Niko Van Dyke @poorjamesbond - Tumblr Blog

Here Lies

As the sting of the blow began to subside the investment followed suit. The traumatic sense of freedom from the noose. My own voice alone in call and answer, standing on the discord of your tune.

And bitterness suddenly had no place in this. Sadness took hold. A sorrow not for the self but for those who could not see their own fortunes unfolding the way I could with sharp and wounded clarity.

Clinging anew the way they clung to me. It was a stillbirth cradled and named, all professional opinion locked out of the delivery room from the inside. Barricades of hope and feelings of novelty. The symbol of a new way deluded by the fear of dying quietly.

And isn’t that how it always is when you prefer sleep. When you lay the most important decisions on the darkness. The path of your heart seen as a track leading somewhere in particular, no need to steer. No need to look or look away.

Your ability to wonder is a demon. Your love will never silence all your fear. A force of great destruction lies within you. I loved it like a blind man loves his ear.

Here is not the place of monsters. I know that place in ways I wish I didn’t. Here lies the hand of fate you always told me wasn’t yours.

Here lies the patience of a saint within a sinner.

For Galena

A chrysalis of hair and makeup, the template of a paper doll plastered over any remnant of the self that may remain, a subject now identified with corners cut around their face to fit them in the very niche they have been chosen to destroy. The floor is for the familiar, no way to brace for impact with eyes averted, with eyes on heaven, the heat sink of hope in growing old with someone you knew when they were young unraveling in the carpet stained only by belief in your belonging. And what is possession but another word we use to describe both the object of our desire and its affect upon us, the killing joke no soul can find the strength to laugh with. She came to me with stars and numbers, constellations, mercury and golden threads held taught through centuries of conflict, the constant witness of kind spirits that blessed our hands against each other’s bodies, the refusal of doubt, but the alchemical nature of our bleeding together was only ever claimed to hide my bleeding out. Dear friend, my heart was never made of lead. You left the stone behind, and for the first time since the first time, you would not look me in the eyes.

#poetry #poem

With it came The only thing That dread could bring. That old Familiar Feeling. Like slipping into Cooler water, Freezing to the touch, Tingling in extremities, Slow ripples on the surface. We weren’t even together, They said as though I never snatched the razor From their grasp, As though I never kissed The river of tears From their face, A layer of callous growing slowly over the hatred and the vitriol, Years of desperation hurled outward from the depths Of what we always called Our illnesses. Showers of stars. A silence like death. A home where no House can stand. A failing rivet In the side of a bridge. There is a sense that comes Only with certain kinds of experience, The meantime of cold that Hits the front of your arms And feels like electrons Breaching the barrier of air And skin and blood, Flowing current dismissing The atrophy of your nervous system. The world itself Coming back inside. An unfamiliar body Wrapped around you With only two hands. Here it comes. The great Unwanted warrant For your life. A step across The threshold Into its antithesis.

cardinal song

Never look her in the eyes. Never tell the truth. If she knows your paper you know she'll have to burn you.

Never tell the one you want that you do. save it for the deathbed when you know you kept her wanting you, and do everything she'd never do.

Fall asleep with stranger's wives, the wild wives of unknown men. Good for you, you've just become just another one of them.

Never say you miss her, Never say a word, and do everything she'd never do.

Don't let her see your cardinal eyes. Don't let her see your cardinal eyes Let her treat you like a criminal so you can treat her like a priest.

Girls, forgive my human mind. Girls, forgive me one more time.

Never tell the one you love that you do. Save it for the deathbed, and do everything she'd never do.

Don't let her see your cardinal eyes. Don't let her see your cardinal eyes. Jesus Christ, you have confused me. Cornered, wasted, blessed, and used me. Forgive me girls, I am confused: stiff and pissed and lost and loose.

Jesus Christ, you have confused me. Cornered, wasted, blessed, and used me. Forgive me girls, I am confused: stiff and pissed and lost and loose.

-Matt Berninger

Tell Them Every Day

This is difficult beyond measure. A wind blows through these redwoods and where once it would have brought me joy, I feel cold in the warm spring air. I hear a woodpecker. There is holly growing in the yard that reminds me of my old house. A sea of acanthus and forget-me-nots.

