Joey

the cheerful clinking of coffee mugs always reminded me of how my keys sound when i’m coming in from the night or the rain. joey always hated jingling noises, said they reminded her of words with too many syllables. josephine elizabeth walker schlaeganfritz especially hated having a name with four parts, let alone the fact that it ended in schlaeganfritz. so she went by joe or joey which i thought was cute. it was like she resented the loss of precious time every time she felt like a word was unreasonable long. time lost was a sin to her, and she spent much of her time on the road to redemption. time promised away in carefully decorated boxes was foolish. time saved was a precious commodity and digital watches are of the devil because they hack into time, chopping away in digital silence. god knows she’d much rather spare some change than spare the time.

but i remember joey in the garden of roses and lotus. her laughter; something about the way her soft, white belly would rise and fall while she was on her back laughing up at the roaring stars, fireflies kissing her eyelashes... i swear it made all the blossoms bloom in the dead of nightfall. hell, her laughter could make blossoms bloom during nuclear fucking winter. and it was her kind of beautiful, uncompromising and altruistic. the hurricane season brought with it an indian summer and i remember the matchbooks from dive bars in the city i pilfered with a fake id. we use to layout by the train tracks after midnight to feel the ground rumble beneath us while we looked for shooting stars. when the perseids came that year, i was flat on my back in ripped levis with a bottle of jack daniels in one hand, a joint in the other, howling at the moon until my voice gave out. we laughed and laughed in an out of breath rapture. she reached over and drew what felt like a word on my arm. i pushed her hair out of her face to see the moonlight on her flushed cheeks, she put a hand over my heart and then we succumbed to the silence.

sometimes i think back and finish the paragraph we were unraveling. i think about that last word, stretched across my skin. but that’s what makes us poets, and as poets we are kin.

Rats in The Walls

So I've decided to go back and start hammering out the short stories and fractured fairytales...

somewhere out there, in the cloak of dusk to twilight, an insomniac is drinking black coffee.

when the train left, it shook my windows and left me listless on the platforms. my mind was betraying me, racing back and forth between empath and psychopath in a manic depressive fervor. “whiter shade of pale” is inexplicably ambling on in my head, flooding my senses like cold iridescent neon around soupy saxophone solos. it reminds me of being sixteen in Virginia Beach. i’d bought Annie Lennox’s Medusa album with money i'd saved mowing lawns. it’s a song that washes over people in a way that makes everyone beautiful by the understanding that true beauty is the acceptance of the ugliness too.

sometimes when a someone dwells in your for so long, their fingerprints grow on us like thick, gorgeous ivy behind our eyes. you have to be careful to not let that lush green spread and spill out too wildly, or it will completely overtake you like rats in the walls. i have resorted to finishing the final chapters caped and masked in the night somewhere, dreaming of typewriters. and i still want to put her face in all my pictures. that feeling is my penance and my personal heaven and will never ever be gone from me. she will be why i am never alone and doomed to a life of sleepless nights. she was no demon lover, she was no friend of mine. friends and lovers come and go predictably. she comes and goes as she pleases.

the november sky held out like something better was coming along but december and january entombed Baltimore City in the white shroud. i was spending my days eating things from cans and watching reruns on the internet signal i was stealing from the neighbors. i’d tried writing but it barely made a dent in the daylight hours. it was going to be awhile before i’d truly write again and i knew it then. the word “dry spell” makes the whole thing sound a lot worse than it really is, i think. it makes a recess in writing seem like it could be compared to a large atmospheric phenomenon creating oppressive weather conditions. there are times for writing and times for living. i don't live through my writing, my writing lives in me and it took me a long time to realize that not everyone is like that. sometimes the world sings back to you and you can devour all that beauty in heaping mouthfuls, but sometimes you have the search the dust for the smallest trickle. i don’t think she thought the words were coming back to me, and i was too low in what i’d conserved to spare the extra words to try to explain it to her. it was a hard winter, and one in which i had all ready resigned myself to solitude. i wasn’t expecting her to slip through that trap door down to my doorstep ever again, but i wasn’t surprised when she did. it felt like a benevolent ghost of bad timing. i frantically searched for the words and the rhythm, flailing around the platform as the final boarding call is being broadcasted. sometimes i think about sending her ten love songs and note apologizing for being late. she was begging me to dance with her but the muscles of my mind had turned to tar. by spring time she’d had enough and left again, wrapped in a letter of unnecessary regret. i have learned that the words come back in their own time like spiders scheming in the corners.