ITS OWN CONSTRUCTION

@itsownconstruction

Silence in the meaning.

192 posts

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YEARS OF RETURN

A day so strangely melancholic, is it spring or is it summer? The world was flat just for one day. Didn't realize it until eleven years later. Man, to hear that voice again. You know the one. The way this started is not at all the way it looks to end. Pathetic and metaphorical, so what? I'm of that age, wistful after bridges. Bridge after bridge. The tall ones look like blossoms.

A more capable me would have found a way to stop worrying, crying all the time, getting paranoid on this permanent vacation from people I'll never see again. It sucks to be the custodian of all these thin receipt stories. God, listen to me, all I do is whine.

Need to remember the window, the open window.

And so, what was the point? No, don't go quoting Raymond Carver. Don't acquiesce to that part of the brain that just wants water. Collision. Night. The nights are so long here. No, might as well—

And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself beloved on the earth.

FROM DIRT AND BUGS YOU WILL RETURN AGAIN IN SPLENDOR, AND AS ALWAYS

This personal pathetic age of trysts kept getting shorter and shorter, sadder and sadder, a long string of endless dead-end days under clouds, so Charlie pulled the car over and walked to where the bridge was spray painted with odd calligraphic epithets, magical runes maybe, some kind of strange undecipherable script that made him feel whole, if only for a moment. There were some seagulls overhead. A family?

Entire lives drove by him, sometimes in mini vans, sometimes in huge semis. At least, they seemed huge. Charlie put one hand over his chest. The sky was an entire life, too, moving east in time with the water in an anonymous country on this Earth.

You're the only one worth seein' / the only place worth bein' The only bed worth sleepin's, the one right next to you

I think of the bridge I saw on the way here. Something distant in how delicate it could have been, except it was within a few hundred yards from where the car was parked. 'The car' in quotes because it doesn't belong to anybody, at least in spirit. Not now. Not since the moon was moved. Not since air conditioner music, the sad low drunk hum.

Physical bones for physical tires. Why couldn't I have been the Tracey Walter character in "Repo Man," with young and beautiful Emilio Estevez next to me? The car is glowing green, or at least blue in this vague and useless dream. Different movie, so the color is different. Radioactive blood in my mouth, but that's just fine.

Up in the sky, wouldn't that beat all?

Italicized line is from this poem by @stolenhead

A YEAR OF BLOSSOMS

We can be heroes just for one day. Sometimes that's all you get for a dream, the one you never dreamt until the night of. "We had our one day, and then some." Didn't realize it until eleven years later. Figures.

A day so strangely melancholic, is it spring or summer? The world looked flat this evening, turning over like a grumpy parent on its side of the bed, turning over into night. They don't last that long here, the nights.

Charlie wishes telepathy were real so that Rachel could hear him one more time. Man, to hear that voice again. "We already had our one day, didn't we?" This is not that kind of story, at least the way it stops is a far cry from how it started.

I've been living a pathetically metaphoric life in sin with a safety pin but maybe I'm finally of age. Looking wistfully at bridges taller than the last. Charlie has his heartbreak, I have the blossoms.

Got to learn to stop worrying, crying all the time, being paranoid on this permanent vacation. I wish home were real. I'm a custodian of all these stories that fall out of my pockets like old receipts. Need to remember to roll the window down again, get a better sense of how those blossoms get to be like that, how they just bloom.

What was the point of anything? I feel like there really was a point after all, but in my stupidity or maybe obdurate frailness I missed it. I wish I were capable enough. Maybe in the next life.

All you've done is scream at the sky this October It's sick of all your bangin' on, sick of all your bangin' on Trying not to shake, but this is over Break the family home, oh, break the family home

ALL OF IT ALREADY HAPPENED

A normal day, I guess, and an evening like any other on this Earth. Purple swatches in the nearby sky. Except the street you were on felt like it was on the edge of the world. It all felt far away and soft, somehow.

Finally getting to the edge, or near the edge, and it turns out the streets there are just like those further in, just like the ones you know, with trees, power lines, houses, concrete, grass, birds, fences, lost band-aids.

Except it's the end of the world. Tomorrow, your street on the edge of the world won't be there anymore. However, for the time being, the late-evening shadows turn all of the houses and signposts and fences and trees into silhouettes that look like ancient dream creatures assembled for a meeting to discuss the lifting of the veil again.

FOOLISH PEOPLE

Caveats in a dark room, and a scene for music. Didactic intransigence, and this thing like a skull the size of a chandelier. Doesn't he know that's the way you get the lighthouse blues? Hobnobbing with the worst of the worst. Concrete tastes like the iron in blood, especially on warm nights like this. I almost think the palm trees are making fun of it all, but there's not that many of them here, anyway. Constant construction at LAX. All of the roads and highways start with "the." It's almost 6:45 pm and the sky is purple in that lusty way it sometimes gets. Southern California isn't for everybody, I guess.