I awoke to my little brother telling me she had a fever and they were all going to the hospital. He told me I was welcome to stay as long as I like. I was up within five minutes, but they had already left. The house was still, the cat was not around. There was a cup of coffee left in the darkness of the kitchen. The milk was fresh. I did not look for sugar or for honey the way I normally would have.

Her bottom lip was cleft at the corner. She had chewed through it. Botox in the sides of her face had helped, I was told, but now she has trouble keeping her mouth closed. It had fallen open on some recent night and her palate had gone so dry that it cracked and bled. I helped hold her forward in the early evening so she didn’t aspirate as she vomited. It was cool in the house. I was sweating with stress.

“Welcome to our world,” her father said, as we did what we could. As we changed her clothes and cleaned her bed. I shouldn’t have been smoking after my surgeries, but I was. I need to stop again.

They tell you what to hope for when you’re young, sometimes with words, sometimes without. They don’t tell you what might happen because they knowingly hope that it doesn’t. It always happens to someone else. When it happens to us, no one knows what to say about it.

A shock of what I can only believe were ducks flew through the trees and I was the only one here to see it. I don’t know how to do this.

She deserves her life far more than I ever did. Loved it more than I ever loved my own. If a crueler mistress than this sort of cold reality exists, I have not met it. Could not even imagine it, as doing so would go against all I’d been taught, to hope for the best. All we’d been taught. All of us. Though, honestly, I’ve never been very good at it.

She had always been patient with my sickness. Every time I spoke to her I’d tell her, out of blind hope, that I believed I was close to a personal breakthrough. I wasn’t. I just needed her to think I was okay. I wasn’t. And every time we parted, she’d tell me we should speak more often. We didn’t.

Now the choice has been made for us. We will not likely speak again, as much as I am supposed to believe we will. I remember her as an infant. I remember her as a girl. I remember her as a woman open to this world in ways I could not fathom. She would greet her day with gratitude I only ever knew as foreign. She chose it.

And in some endlessly mysterious way, she chose this. It’s too much to wrap the mind around. The last time that we communicated, she sent me photographs of the gorgeous architecture of the Germans. I was so happy for her. I asked if she was in Spain. She said no. She was still in Bremen. She missed her flight with intention. Germany called to her and she felt the need to stay. It was a compulsion. The accident was the following day.

My follow-up text was only hours too late. She would never read it. She was already fighting for her life.

I don’t know how to do this. Yet here I am, trying to do it. It’s like trying to glean meaning from an unknown language, or attempting true wilderness without water or a compass.

One of her first words was my name. She’d wake up in the morning and cry it out with gleeful repetition. She loved me before we had been taught what love was.

I needed her more than I thought I did. I don’t know how to do this.

Fixer

I have become an infiltrator several days a week, I spend my time in the offices and homes of hoarded offshore wealth, so cold and sterile and lifeless, I wear a respirator and pretend that I am just as stupid as they think I am, that I chew tobacco and I think that women belong only in the home, I pretend I haven't read the books interior decorators were paid to purchase and to wear until they appear to be cared for, shelves of empty promises only made to hold appearance, I sneak little glances of Masonic Emblems tattooed on their wrists or plastered to their doors, the back windscreens of their cars, sets of symbols they do not even know, remnants of what this echelon of power used to stand for, but the power now has bled like ink into the white gravel of a long driveway snaking toward a whiter shade of sickness than I ever thought I'd see for myself, so I smile, and I nod, and I stare into the cameras that will someday fail to protect them, and they think, above all else, that what I want is what they have, but I see the way they live, in cramped $13k rental units stuffed with toys and teddy bears and plastic Disney princess shit, sending all their laundry out through an app, pretending there's no warrant out for their development, or cavernous houses without a trace of personality or taste in anything past their quest in finding a chip in the paint on the wainscoting or a loose thread in a six figure carpet, yes, that is correct, a one hundred and fifty thousand dollar piece of cloth beneath their feet, and I watch them watching carefully around their corners and through pinholes just to see if I might pocket a copper paperweight, and sometimes I pick one up just to make their hearts leap, until I put it back, and smile to myself, and ruin their little fantasy of catching who they always knew to be a thief, a marauder for their long and longer numbers on their screens and their receipts, an infiltrator on a mission to separate the useless from the useless, though I'm sure they word it differently, so I pack my gear into the pickup, hand them an invoice, and leave them alone again in the quiet air conditioned spaces, in between the bars of their good investments.

