Lost

My witness is the empty sky.
--Jack Kerouac

The Dragon in the Elevator, Pt. 4

I am not well, I tell the dragon.

Still.

Yes.  I know.

My head hurts 

It feels strange 

I don’t know what normal is anymore but

I want to remember

I want to remember what it

felt like to hold my head in place

to not feel as if it was either going to

fly off

or pull me down to the

bottom of the ocean and

hold me there

an anchor I cannot escape

I am not allowed those memories anymore

I am not allowed any memories at all

Maybe if you asked.

I don’t want to ask

Then what do you expect?

I don’t know

Nothing

And that is the problem.

Art Therapy/Consequences, 2004

Letter to Ryan, December 17, 1989

I talked to my dad today and it was quite an ordeal.  He told me that he wanted me to visit while he was on vacation (the week of Christmas), which I said was impossible because I’m visiting a friend the 27^th-29^th.  So he said I should spend that weekend with him (including New Years’ Eve) to which I said, “No way, Jose” or something to that effect, anyway.  So I suggested that I spend some other weekend in January.  Well, Dad flipped out and said he wanted me to visit while he was home and not working.  I asked him where he’d be on the weekend if he wasn’t going to be at home, which greatly confused him.  He kept repeating how I had to visit him while he’d be at home, which leads me to wonder just exactly what does he do with his weekends...?   Does he have some island home in the Pacific that he visits from Friday through Sunday? 

By the time I hung up Dad could hardly spell my name.  He told me to write down my schedule for my entire break (as if I know what it’s going to be...oh, yeah, I’m psychic) so that he could mull it over and decide when I should visit.  (From 8:03 a.m. to 8:04 a.m. I will be brushing my teeth...)   I never knew a semester break could be so stressful!

So did the Vikings win today?  Did the Bears win?  Oh, please, send me all of the football scores and stats, will you, huh, huh, please?!

The Bride

Notebook, circa 1990s

I slipped inside of the

oily puddle today.

Even though I knew it

was there.

The twig you threw was good

enough to save

itself, barely.

Still, it was the strangest thing.

While I was waiting,

suddenly I had this tree.

Not much moves me,

but I had to move for the roots.

They were so big.

It burned inside, I know it.

The petrol had to burn the

branches inside,

had to leave scars that

never turn white.

The explosion would have

horrified you,

had you waited to see.

Oil does that—

it explodes.

And then there is nothing left.

Nothing.

Not even a twig.

Reconstruction

I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

                                           --T.S. Eliot, The Journey of the Magi