01-22-2011 - You Should Just Stop Trying

I thought I'd surprise Keta this afternoon -
Saturdays I usually have to work all day
but I got someone to cover the second half of my shift
and yesterday I bought us two tickets to the game

I drove home, tried to park the car in the lot
but a beat up SUV was parked in our rented space
she was definitely home, but the front door was locked
a chair squeaked when I put the key in the slot

When I came into the kitchen they were rushing to talk
awkward - like they hadn't had the time to pick out a topic
she introduced him but I knew exactly who he was
it was Ben who was always playing down at the club.

For the last month his name kept popping up here and there
he played every thursday night when Keta worked the bar
when I joked that they were dating, she would play with her hair
I found his CD tucked under the seat in the car

I shook his hand, imagined I could smell the sex on it
by the time I got my jacket on the rack he was gone
I pulled out the tickets and put them on the table
changed my shirt, grabbed my hat, and put my jacket back on

She didn't say much as we drove down to the field
I kept both hands up high on the wheel
I said, "You should be happy" but I wasn't sure how I meant it
and she answered, "don't tell me how the fuck I should feel."

It started raining harder but we didn't try to leave
the stands were stark empty but there wasn't room to breathe
I double over coughing with my shoulders on my knees
she didn't touch my back, like she would usually

"You used to hate football," she said, "you couldn't stand it"
but she wasn't saying it like "good to see your interests are expanding"
she was saying it like I was a boy pretending to do man things
a puddle formed around me while she took the rain standing.

We were far past the end of it and both of us could tell
I wanted to stand and leave her but I wasn't feeling well
I was disgusted with myself, but I pretended not to be
I asked her if we could still go out later and see a movie

"You used to say the movies were way too overpriced"
"I brought you here because I was trying to do something nice!"
"I know... I know..." she said, "you should just stop trying."
I knew it was the rain but I pretended she was crying

She left - I stayed, wet and old
trying to rewind about four years or so
what had I done to turn a warm girl so cold?
All I could think was that I'd done just as I was told.

She wanted more stability, she wanted more attention
and I just wanted to have less tension between us
I told her I could change my whole life if she'd be happy
when she said I'd never change, I called her a defeatist.

And then I did it - I put a knife in the thing I loved most
It was music that I burned at the stake,
as a toast to the girl and the world that I want to be a part of
maybe going back to school was when I started to lose

I've given up everything because everyone told me it was the right thing to do

And it's been hard on me too - very hard
being 32 years old back, in school, makes you feel like you've got a
giant scar running through the center of your face.
Any attempts to include you makes you feel out of place.

Sure, the professors love me - we always share a good laugh
but it's weird when you're the only two laughing in class...
I just didn't think the age gap would run so deep
and I thought she'd be ecstatic that I turned a new leaf

But when she mentions my school she does it through bared teeth
and when I ask her if she's happy, she says she's happy for me
but I DID THIS FOR HER so why are WE falling apart?
what more could I sacrifice to Keta than my art?

Even if the gift I tried to give her is refused, I'm gonna prove to her world that I can always follow through

2011

My Nemesis

Red Teller was seven when his brother Colin left for the Congo. After much frothing from his panicky father, Colin agreed to book a return flight for 3 months later, exchanging his “where-the-road-takes-you” Marlboro Mantasy for continued use of the family Dodge.
Mr. Teller’s fears were reflected and magnified through the convex carnival mirror of Red’s seven year old mind. The stories he recounted to his lunchroom council of third graders bared only a passing resemblance to the letters received from Colin; the thin narrative frames of Colin’s postcards were insulated by the fictional fatty deposits of Mr. Teller’s evening tirades. Only the bulky Nick Canache challenged the presentation, declaring Red a “white trash gaylord” and securing a slice of pizza to his cheek.
Caboosing the train of woes that was the six o’clock news (and fueled by the dark coal shots of whiskey lined up on the coffee table like penguins), Mr. Teller’s rantings regarding his son’s safety would escalate to tea kettle proportions, nightly. Whenever they finally eclipsed Matlock, Mrs. Teller would pop his lid with something like, “Richie, they all have cel phones over there now!” (for Mrs. Teller, cel phones were the clearest distinguishing factor between good republicans and anarchists).
“Deb, you just don’t understand how far one of them will go to get his hands on the White Man’s Magic (this was one of numerous references Mr. Teller made to various episodes of Ramar of the Jungle).” Every concern for Colin that his father was able to articulate (because most he wasn’t) seemed riddled with caricature - wildlife became “beasts,” God was pluralized, and Africans werewolfed into “savages.”
Two days following Mr. Teller’s speech about the White Man’s Magic, Colin was killed by “savages.” A week later a fraction of him, sent to the family in the form of three photos in a manila envelope, was presented as evidence – from the second knuckle of his four remaining fingers down to his left wrist, where a bulky compass/watch, given to him by his Aunt Rena on his 21st birthday, still fervently testified its location.
The family and the house it inhabited donned a cloak of famine-like travesty. They slumped through the stages of depression together and vastly apart at the same time. The neighbors and friends shuffled through the stages of consolation notably out of sync with the grieving, exasperated by the poor reception their meatloaf dish had received, and eager to arrive at the party of Life Goes On where they could whisper to each other in mock reverence, “I just feel so bad for the child!”

