if only for a filched second of eternity.

The lazy-eye river town where I have exhaled the bulk of my existence is called Peoria; the genital wart of the Midwest--a discourse in paralysis; a hushed lipped boot-legging hymn to working class stagnation and wizened wished-for dreams. The high school where I attended was less of a melting pot and more of a multicultural mold-inflicted burrito--a few french fries short of an academic happy meal. My sophomore year Manual high boasted the lowest I-SAT scores in the state and the highest teen-age pregnancy rate in the nation. By my senior year they had a "Bring yer kid to school day." No shit.

Looking back fifteen years ago, I realize that the disintegration of our team was spawned by social gravity (thinking of the bleach blond uppity twats from Richwoods high, on the opulent north side of town). That a kid, an athlete, a loner, a drifter, a fucking dreamer, functions differently, sprouts differently, develops differently, grows differently depending on the social-soil from which his seed of individuality has been planted.

I remember Gabino's 14 year old girlfriend coming to me freshman year telling me that she and her boy friend had just broken up and she was three months pregnant and didn't know what to do. There was gang activity, fights in the hallway, manipulation of grades for athletes who played more recognizable sports such as football or basketball. there was our corpulent principal's bobble-headed nod that Manual was the best kept secret in the state and that everything was fine.

There was watching Hans Peacock get booted from the team for attending a local protest. The sad sighting of Jose, the former captain, in early February, overweight and with dreadlocks, dropping out of school, informing me that his high school girlfriend was pregnant and that he was working full time shit jobs to support her.

Coach Ricca never lost his equipoise, his expectations, his resilience or his underlying adamant belief in his students that they could make something of themselves. His belief in his athletes to overcome, to achieve, to give what they could of their bodies, both mentally and physically of themselves for the body of the team, for the colors of the Institution they represented.

There was my own inner demons and foibles flooded with typical teen angst riddled attention salivating late-night masochism. The interior of my rattled nervous system was coursing with more anti-depressant pills than the mawkish-eyed audience at a Morrissey convert. There was introspection and solipsism and the salty taste of tears skiing down the contours of your face at night, wondering if perhaps, the experiment of my adolescence and of my life was botched from the outset and that I had somehow failed.

(Too many kids deal with this shit, and where do they go, when they are naked and drunk and can't find someone to hold them?)

In running too, I felt like a failure. Despite achieving respectable times, I slogged through Freshman year on a stress fracture inflicted on my right leg. Sophomore year the bone-fissure appeared on opposite left leg. A year later I bowed out of the thrice a day routine work-outs hoping that lighter workouts would mean less injuries. I completed the season without the season breach in my femur but sadly my times remained stagnant, unchanged. The inability to watch my dreams of being an accomplished long-distance athlete timely actuate themselves during the static discourse of those four post-pubescent emotionally addled years of high school, where so my individual development somehow gestates, creating the present day creature you become.

There was my father not knowing what to do with his beret-wearing clove cigarette dangling son, a copy of ON the Road or LEAVES OF GRASS perennially tucked under the pit of my arm like a fallen army flag cosigning parental defeat.

Gradually the realization that I wouldn't get any faster. Gradually the realization that running would not be in my future and that I had failed. By senior year, despite coach Ricca's one-on-one's and his encouragement, his stops at the house to talk to me and his unflinching belief that if I chose so, this would be my year, despite the fact that it would be my third year in a row of being captain of the Varsity squad, I didn't even go out for the team.

My career and dreams of becoming an athlete had completely calloused my ability that I would ever make anything of myself. Sporadically I started scraping up the white sand of the page at night with little inky-tears, hoping that maybe, through scribbling and shoveling around the dunes of my emotional mitigating self-worth viable human archeology, I would unearth just what was inside of me and somehow (hopefully) understand the perpetual pain and joys of the ever pulsating world around me.

It's been about 13 years and every time I pick up that shovel and start scribbling out what's left inside of me, I'm astounded as fuck by what (and more imperatively who) I find deeply stowed beneath the porcelain flesh of the page.

My late father taught me a lot about sports. In baseball he taught me never to strike out without first swinging the bat as hard as I fucking could. To never "strike out looking." In running ( and in life) he taught me to always cross the finish line with my head down as if in prayer and with my body astride in full sprint. Regardless of any sport I would play, regardless if the season was seeped in the caterwaul of glory or dotted in a string of agony and ill-timed losses my father vehemently insisted that after the last game of every season--after the final strike was called and the last time out transpired, Dad would tell me to simply go up to the coach, extend my paw and thank him for his time and mentorship.