Consideration

This morning I walked it off, seeing small colors coming out from someone else's sense of black and white, a slow vibration of pain running down through the nervous system, consuming only what I knew how to consume, but thinking in songs, and the pain wasn't like a knife or a sunburn, it was a pleasure like knuckles in my shoulders or that moment I'm already asleep, finally up against the coldness of sheets, just almost clean, and I saw death in slow motion, vapors of blood against the coals of a fire, I saw someone falling forever, and ever, and they never landed and they never stopped, and my mind was kerosene, and my body was a cotton wick, and no one who ever wronged me mattered in the slightest bit, the ones I loved tomorrow were almost ready to come around the corner, unaware of what I carried all this way for them to see and burn against, and through, and from until we mutually understood a small thing, if nothing else, and nothing else came down through the awful summer sunlight, as hard to look at as any truth worth seeing, or believing like a man pinned between a boulder and the rest of his life, hearing nothing but the carefully deliberate notes of a small music, so I let it in and walked with it, and put my weight onto the weaker hip, making sure the pain of these things continued to be felt.

Held Apart

The days linger, but the nights stay when the call you lose the strength to handle grows impossible to make, a thing within, without a name, claws beneath the weight, the rubble several stories high of failing obligation, almost met, avoided like a sharp emotion dulling up against the silent growing tension in a pair of clenching fists, a child somewhere screams without a thought toward what the others think, so naturally automatic is the voice of someone yet to break, abrasive needful cries of the immediate...

It should stop there but nothing ever does, the pieces come together like a magnet shattered up against itself, the mind is held together by a pull that any shotgun- sucker knows to be a curse, so we learn to silence the external just to move along and long between the static and the verse, especially when knowledge comes and breaks you up against the valleys of experience, strange words only spoken to the walls, then comes the valor of the greater fall, the deeper horror always was the facing of a truth, that walk along the edge a man can only take against the lack of anything to prove, a shovel tearing through the carpet to the plaster to the concrete to the dirt, cold and unforgiving to the skin, let me in, we all say, let me in, as though an action of that sort could ever be deserved, as though a love of any sort could ever really save a soul, there is such a thing as a drink too tall, and an hour too late to make that call.

Occupational Hazard

Things come up at times when you've seen someone else just let it out and cry like there's nothing else to do.

I broke a window today, a big one, which is little more than an occupational hazard, and it could have been like losing a lover or breaking a finger, it could have been like shitting myself in a public place or being starkly reminded of reality through the specter of a sudden death.

I've seen someone cry out in brutal and honest pain as a window broke to pieces in their hands.

To be fair, I've also seen someone laugh at the exact same thing.

The difference is a matter of very few degrees.

As the spiderweb grew out in a fraction of a fraction of a second, all that hardened tempering coming to an end like lightning striking human skin, tattooing itself into permanence, I walked off and found something else to do.

I sat on some grass near the sidewalk somewhere in Pacific Heights, and bummed a smoke from the very same man I once saw crying over broken glass.

We both kind of laughed.

Whenever someone else is crying, most everyone tries to pretend it isn't happening.

I usually just wish I could do what they're doing.

I envy their place of having no other option but to break down against whatever wall they cannot find the strength or will to navigate around or break their way through.

Every time I find myself against it, it seems there's always something else to do.

I'm only as strong as the strongest pane.

And as I have learned through the hazards of my occupation:

All glass breaks.

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“It Lives”- Niko Van Dyke

It Lives

When it goes away and all you feel is that it's gone, very little keeps you there at whatever desk or door or corner of the street, a single drink descends a hangover in thirty minutes, every conversation is an army of needles at the creases of your skull, and all you ever want to do is not feel any of it anymore, all you want is to feel nothing, but you feel everything for what it should be worth and isn't and never will be without it.