Two weeks after the funeral, the strangest thing happened: a package arrived at the battered house, addressed to Red, from Colin. Twenty minutes before Red stepped off the bus, his mother saw it in the pile of mail by the door. When Red walked in, she had yet to exhale, yet to touch it. In contrast, Red was hardly incapacitated by its presence. On the contrary, it fit snugly into the string of surreal events that he’d found himself in, and he excitedly scooped it up and examined the quilt of colorful stamps that covered it.
In the box Red found a letter. Mrs. Teller read the hobbled English aloud, “My name Fidele. You brother Colin stay with my family for weeks before he leaves for west coast. He buy this gifts for you and ask me to send. Be Gola.”
Wrapped in a purple cloth Red found the jaws of something large. Before he knew what he was doing, he’d brought the box into his room and propped up the teeth on his nightstand. He half expected them to say something. When they finally did, it was an hour past his bedtime and his eyes were adjusted. He watched the jaws open and shut three times before they said, “Red. Red. You awake?”
For some reason he was more shocked to hear Colin’s voice than he was to see a set of unclaimed canines talking on his nightstand.
“Colin?”
“Don’t be afraid. I’m coming back to see you.”
“Aren’t you dead?”
This last question hung in the air unanswered until hours later when Red fell asleep. The next day, Red opted not to tell his parents about his talking teeth and instead consult the lunch room council. Tory, Steven, Michael, and Perry were speechless. Nick Canache, who Red had thought was out of earshot, leaned over from the neighboring table and punched Red in the arm, “Douchebag.”
When a set of chicken limbs arrived a week later, wearing the same patchwork of stamps, Red’s mother threw up. Not on the box, but in the kitchen sink. There was no letter, but it was addressed the same. Before she could do anything drastic, Red ran the claws up to his room and put them in his dresser drawer. His mother never even came up the stairs that night – she’d vomited out the last of any feeling that was in her.
“Red. Red. You awake?”
“Colin!”
“I’m coming back to see you.” Again, the conversation halted on those words, and inside his drawer the chicken claws clicked and clacked and scratched the lining. Red rose twice to observe them moving, but they would not be caught animated. He spent the night watching the windows while they tapped out a marathon of Morse code.
This time in the lunchroom, Red presented the chicken legs for everyone’s inspection. Nick Canache accused him of buying them from Mexicans. The way he put it, associating with Mexicans was a bigger insult than the insinuation that he was making things up. It should be noted that Nick appeared to either be in the midst of or completing puberty. So Red, and his entire 3rd grade class, stayed mute.
Three days later when Red got off the bus there was a third package. The arrival of gifts from his dead brother had officially become routine, and this time Mrs. Teller participated with a mouthful of grapes, the box of leopard ears held at dirty diaper distance.
Two days later, when Red unwrapped the eyes of a cow (or something with eyes just as large and milk), his mother was napping. He quietly took the eyes up to his room and sat on his bed, nudging them disgustedly with his pinky. He couldn’t wait until evening.
“Colin! COLIN!” he demanded. The eyes turned towards him in their watery sockets. The teeth yawned.
“Hey, stop yelling.”
“Colin, can you see me?”
“Of course I can see you, dufus. I told you I was coming back to see you.”
Throughout the last week, Red had tallied up hundreds of questions for Colin about his whereabouts, about Africa, about life after death. None of those questions could squeeze past the words that he now blurted out, “Nick Canache doesn’t believe you’re coming back.”
The eyes lolled left and right.
“Red, you need to do something for me.”
Red was unsure if Colin had heard him. There seemed to be a faulty connection he battled when talking to his dead brother through the facial extremities of wild animals.
“RED, you need to do something for me.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to go get mom’s sewing kit. And I want to make sure no one sees you.”
“Well no one’s home anyway,” he said in that snide tone a child takes when the boundaries of authority recede momentarily. He returned less than a minute later, bouncing through the door, clumsy with curiosity.
For the next two hours Red received a crash course in taxidermy from his fragmented brother. The final product was far more disturbing than what he’d started with. What was once a rather large Winnie The Pooh bear was now a fanged, dough-eyed Frankenbear, flexing its claws incessantly and twitching it’s asymmetrically-installed ears. One of the giant eyes stared ever upward (slightly handicapped from where Red had accidentally needled it). Once he had finished flexing his new personification,
Colin turned to Red and was shocked to see fear writ large on his seven year old face. The bear’s motley features pulled together into one big wound.
“Put me in the closet. I don’t want you to see me like this. Put me in the closet, please,” he said curtly.
Later, Red lay in his bed imaging life with his new stuffed brother. Will he be able to go outside? Will he eat and go to the bathroom? What happens when Mom and Dad find out? To his own surprise, these and many other fitting questions were replaced by, “Colin, Nick Canache doesn’t believe you’re coming back.”
And from deep in the closet it finally answered: “Red, bring him to see me.”