My cross country career was punctuated in cowardice. I never thanked Coach for the hours we spent together, a galloping rehearsal of my pending road race through the sometimes lonely cross-country hills and arduous up-hill mile-splits of life. I never thanked him for the constant reassurances and gruff chin nods and attaboys. The shrill of the bell senior year was accompanied by interior psychiatric drug-hazed musings on how I might reach the next classroom without skirting past coach Ricca in the hallway.

Well Mr. Ricca, it's been well over a decade but here's me stretching out my appreciative palm teeming with nothing short of life changing gratitude and thanks in your direction.

(the future author--far right in towl, gleaning some last second insight
from his Coach. circa autumn 1993)

Thank you. Coach.

Reflection of Joy (July 6th, 1997)

2007-07-06T14:00:00.000-07:00

The author & poetic company on his 20th birthday July 6th 1997, from left-to right, David "I've always been there for you, man" Hale; Brooke "I forget yer' last name now that yer' married" Ferraro; Matt; Margot Wllard; Patrick "The Great" Mullowney, the copper-headed author; Misty Gardens; Goth Dan; Precocious Stephanie. Bottom row Alexis (now dr.) Jordan...Summer of 1997 and everything is new and exciting and your whole life is ahead of you boy.... Pure Joy...

Just 120 whisked calendar months ago I spent the sweltering heat of July1997 stationed in front of the jutting metallic tongue of the cash register at B. Dalton Booksellers, inside the rattling central air conditioning of the mall, routinely scanning the bar codes for mass market and paper back bestsellers, fueling up on caffeine and cigarettes, staring at the lazy heliotrope of a summer sun at dusk wildly contemplating how it must feel at the end of the day to write fiction for a living, to crack into the white dry-wall of the page every morning splattering the bulk of each page with continents and splotches of lettered shadows the way dawn breaks into planet, with peach-hued blinks and splashes of nectarine from the pink-eyed east and then vision and then sight.

It was ten years ago to the day. Bill Clinton was seven months into his second term as president, nocturnally drooling over a young intern by the name of Monica. The Bulls had just won their fifth NBA championship in seven years. Logging on to the static sunrise of cyberspace entailed ten minutes of rickety white noise followed by a gulping modem tittering warble followed by more pauses and frustration and password changes and verbal "fuck-it's." It was possible ten years ago to walk fifty meters across any random populated area in the United States and not find yourself being surrounded by a swarm of human beings each with their neck tilted into their collar bones droning mantras of materialism across a dimension of wirelessness.

Ten years ago a pack of cigarettes and a gallon of gas were under two dollars each respectively.

The dual steel tendrils of the World Trade Center stood tall as an intractable testament to consumerism and culture--on early mornings if viewed from cross-town resembled a two fingered sign heralding the promise of peace.

Ten years ago Princess Di was traveling the world, squeezing the hands of victims with HIV, visiting land-mine amputees in third world countries finalizing a romantic weekend in Paris come the end of the following month.

It was the summer I dyed my hair blonde with a little help from my best friend David Hale's sister Becky, who read the directions off the side of the box in her garish high-pitched nasal din as I genuflected both knees in front of the bath tub as if in prayer bowing my neck and head into the linoleum basin as if grieving over something lost. It was the summer we drove around lost without an atlas listening to monorail techno elevator muzak of Moby and the sweet gruff guitar chords of Ani Difranco, driving through country roads, fast, smoking cigarettes not knowing where we were going but succumbing to the overall golden often Kerouac-inflicted feeling inside that we there already--that our destination and overall purpose in life had something to do the fact that we were pulsating, that we were thriving, that we were driving down the gold sprinkled dust of country roads flanked on both sides by thick emerald staffs of corn.

That we are here.

The summer of hemp necklaces and cigarette ashes. the summer I saw CHASING AMY
six times in the theatre (cackling aloud during the lesbian make out scene when two elderly crones walked out, seemingly appalled) . The summer of multifarious late night viewings of Pulp fiction and Linklater's finest and Dead Poets Society The summer of clove cigarettes and french kisses when your eyes wisp open in medias embrace only to espy her forehead and eyes hushed like petals, the bulbs of her eyes backstroking behind the pink cave of their lids, as if part of her body is wadding in a pool of emotion and that somehow your lips keeping her balanced...keeping her afloat.... the elongated interim between 19 and 21 when the bars are elusive and you find yourself loafing in coffee houses bent over a splattered corpse of opened notebooks fraught with inky veins and metaphorical arteries--the battered french fry poems of youth, trying to make sense of your life by laying tracks of words together and then reading them aloud--certain of your genius, certain of your place in life.