NAIL POLISH CATASTROPHE DESKTOP

There's an indescribable, unquantifiable tenderness in you. It's mythic, now, almost, I guess, like a lost continent. Atlantis got stuck underwater, where does something like this get stuck? In dreams, I'm led by the wind or someone's hands onto piers, down side streets, and corridors, too. I can't seem to finish anything, even a sentence or a string of thoughts.

RECALCITRANT / COMBUSTIBLE

Unkempt, forever I guess, in droves, too. Say it, don't spray it. I'll take visions of war, huge grayscale sky full of holes, that sudden equatorial emptiness, over the little horrors that happen cold and quiet in so-called safe places like rooms, kitchens, houses. I bear in mind the shellshocked old man with the rooster, or was it a chicken? I bear him in mind until the mind drifts and I'm in Kansas or in Nebraska, except I'm only here.

STRANGE DREAMY & SPECTRAL GOP FANFICTION OR, I ALWAYS UNDERCUT MYSELF / TOO MUCH TREPIDATION

I've been reading about Charles de Gaulle. I've been thinking about which Republican President I'd pick to meet if I could, just for a day.

Reagan was awful and dumb, quite frankly. Nixon was evil but damn if he wasn't interesting. Maybe I'd hang out with him for a day. Not that I've been actively daydreaming about this. This is just my way of saying life hasn't been working out too great lately. But hey, that's life, right? Ford wouldn't even be on the list. A bunch of presidents wouldn't. So, really, it's down to just Nixon.

If Nixon isn't available that night, I won't ask for Reagan. I wouldn't ask for Lincoln, either. Too predictable a choice. Was anyone ever attracted to Nixon? I hope his wife was. How truly lonely it must have been to be Richard Milhous Nixon.

I bet somebody somewhere will misconstrue this awful free verse piece of shit as some kind of strange, dreamy, and spectral GOP fanfiction. Okay, man, go ahead. I don't care. I'll be here.

Slow dancing with Dick Nixon in a neon-lit leather bar in my head.

I AM WANDERING IN THE SOUP & I AM VERY SCARED

She asks me to tone down the obvious in what I write, or maybe she doesn't; it's a dream so none of it matters, except the part where she lets me hold her hand in the car on the way to the sea.

Lately things haven't been very good. And it's been years since we last spoke, maybe two or four or eleventy-seven. Who knows? Besides, who keeps track of something like that? It's too large to mind, like the moon. We usually don't stick our heads out every night to make sure it's there, we just assume. The same goes for absence.

DEE (poem about a photograph)

a beautiful somebody holding a creature in her arms, smiling / in her arms! an animal! / beautiful / and she smiles / like something magical just lit up right in front of her / I'm looking at her eyes and I can't believe them / a soft smile, too, maybe / and on the edge of a terrible fear, or sickness, there's this

FOR YURA

Spent all afternoon / all evening / underlining, boxing in / whole sections of this book of poems / by a man no longer living . . . . in a dream / from a few nights ago, you and I were in the same car / together / traveling north / it was like holding hands . . . .

RED PLANET AGENCY GROUP

A pretty man crosses / the street / He doesn't look my way / that, too, is poetry / a poem that doesn't / give you what you want / or ends abruptly is still a poem . . . . and I've painted all these pictures of Earth, but that's unusual to you . . . I think of the junipers . . . in the spring growing . . . .

italicized portion by alvvays

THAT STUPENDOUS GUILT THAT COMES WITH BEING BORN

Feeling like Napoleon's march into Russia / a historic mistake / made more than just the one time / and she asks me what I hope to achieve, what I have been hoping to achieve / To not have disappointed anybody in the end — what else?

FUTILE DEVICES

2 days of remorse / the 2nd exponentially worse, and heavier / than the 1st / then 3 days of grief / the kind that kills, if it wants to / and 1 forever, folded in / and in . . . . and I would say I love you, but saying it out loud is hard . . . so, I won't say it at all . . . and I won't stay very long . . . but you are the life I needed all along . . . I think of you as my brother, although that sounds dumb . . . .

italicized portion by sufjan stevens

WOEFUL COUNTENANCE, NIGHT OF

Not my hometown / but not not my hometown, either / twilight land, night-dappled country / in and out, all at once / Recusal, not heroic but not friendly, either / plus silence / Space and silence, and even if with time it appears effortless / it absolutely isn't.

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