Officer Canard didn’t say so but couldn’t help but notice that it was as if someone had attempted to give the dresser organs of its own: a head in the top drawer, heart and lungs below that, intestines where the once clean pants lived, and hands and feet in the bottom drawer. He wasn’t sure what was more disturbing, the macabre filing of a child’s body parts in a dresser, or the fact that his parents weren’t hysterical. The truth is, the ghastly murder of their one remaining son did not shock them - it fit snugly into the string of surreal events that they’d found themselves in. When Officer Glenndale extracted the head from the top drawer, both parents were finally shocked. It was not the head of their son Red, it was someone older. Someone rounder. And, unlike any expression Red had ever worn, the look on that head said, “bite me.”

18 minutes later, while the four officers catalogued every inch of Red’s room, Mrs. Teller found the envelope from Colin in the pile of mail by the door. It was postmarked June 14th, the day Colin was killed. Inside was a photo of Colin and Red, making monkey smiles out of orange peels and waving from the jungles of Africa. Scribbled in blood on the back were the words, “Wish you were here.”

03-23-2007 - Fed

It's 2007,
I'm sitting in the back of Lupos 'bout to play a show... I don't know,
I'm 28 years old and it feels like a lifetime has passed -
worse than that:
it feels like I did the whole thing backwards.

The girl kept saying she got us Gatorade and crackers
but that's just a tactic meant to distract us
we'll get so juiced up on the crackers
that we won't notice the Grand Buffet she laid out for the headlining act.
Not hungry anyway,
I'm sick to my stomach from the music that the opener played.
I sneak a sandwich from the giant buffet though,
as some kind of justice for after, when we don't get paid.

There's a punk rock kid on the couch,
all sweaty cause he just finished up on stage
he keeps nodding at me like we were both thieves on a heist,
as if I couldn't see that he was half my age.

He asked me how it sounded, I told him "amazing"
too tired or bored to put the sarcasm in...
he thanked me and then spilled some beer on my shirt
everything was ruined but I told him it was nothing.

Keta says I'm down on my luck,
but when you have no luck to start with, you've nothing to part with.
And I'm not mad that I don't have it,
I'm mad that luck should have anything to do with being an artist.
And now going to a show makes me wanna quit
not because I'm not good enough but 'cause I love it too much
to watch it squirm while its bones get picked
and all that I can offer is a bit more traffic.

There was a time when I thought that I could change the country
with a few choice raps and some odd time beats
but noise plus noise equals noise,
and the only way that noise can make silence is defeat.
I'm not hard of hearing - it just all sounds heartless
I wanna leave the state but I've been 5 years car-less.
Fame is a club that I'm not a part of
so why am I obsessed with success?
Regardless, all my friends are getting back on the high horse of college
mom breathes a sigh of financial relief...
and with each new year that I stay the course
there's a new tax bracket that I fall beneath.
My sisters play along like I was dating a convict
not sold on the vision that I conned my mom with
no one wants to come out and say what they see:
a man with no plan and no college degree.

But I could still turn -
I've only wasted a third of my life, I could still do it right!
How many nights does a man need to fail
before he can say that he fought the good fight?
Tonight - naw - RIGHT NOW I'm gonna change things.
This is NOT how I wanna spend the rest of my life
'cause I got it in my head that I had to stand for something?
Once you get passed that the future actually looks bright
man, all these years that I've starved and hustled,
convinced myself that the struggle was cool
I lacked the foresight that I was oh so proud of
but not anymore, tomorrow
I'm going back to school.

2007