The summer of Walt Whitman and Hesse and Jack Kerouac, always reading, always seeking, always staring into the alphabetical pond of the page and hoping to see my reflection peeking up towards me. The summer I lugged the technicolor bound travel-luggage sized INFINITE JEST with me every where I went--as if it were a concordance for postmodern scripture. And James Joyce. And Nabokov. Writers I was sure would teach me. Writers I was sure would help me grow.

Ten years ago today was a Sunday. I arrived at the bookstore and hour and a half earlier to open up, balancing the cash registers with the papery green shingles that somehow sadly dictates our existence and place in life. I wore a tie to work and sweated in the July heat, even though the mall where my bookshop was located was heavily air conditioned. Although my profession was books, it was still basic retail--still bartering over priced commodities, still catering to the financially endowed caprices of the consumer. Still toadying up to strangers to coerce them to purchase something that don't really need so that our store could reach its corporate quota and that I would still be employed.

Memory is like a long elongated red carpet kicked from the side from a celebrity limousine like a tongue. So when I reminiscence ten years into the stream of yesterday I can see myself on that day, coming home from work, stopping off for coffee at Starbucks, arriving home, thumbing loose the constrictive pentagon from beneath my chin into two uneven jet streams of silk.

I see myself now, a decade past expired, arriving home in the Buick that would be stolen two months later, standing behind the shoulders and occiput of the brassy headed lad who ten years ago arrived at the cement lip of the house where he was conceived to celebrate twenty years on this planet with family and friends and with people he loves. The oxygen and residue of memory illuminate those whose bodies have failed them like a spotlight. When I enter the sylvan french doors of my old living room (the house where Swissy-Missy ironically lives in now) and if I squint past the back of my own twenty year old head I visually discern the acrylic wig of my grandmother is sporting, her sweet breath and cigarette paper white skin, oblivious that the cancer will reel her from all of us in a little over a year. I can see my mom, her hair darker and spumed into a gelled perm. I can smell and hear the scent of our family schnauzer Lady (deceased) snapping her grainy goatee when my friends enter the living room.

I can see my father. His beard and bespectacled scent humbly nodding at my bohemian friends bartering witticisms and artistic anarchy and small talk. The beautiful beard of my father--the twenty year old wannabe writer, completely oblivious that the he will spend the bulk of the preceding decade of his life with the bone architecture of his father underground, decaying--his spirit and humility and generosity still resonating. Still singing.

This is life ten years ago. Patrick Mullowney, my playwright friend from NYU is telling anyone who will listen about the play he is composing. David Hale is romping around the living room laughing with heavily accented yawps. Sprite sized Aleixis is playing with my dog. There is Goth Dan who is sitting in the corner, nodding, trying to put on a Sisters of Mercy Cd. There is Misty Gardens who studies philosophy and ebullient lilly-eyed Stephanie who is a sophomore at IMSA.

They have all come to celebrate.

Misty clanks shut the bathroom door to change out of her work clothes. Two weekends ago Misty and I watched the dip of the June sunset lower itself into the manhole of the western sky together. We had driven in the country after work chain smoking and talking about part time jobs and life. We kissed and held each other in our underwear as thick barges of drizzling ionized light slowly dwindled into copper and then into tint and then into crickets and stars. Misty is leaving for Campaign in a month and has made it very clear that dating seriously is out of the question. For our own good.

Hale, being the jovial best friend he is, has made it lucidly clear that since things with myself and Misty are moot for the remainder of the summer he plans on stepping in and showing Misty what a real David tastes like. Laughing afterwards in his thumping guffaw, asking myself if impotency has set in on the genesis of my new year. When I mention to Hale that Misty isn't into having anything serious, she is just looking to have a good time Hale flashes a smile, echoes out his signature whew-hoo and tells me straight up that he thinks he has just met the woman of his dreams.

