Micropoem: Madelyn wakes up

You bug me out, opening your imperturbable eyes at me like I've always been here.

02-04-2020 - I Tell the Children That I'm Sorry

I promised to keep the kids busy at the park for at least two hours
so that Sarah could get the house in order and all the laundry sorted out.
I told her that the party was her idea so she could damn well clean it up herself.
I didn't mean to snap but since mom died last week I haven't felt like myself
I only just turned forty two and all I think about now is my health.
I know I've gained some weight but Sarah's so nice, she claims she can't even tell.
Two nights this week I dreamed that my teeth crumbled when I tried to eat.
When I wake up my gums feel weak - I make the kids brush their teeth til their mouths bleed.
I feel ambushed by my body or at least a little misled
as if the blood that moves my parts can't keep up with commands coming from my head.
Sitting on a park bench, watching Zooey climb to the top of the slide
where she'll cry until I come up and get her
Sarah says she does it for attention but I think she knows better.
There's a girl with these legs running laps on the track
I watch the muscles sing in her thighs
when I turn back to Zooey I'm confronted by the eyes of a young mother helping her down
she greets my approach with a full body frown
"Maybe you should keep your eyes on your own child," she sniffs.
I pretend not to hear while I oversearch for Chris.
I get him and bolt down the street to the pharmacy,
Chris screamin bloody murder 'cause we had to leave.
I get my pills refilled so I'll be good for the party
pop one on the walk home 'cause I feel the panic starting...
I keep saying that I'm sorry...
I tell the children I'm sorry...

2020

02-03-2020 - My Ears Still Work

It was a stupid thing to get worked up about maybe... it wasn't part of some long standing battle we had, not a conscious one anyway, it was just a quick unfinished response to something Merril said... she asking me if I was always into programming and "No, I used to play music and perform in a band" and "Oh? would I have heard of you?" "No, probably not..." "So, you used to have actual CDs of music?! Did you ever make, um.... alllllll... 'albums'?" "Yes, I made a few albums back then." "Well why don't you play one of your songs for us?"
And then there it was --- reflexive and presumptuous and all-encompassing, Sarah's interjection:
"Well, he's not really...."
and then a look towards me
somehow both an apology
and a "You're welcome"
at the same time
And of course I fell in line, wrapping my trunk around the tail of the elephant in front of me,
"Ya, I wouldn't know what to play, my keyboards are all..."
pointing way yonder, to anywhere really
anywhere not immediate
and like a good publicist Sarah swept the conversation towards the children
our one success story
and when it arrived at Chris' recital I excused myself for the bathroom.

Sometime in there
while I was trying to figure out what looks so unfamiliar about me in that big mirror
I got it in my head to sneak out the window. I was in the downstairs bathroom so it really wasn't much of a drop.
I locked the door and shut the light off and then tried to open the window but
I'm so stupid
Sarah just had $32,000 E-Sills installed last week and the remote is on my keychain on the hook in the hall
so I sneak out and grab them and sneak back
almost undetected --- Carter is watching me from the couch, but not suspiciously
No, he watches me in a way that says, "I've been there. I also have executed back-to-back pee sessions"
and I nod and point at my groin so that he feels at ease.
I lock the door again, leave the light on though, this time,
zap! the window's open
the toilet seems taller, my knee caps salute
one leg on the toilet, my knee on the sill
there's knocking now
Carter's voice, "Ay, Gavin. Hello?" whispering, like it's us against them
"Gavin, you need anything?"
I'm not sure if that's concern or a proposition of some sort
I will just squeeze out---
"Honey?"
The voice of 1000 lbs!
with a love so heavy it ages me
Now she knocks too
I know because her rhythm is somehow accusatory
The window begins clamping down on my back, even as I work my left thigh through
is this the boasted "Anti-theft technology"
that blue-suit bastard was touting
in MY living room smiling at MY wife?!

In my head I'm already down the street
smashing bus stop shelters with a hammer
in serial fashion, walking straight to downtown
Glass cases populated with beautiful people
Smiling, nuzzling, drinking wine coolers together with big jewelry
the way things never were
and I swing the hammer into them and walk on while their guts sparked and hissed at the new air
(nothing beautiful or classy about that)
nothing's so pristine when you get the scalpel out and really look at it

but here in this bathroom,
caught in transit by our stupid stupid new hi-tech E-sills
My wife
who has keys to even the bathroom door somehow
is looking at me like I'm a rabid skunk
while four or five of her friends have clustered around me
overtly sympathetic
but I hear you snickering, fuckers
in my house
I may be drunk but my ears still work

09-13-2020 - Kitemaster

Today is Cravin Day. Zoey named it that of course [Sarah is concerned that Zo's vocabulary is comprised of more improvised words than Webster words. I furrow my brow and exhale loudly in congruence when she brings it up, but to be honest I couldn't be more thrilled about it]. Cravin Day is when Chris and I join forces to further the Male Agenda. We enter the Testosterzone. We manage the MANage. No matter what our original trajectory, we always end up tossing a ball back and forth at Shelby Park and picking at the carcass of a Happy Meal. From the day the doctor told us that we were having a boy, I swore to myself that growing up as my son would be a non-stop Disney ride. I had so many plans. Then came the floods: Sarah's surgery, Sarah's mom's surgery, an Astralvan, my back, Zoey...