Survival in that place is like a thirst in a desert neverending and complete in its abrasiveness and volume, deafening and razorlike, and it goes on into oblivion, death by a thousand cuts, you somehow live by drinking your own blood that seeps down through your clothes and sheets and pools between the tiles on the cold and dirty corners of the floor you walk at night and every morning, waiting for a sign, a fork in your reality, waiting there for anything that isn't absence, knowing that you lived, somehow, before it came, that maybe you were stupid then, more capable of living then, without it, knowing if it came before, a chance exists that it might come again and fill you with a nameless fire known by anyone who hangs onto that thread, knowing full well that it may simply break, knowing that the gamble taken doesn't guarantee its capability to hold you and your weight, knowing fully that you may die alone in all of this, without it.

And then it comes.

It comes like sunlight for a moment through the darkest day you had no chance to find a way through from the start, and you will know it never died in you, it never cursed your name and spat on you, it never wanted you to feel this way for any longer than you had to, and you will drink it like that water that you couldn't see through crusted mind and broken will, that you couldn't see even in the teary eyes of those who genuinely loved you, even through the lack of it, the ball of snaking nerves beneath your navel, slicing you apart with silence and the lack of words to describe it, to yourself or your room or any solitary moment of desperation and the feeling of death across the doorstep, that moment of return, reprieve, the vow of silence broken by necessity, alive like lust, alive in the nevermind, alive in the tiny corners that you saved, protected all that time, somehow still knowing that there would always come the day you would no longer have to live without it.

Elixir Rubeus

From the moment I saw her it was out of my hands, I saw red in her hair that she put there, red in her eyes from within, her lips to my face would be Sylvia Plath's if only she'd broken the skin.

Only days in the past was a moment I chose to be as alone as I could with the moon in the morning, as red as the stains she would leave in my bed before long, hiding only from light and the truth of intention, hiding only from what she might crush in her hand, I asked under my breath for a new revelation, I asked only for that which I could never have.

So I went along through the flow of the motions, watching the red of her nails on the glass, screeching like chalk on a slate in a prison, deaf to the sound of a bell with a crack, smelling her skin from a matter of inches, imagining what might be coming around, a fool in the garden of promising masters, a slave in the power to which they are bound.

We found it on the symbol of a rooftop, the swirling filth beneath us in the street, the red of distant neon flashing soft across her face was just enough to bury my defeat.

And then it came, the sickness and the verse, the influence, the holy sacred whore alive in spells she only had by strength to whisper underneath her breath, hot and red, witching hours waking her to watch me twitching like the ones she left behind, breathing into me some ancient form of twisted life as though in sleep I had no power to defend.

What a blur, the time it's taken just to move a single step, the way it was, the way it is, whispers of Anaïs Nin, cracking covers bent and broken, books surviving fifty years, destroyed by an obsession, little recognizable remains save for the color in her cheek, a red hand that I left there just last week.

The cards now don't say anything, jumbled swords and Seraphim, another red moon came and went and she missed it again, but I didn't, I was patient in the freezing wind, watching for the revelation, and when it came, it cast my shadow back across the wet cement, burning me with permanence...

Just like she did and always would, as only the blood of a woman could.

Only a Saint

Anna burns a hole in my stomach, awake in the length of her legs and even longer fingers, a loss that didn't come with simple words or difficult decisions, just the burning like a cherry in the arm, like my light awake in all her dark, or did I get that wrong, Anna burns her hand in my pocket, never asking what the other side was like, what I brought back, or what it meant there in the moment that I climbed to life again, she waits for me to tell her and I don't, I am a coward, terrified of doctors, always turning down the light instead of trying toward the details, and now she's said out loud, “Don't look at me,” but I did anyway, Anna burns her eyes on my burden, which tends to happen when you split the skin, the way in being sharper than the method, love was never what they tried to teach us, fucking doesn't fix the sweet tooth, and here, my mind still screams at me to be alone, and tears at me to have her close, the very thing that saved me is the thing that's slowly killing her, so Anna burns her name into my sternum, and the pain is what I used to know as pleasure, sharp enough to bead the sweat from foreheads of more human men, I sit still, finding comfort in the silence.

Long Run

Smoke hung in the air like a scream in the hall, and most people, they didn't answer. They all climbed down from wherever they hung and went blind in the light of the amber. That day I awoke to a list of demands, unprepared for the coming advances. I couldn't imagine the mind of the man uncovering skulls in the ashes.