More friends continue to wend their way into the living room where I took my first steps. There is Matt and Brooke whose face is so white and gorgeous that is looks like a tear fallen from the socket of a china doll. And then there is Margot, the women I have been pursuing since Misty Gardens, entering the door, smiling.

Later that night in celebration we smash tables together at the coffee shop we congregate on a daily basis. There is a freight train full of Bohemians and witt. patrick Mullowney's laughter is ricocheting around the restaurant. Hale is smoking a pipe, leaning perilously close to Misty's shoulder watching her face blush in laughter after every retort.

There are clove cigarette and there are endless carafes of coffee. When my friends inquire about my birthday I blather off puddles of poetic dross. I quote Milton's How soon hath time, the subtle thief of youth. I plagiarize Charles Highway, the uppity smart-ass protagonist in Martin Amis' THE RACHEL PAPERS, quoting how 20 may not be the beginning of adulthood but it irreparably constitutes the end of youth.

Looking back now, ten years, I see a sea of joy, the laughing heads of those I love all stationed around smashed together at a table at our favorite coffeehouse that was torn down six years ago. I think about the potential and the love and the yearning and the future each individual seated around me, swathed in a plume of smoke, thought that he or she might inherit.

I think about the people I have lost in the last ten years. I think about holding my fathers hands on his death bed, singing Lutheran hymns to my grandmother in her last hours.

I think about love and the women I have loved. The ones that have hurt me and the ones I live with every day and the ones who fill me and complete some part of me.

Looking back at the congregation of young hedonists and artists, I turn my head now and think about the next ten years. There will be loss and hurt and pain.

There will be death and seperation and arguements that seem so fucking signficant at the time that will later transition into pettiness....

But there will also be laughter. and growth.... and Love....

and plenty of wished for joy in the narrative song.

the writer age ten (tanned)

2007-07-03T19:14:00.000-07:00

Requiem for Coach Ricca (pt 1)

2007-07-01T15:30:00.000-07:00

There is perhaps no greater monosyllabic word in the English language connoting such solemn respect and veneration among the heterosexual north American ESPN-sports saturated cheap domestic beer beast renown throughout the planet as the male species than that of the word Coach. You can feel the towering respect such a word carries with it as you bite down into the side of your cheeks prior to its pronunciation, your lips forming what looks like triangular offense as your tongue lunges stagnant near the sky dome of your mouth, a raw breeze of sound kicking it's way out from the locker room of your lips, like a homecoming football team locomoting it's way on to the field, the final "ch" sound mirroring the foaming chant of a highschool stadium Friday nights in late autumn under stalks of stadium light and a brisk dip in the temperature.

Coach.

The sideline silhouette. The clipboard. The stop watch. The whistle. The stoic-chinned countenance demanding both respect and results. The flashed look of seriousness or disappointment expressed from the distance of the court or field. The spewed mantras of seasonal performance expectations and self-goals. The one individual whose status will marshal your talent, fledged your attributes into accolades and sweat the living sin out from your brow. The one individual who will coerce your anatomy into pushing itself past the mental hurdle of what you thought was possible.

The Vince Lombardi's. The Coach K's. The no-non-shit antics of Scott Skiles (I have a photo of Scott Skiles scowling at me from above the metaphysical bleachers of my writing desk; the words NO-SICK DAYS NO NON-SHIT....GET TO WORK BOY!!! etched above.)

The thick lipped Charlies Wies' and implacable Bobby Knights.

The one individual who will create you. The individual who will immortalize you. The individual who will lead you to glory and weld you into the man of character you were destined to somehow become.

The one who will lead you into the sun.

COACH.

***

The first half of my life I was an athlete. I ran seventy miles a week, my coltish limbs kicking a blurred cycle of motion beneath my torso as both my arms formed tight right angles gliding into a steady sprint, coursing the curtain call of my puberty and early-adolescence in a weighted series of quickly snapped footsteps and exhaled pants as I jetted across the topography of my youth in a steady gallop of limbs and arms skiing past the grandiose thick eye-lash windexed houses of Moss Avenue, residue from a bootleg era, sprinting around the coiffed perimeter of Madison golf course careful to avoid the lumbering silhouettes of late-middle aged golfers lugging their stalks of clubs like a fresh kill. I ran circles around the affluent timed sprinkler lawns of West Peoria, each street guarded with a sentinel of mini-vans and the chiropractic spines of basketball hoops. I ran through the gangsta-graffiti'd flotsam and jetsam of the south side, unaware that the thirty seconds it took to dip down the hilly gravel slope of either Western or Ligonier served as a sociological fissure, an arbiter of class and status discerning if you would make it in this world or if not. I ran through the leafy foliage of Bradley park, the golden timeless leaves in autumn breezing behind the back heel of my stride in a flurry of wisped crunches, across the Chinese bridge, the cratered amphitheater barren of it's summer stock tent come the genesis of fall, when high-school students don jerseys and flimsy shorts and cleats after class and take to the hard soil of the earth, a herd of athletes all running cross-country, all roving their feet over the scalp of the planet, accumulating the velocity to push harder, to run faster to quash the blinking hyphenated digits of the clock at the finish line: to pour out simply what is inside of you and find out what is left.

