Depths

“She’s down!” someone shouted, but Megan wasn’t hurt.  She was just curled up in a ball on the kitchen floor a few feet from where Alturis lay--his dead eyes staring at the Williams-Sonoma Thanksgiving cookbook cover.

To Sleep Once More

Tired but awake again

because wakefulness is waiting for

my answer

I am ready this time

ready to embrace the disbelief

to refuse the hand that

once could pull me to

my feet

Floating into ache once more

with no morning defense

when the sun broke me like

a cudgel to

the head

stole from me any

last moments for

dreaming

Memory waits still and near for me

I am endlessly choosing I am

at last losing what allowed me to

creep through the hole in the

floor

So tired of attempting

            to end this need for sleeping

The Day After

Jack showed up on Sunday afternoon, during the Packers game.   He muttered a vague greeting to Jonah, and then dropped onto the couch.  “I was listening to the game on the radio during the drive over,” he said.  “We are so hosed.”

“Yeah.”

“Got any beer?”

“In the fridge.”

Jack went into the kitchen.  When he came back he was carrying a beer in one hand, and the bag of Doritos Jonah had bought yesterday in his other.  He opened the bag and set it on the table, so that it was within easy reaching distance of Jonah’s chair.  “This flavor is pretty good,” Jack said, crunching hard on a sample chip.  “Cool Ranch, huh?  I’ve never tried it before.”

“It’s been out for a while now," Jonah answered, his attention still on the game.

“No kidding?  Guess I’m pretty clueless when it comes to new trends in snack products.”

“There are worse things to be clueless about.”

Jack grunted.  “Yeah, like stats.  My fantasy football team is getting crushed this year.  I just haven’t had time to keep up, you know?”

“My team is pretty hopeless, too.  I’m in last place at work.”

“Your team is always hopeless,” Jack answered, grinning.  “But that reminds me—you wanna go bowling this Saturday night?”

“I thought Kelly didn’t like you to go out on weekend nights.”

“Oh.  Yeah.  Well, she moved out.”

Jonah turned to stare at Jack.  “She did?”

“Yeah.  Yesterday.  She said she was just waiting until Mom died.”  Avoiding Jonah's eyes, Jack grabbed another handful of chips.  “She said I wasn’t ‘emotionally available,’ or some bull shit like that, but I don’t know what she’s talking about.  I was home every single night, just about, and, I mean, I wasn’t going to give up poker night.  It was only once a month, for christ’s sake.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you’ll find someone else.  You always do, right?”

“Not this time.   That’s it for me.  I give up.  Three strikes and you’re out.  I know I wasn’t married to Sheila, but close enough.  I’ll never understand women.  They could be locked up in a room and studied for a thousand years by the world’s leading scientists and we still would never understand them.”

“I don’t know," Jonah said. “I don’t think they’re all that different from us.”

"Maybe not,” Jack answered; suddenly he sounded very, very tired.  “But if that’s true, it means we just aren’t marriage material.  You and me, I mean.”  Jack frowned to himself before he took a swig of his beer and pointed at the T.V.  “Look at that moron,” he said.  “A loss of two yards, when there was a huge hole right up the middle.  The Heisman curse strikes again.”

Eternity

For you I know of fires

around my eyes they burn

they bring me here with

crooked fingers

Make-believe

We are one day past forever

so let me tell you a

story

full of hope and

recrimination

and yet somehow                   

somehow

            hello hello                    fire in the hole

I wonder

but I cannot get past the bluster

the suggestion dripping down my throat

We tried but

            this is not what I

kiss me good night

            as forgiveness winds around my

could we just

            a lie must never be hunted

when the game is already dead to me

I could tell you a story

full of tomorrows and redemption

but who would we be

kidding

acceptance is the poison

In this lexicon of sorrow

I am too tired to speak for myself

if you saw miracles spring from darkness

I saw only memory

swathed in charcoal dusty

dream

The Long Walk

Knowing matters.  Why does it matter?  Because it does.  It matters.  But that’s the game—the torture—the double bind.  You will not be allowed to have the one thing that could either give you peace or send you off the cliff of despair, or both.  This one thing will be taken from you.  Instead you will wonder whether you have banana Weetabix poisoning, or if you are right but lost in the red straw network, or if you are sort of right but kind of wrong but full of good intentions, or if you are just a nutter.  You will be told you hold the answers, but there are no answers inside.  Just a howling wind, an incessantly buzzing bee, a mass grave filled with the fallen, the ones who foolishly entered into No Man’s Land armed only with a musket and grim determination.  A musket is no defense against an ICBM.  Grim determination and a dollar will get you a ride on the bus.  Or it would have about twenty years ago.  Now you’d probably need a couple of bucks.

You will be denied all knowledge.  Knowledge will die within you, to be replaced with rotting suspicions and wilting hope.  No seeds can be planted here.  You will be left a slave to ambiguity, a prisoner of doubt.  Enjoy the banana Weetabix, because there is no going back.  And I do like it.  It’s quite nice with yogurt.  Not with milk.  Must never eat cereal with milk.  Never ever ever.

Endings

your promise on the end of my fingertips

and it falls

it falls