in prague

Three months ago in Prague I meet her in a three level steampunk nightclub on the outskirts of the city. We walk the wrong direction back to where I am staying. Like all cities, I think I know where I'm going when I don't.

Finally she calls a cab and we ride in the backseat together to her apartment.

Up many flights of stairs, she invites me into a studio that is sparse and simple. For a pet, she has a Japanese fighter fish. She shows me how when she presses a compact mirror to the aquarium, the fish starts instinctively attacking its own reflection. The Japanese fighter fish smashes its head into the glass over and over again, hellbent on destroying what it thinks is an enemy, but is only itself. She slides the mirror off and the fury subsides. Then the fish drifts off and melts into all the other abstractions of the room.

She whispers stories to me of her time living in the mountains as a kid when the communists were in control.

I walk home the next morning with lazy bones hingeing like antique doors. As with any morning after making love my body and mind feel more receptive to what the world is trying to tell me. So here is what I am noticing before the world falls apart again. Here I am walking in a foreign city I won't ever truly know. The election is not for another month. I am all alone and faraway like I want. All I have to do now in these moments is concentrate on moving through the space that time is affording me while in this functioning body. All I have to do now is find the determination to not go hurling myself at whichever version of me appears next.

broadway joe

I have been having these vivid malarial dreams but it's just the coffee

and i ate too much sugar today

and then i got the blues

dammit

or

or what?

or how my brain fragmented from my brain

almond yogurt

Honey yes honey you said if we were good enough if we were good for a long enough time that we could fuck other couples honey is what you said

Honey no honey you misremembered the way the tea went cold in our cups that day out there on the dock of that small tiny lake out there that one summer eve

And I get so terrified fretting about my life. It is wearing itself away like my chipped up teeth and I don't want to go honey I don't want to go.

Oh honey you will never go you will never go

erewhon organic grocer part 2

You would always insist on coming outside to see us off on Sunday evenings. Sometimes I didn't think it was necessary. How we would go back and forth in conversational bursts before I would finally get into the car and drive away.

Usually you would tell me to wash it, my car.

Dad, I now know I will never get over you. The way the memories of you come in, only a little at a time. Only in little bits and pieces I know I can tolerate. The whole of us would drown me.

We are such average people Dad, it's amazing how such average people can have such profound pain. We were not kings amongst men Dad, only amongst each other. And I want to tell you something, I want to tell you how I wish you could see me.

I wish you could see how well I am doing for a haunted man.

we just wanted to see the sunrise

Up against cave walls we smelled like animals. I grabbed your hair. You groaned like the earth. Animated bones. Collapsed pervading tone. Our story is not a story. Our story is a window. I am one side of the pane. Your hot breath and fingers draw shapes on me. It cracks. I grip you in thin reflection. I feel my mind rippling.

I wipe food off customers plates. I eat food off customers plates. I get fucked in the face and everyone couldn't be nicer about it

erewhon organic grocer

Will being old feel like a dream. Will my mouth chew my lunch slow and cautious. Feel the bread from my sandwich distant on my tongue. And will i mind

Cuz i was struck yesterday walking. About how we treat a body when it dies. How we have to lift it on out of the house. How the life becomes a symbol in the hearts of those still beating but the body is worthless to anyone.

So i watch them lift him out of his bed and bring up on the stretcher down the two mini flights of stairs and outside and into that van and the doors shut. And it drives off to the valley, another vehicle in traffic on the 101 heading south

How i drove the other direction 6 months later still full of life in my body, north. We climb north while alive, we fade south for death.

How he, whittled to skin and bones, brushed his teeth the day before he went. Like he was going to need them where he was going. Maybe he was going north