And then pour that out too in a draught of sacrifice and sweat.

My father ran for leisure, noncompetively. He ran everyday after standing in front of fourth graders. He boasted a waddle to his run and always ran with a demure smile sketched into his face. When I was real young I would run with my father. I remember my father pretending to have invisible buttons on the top of his curved fist he would press, making jet engine thruster sounds, claiming that they were accelerators and could make him run faster near the end of the finish line. One of the joys of my dad (as my sister Jenn pointed out in his eulogy) was that, near the end of the finish line when we were young and he would run with us, he would always let his young kids take the lead and finish ahead of him.

An emotional memory for me was dad, telling his eight year old son during the half-way point turn around of their four mile route was that, "Every step after this gets you a little bit closer to home, son. Just a little bit closer to home."

Running was deeply seeped in the blood type of our family genes. Our summer weekends were monopolized chartering the family station wagon wending our way through the arteries of Illinois highways hitting up a variety of mid-summer festival road races peppered across the state, accompanied usually with my Aunt and Uncle and their four slim tanned daughters--all boobless and lanky and all runners. My Uncle ran marathons and was a beast in local 5k's. I can remember running my first four mile race when I was in second grade. By the time I was ten I could run a six minute mile. By the time I graduated from eighth grade I was on the verge of breaking the junior high elusive five minute mile and was the second fastest miler in the state for my age.

I played baseball and Tennis during the summer. Laced up cleats and swatted around a soccer ball employing only the symmetry of the lower portion of my body in the spring and fall. Stayed late after school and worked on draining my free throws in the winter. But it was running where I had my gift. It would be the twin stems of my legs that would ferry me into the future as an athlete. The bone and tissue and muscle of my interior leg and thighs served as my promising rod and staff into a heralding future of promise. The crack of my ankles in the early morning--the rote machinery of my torso, the lapsed rhythm of my breath, the feeling of sweat trickling down my brow--the feeling of pushing yourself past a interior-manacled barrier of what you thought was impossible.

***

I met Coach Ricca the summer of 1992, exactly half my lifetime ago. I had just graduated from eighth grade. My individual mile time averaged out near the low five minute single digit area code. I ran three times a day. A three mile skid in the morning. A vigorous hill workout under the hammer of midday sun at noon. And a pleasant 4-6 mile trod at night. I kept tallies of my daily workout evaluations, performed squats and dips in my bedroom to the music of Guns-n-roses and Nirvana, plastered note cards heralding never give up maxims all over my bedroom wall. I can still remember how the earth felt that summer and spring. Can still remember the grainy taste of caffeine splashed inside my lips, trying to be more adult and not scowl at the then revolting taste. I remember the the cool melody of the sky at 5:30 in the morning when pastel shades of light pink drip into a morning haze of copper in the east when street lamps fizzle into a pre-dawn hush as I kicked my way into the future scaling the latitude and longitude of the city that had reared me for the first decade and a half of my life. It was the summer of the '92 Barcelona Olympics. I pushed myself harder. Poetically plotted how I would seduce fellow precocious Olympian Kim Zmeskal (it was hard to write a poem that rhymes with her last name). I mapped out a trajectory of personal goals set for myself over the next four years; how I would be damned if I wasn't a world class athlete. If I wasn't employing the calcium of my bones to their optimal capacity I simply did not wish to be.

At night I capitulated to the caps of both my knees, the dual bony knobs functioning as joints for the plants of my legs; the vessels that would ferry me in my quest for glory. I prayed with the fervor of saints angels that my own biased waspish variation of a God would assist the fuck out of me.

It was that summer I met Coach Ricca.