Dryness and dust were like paint in our lungs, masks hanging stained across collars. The corners got sharp in the dull of the public, and no one had hands for the fallen. The bars were all bent and the people who drank danced alone with their wired eyes empty. Hope turned to prayers turned to nothing at all, and the rain falling short would be heavy.

I couldn't write to save my own life or those of the friends I was losing. Crowds drew around huddled massive mistakes, subjects who'd die for their kingdom. Save for the nothing that I'd always known, all my words hinged on confusion. When I tried to think of what hadn't been said, the effort to mind was a mountain.

Love was a word we spelled lonely and long, seeking a face to disfigure. Scrolling the trough through hot bullets and blood, salt in the wounds of our anger. It was clear we had choked on our part of the whole, clinging to shreds of defiance. Now comfortable men speak from towers above, drowned out by the great white silence.

My day off, I guess.

It's getting more difficult by the day to hold any kind of conversation with anyone. No matter what comes up, there's an elephant in the center of the room. Not some early nineties NatGeo elephant at a watering hole of Disney sterility. A raging beast screaming out torturous guttural wails in the late stages of prion disease. We dodge around its flailing limbs with feigned nonchalance, speaking of the problem in abstractions. It was day in, day out, for so long. Work the hours, get paid, find time to do things you don't hate. Such a thing isn't even possible anymore. There isn't a such thing as free time. Sitting in a bar with an old friend feels like you're stepping over bodies in the final throes of agonal breathing just to get to a place comfortable enough to slip out of consciousness later in the night, only to wake into a nightmare the following morning. A nightmare that pales in comparison to the ones many will be living for the rest of their lives. The kind of suffering that makes you feel guilty it isn't worse.

The day isn't coming when we will need to stand up and risk our own comfort and safety to battle racism and corruption and violent vitriolic hate with whatever strength we have left in us. That day passed long before anyone my age was even born. It was always this way. Every day is that day and they are piling up like discarded cell phones in a landfill, leeching into the groundwater. Piling up like plastic in the Pacific. Every consecutive day spent working to maintain a living feels worthless and wasteful and infuriating. People ask me about things I'm paid to tell them, and I'm losing my ability to respond effectively. “Where's the Beat Generation of today?” Look around you. They're dying in the street under a barrage of advertisements for how to get the best interest rate on a mortgage loan. “As little as three percent down!” Maybe the concept of building a personal brand in the twittersphere revolts them beyond any imagination of language. Maybe they're working themselves to the bone just to eat, terrified that any illness at all may throw them into years of crippling debt. Maybe they're exhausted and suicidal and desperate. Maybe poetry isn't the solution to this Sisyphean cycle. Maybe it feels pointless and masturbatory and selfish to those we once desired to admire and draw from.

I also work for staggeringly mentally ill rich people, charging them stupid amounts of money to fix meaningless aesthetic problems. Every tiny little thing in their San Francisco Dream Homes needs to be absolutely flawless so they can sell photographs of their creepy sterile living environments to magazines that people flip through on first class weekend flights to Zurich with quick stops in Paris for dinner and drinks. “You should have worked harder. You could be making a living doing something you love.” Yeah, that would have solved everything. I could have a far more rewarding way to remain attached to my detachment. Regardless of my near departure from doing such things for money, those things will remain. Thousands of revolting wealthy elites will still be screaming racial epithets at struggling sub-minimum wage migrant workers who accidentally left a mark the size of a pinhead on the bottom two inches of a piece of glass twice the size of any wall in any house in which they could ever afford to live. It's decent money, though. The dust here at the foot of the golden mountain.

I watch so many of the people I know rushing around, trying to check all the boxes. Bring in the bread, find a compatible spouse, find a permanent roof, replicate personal genetics before age 35! GO! GO! GO! And how could I possibly blame any one of them when they're only trying to avoid dying in the gutter and rotting there for days as hundreds walk past their corpse before a junkie who managed a Starbucks in 2002 figures out they're dead in the middle of picking their pockets to avoid the hell of another detox? I was already digging in my pocket for a five dollar bill, a bottle of much needed scotch under one of my arms, when a man in the Tenderloin the other night began his rambling story about how his friend in the adjacent alley who had two broken legs just needed something to eat. I didn't care how he was going to spend the money. As I handed him the bill, he swore to me, he swore on his life, his words, that it would come back to me. The five dollars. I couldn't even think of a response. I wasn't paying him to leave me alone, and I didn't want it back. It wasn't about that.

It was about some horrific wordless maw of a thing, some bottomless pit of suffering and inequality and hate and debt and death. It was about all of this. Everything is. You're selfish if you do, and a failure if you don't. Here on the high wire, you're only human if you hold your balance. Completely fucked if you fall.

I got my ballot out in the mail last week, though.

Allow Access

Every ship out here is taking water ten times faster than a man can move a bucket.

Every captain drunk and powerless, every passenger a raging addict.

I once drew my blood to pen a contract, though I didn't mean it.

I used to vivisect myself in the assumption it was someone else's job to study what I am, and understand it.

Honest mistake of a generation made irrelevant, another false idolatry, a passionless investment.

The plague has come, the element of death, and we believe we are immune, ignoring symptoms of our sickness, refusing treatment for the truth.

Our fears of being tracked by microchips beneath our skin have given way to calm acceptance in the system.

Instead, they have been sold to us at will, relinquishing our fingerprints and facial scans, identities, convinced that we are fortunate and privileged in our chance to foot the bill, our nervous systems sewn into the screen, emotions as emojis. lithium in our batteries, slow poison in the well.

The other day, I didn't find the twenty grand that I imagined on the ground.

Not that it would have helped.

No amount is ever enough.

No balance exists in a place like this, no paperfolded pocket savior from distress.

Married off or written off, or buried underneath it all, the information comes and doesn't cease, product placement bleeding into dreams.

There's no escape from this.

From what it means.

Culture is a cavity, the pain of its intensity as sharp as a syringe every time you dare to take a breath.

Every time you dare to write a post and count reacts.

Sweet dopamine, a drip to throat our diagnosis.

Someone couldn't wait to feed me a new line that fell from the pole of the president's mouth.

What an asshole.

What an idiot, amirite?

Amirite?!

Yeah.

Yeah, you're right.

I guess.

Such is the rate of interest.

Nyx

She's the kind of tall that cuts through the apartment air when she walks around the bed for a glass of water, as naked as my pain, some of her ink as bright as the curtain while the rest of it bleeds into a personal day, a wall of history gone against the one we made, she loves in a way that would terrify a selfish man into fleeing the scene, but I lay there in a pool of our sweat, listening to her grind the coffee, growing tired only of tomorrow and the nightmare it will bring us separately, on the street in the tenderloin, I watch the denim hug her thighs, imagining the dresses that she doesn't wear, the set of sets that make her sense of personal awareness, lipstick smeared across the mirror in her bathroom, messages to future deaths, ribbons around fingers that she slips inside herself, droplets on the tiles, white against the warning of her bloodlust, her phone in a perpetual state of flickering out, and I am born each time it does, alone and drunk, secret garters latched beneath her pants, one of many habits from a book that Deming would have bought were the cover anything but pink, she summons Satan when it gets too dark to hear me in her head, to hear me from the hole I live in, the pit I try and fail to crawl from every time she needs to hear my words, but even from the bottom of my well, her voice, an echo through the depths, soft and smooth like Cigarettes After Sex, reverberates itself with every inch to where I lie awake, in wait, the world bursting at its seams to break between her fingers latched around the steering wheel, ready to drive us anywhere as long as we're together at the heel of whatever all this lunacy around us may define, she dreams of being flexible enough to fuck herself, an animal in visions of the strange and the obscene, the sacred freedom separating blood from oxygen, as we accept, we turn from everything to nothing back to everything, order transforming into whispers of Eris, apples of lead golden only in the light of our mornings, we take notice among neighbors perpetually sleeping, we take notice when the walls are breathing from necessity, giving us the room we need, our bodies strewn across the under sheet, we demand it wordlessly, and we are gifted everything, we accept all that we don't deserve, and wasting it is not an option, I watch her walk around the bed, and I'm transfixed, I am entranced, by the dimpled eyes in the small of her back, as naked as my life, petals blooming from her footsteps, just before they die.

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