Being a new parent is like getting carjacked by a wild-eyed man brandishing a gun and screaming about The Voices: you must be forever on your toes if you want to get out alive. You are looking for any pattern that you can rest in, any behavior that you can maintain to keep him from pointing the barrel at your face. Your rate of fatigue is accelerated dramatically by the sporadic volatility of everything. You just want to be left alone. You want sleep. You will trade every facet of your dignity for a few hours of sleep.

By the time Chris turned four my fantasy fatherhood was tucked away somewhere next to my old keyboard in the attic. Surprisingly, Sarah was the one who suggested that we take one day a week to do boy things. I was so pleasantly surprised at her selflessness, trust, and encouragement (truth be told she never really left me alone with Chris for the first four years of his life...) that it did not occur to me to ask what she'd be doing on Cravin Day. One evening a month later, while brandishing the Visa bill in my face and insisting that I justify a $341 night out with my sisters I caught sight of the real reason for her enthusiasm: every Thursday night while Chris and I were at a movie, a baseball game, or wherever, my lovely bride and tiny Zo were having their own private shopping spree. Six purses in two months - I'd never seen anything like it.



Today we drove an hour to Colt State Park to launch the kite I gave him for his sixth birthday. Of course he says that flying a kite is "straight" (it's frightening how early kids are picking up heterophobia these days) but I tell him if he wants something gayer he can just stay on the blanket with the snacks while I fly it myself. He couldn't understand why we had to drive an hour to fly a stupid kite, and the nostalgia for this park exists only in me, so I didn't bother explaining. He'd never met Lumas. He was not even a twinkly thought of a sperm's thought when Lumas, at full tilt, bowled through the wobbly legs of a 78 year-old woman being escorted to the seaside by her much younger children. Geez, that was thirteen years ago. Nor was Chris present when we gathered her distant shoes and beat a quick retreat while other park-goers tried to describe us to park officials. I guess this park holds a lot of weight for me because of those days. I'd flown so many kites here in my youth that in my head it was the only place with wind. Sure enough it is still the windiest place in New England, When I notice that we are the only ones not flying something wireless, the lack of synchronism between me and the world feels palpable.



After I get the thing a hundred feet up, Chris slowly makes his way to me, and within minutes he insists on flying it alone. This is fine by me - I get dizzy when looking at all that open space. My medication is doing strange things with my inner gyroscope. It's a fair trade though - I feel nothing. Absolutely nothing since mom died. When I think about her, think about that funny, music-heavy service we had, I see it all on a screen with red velvet currents and I'm way in the back of a heavily populated theater. I could nod off and it would continue on without me. It's practically subtitled I'm so apart from it.

04-23-2018 - Birthday in Kent Hospital

I woke up in a very dull pink room with the sensation that there were far too many curtains about. I coughed quietly, aware of people and machines buzzing and whirring around me, maybe just outside all these curtains, and I didn't want to alert anyone until I could figure out what was going on. A wizened man with piercing falcon eyes and deep folds for cheeks slid back the curtain closest to me and leaned inward, wearing a smile that suggested we'd shared time on a sinking ship together. I nodded hello, and his smile didn't falter or respond, just hummed a tune that I'd been hearing long before I'd opened my eyes. It was How Great Thou Art, a hymn I'd grown up with in church. The dream it had soundtracked had indeed been about my childhood - something about a summer in the woods of Maine and a fort full of caught turtles.
He began shuffling about the room, sliding drawers open, checking cupboards, making notes on the back of his hand, taking stock of things, always humming.
"Excuse me - could you tell me what hospital this is?"
"Well brother, you're in Kent County Hospital right here. Yer in good hands," he winked and patted my arm. He left his hand on my arm a bit too long and I began to feel uncomfortable. His touch was grandfatherly and comforting but my skin had been alone long enough that foreign skin alarmed me, I guess. He didn't seem to notice, just held it there and looked around the room as if it were made of rainbows.
"I'm gonna... I'm going to call the nurse to see about my... situation," I said in a way that I hoped didn't sound like I was telling on him or anything, just needed to get things rolling.
"You do that," he nodded dreamily but didn't move from my side. I reached down and pressed the red button by my thigh. He didn't seem to feel responsible for the heavy air between us, so I rushed to fill it, "I'm 40 today." I say this like it's some sort of explanation for the chemical they'd pulled out of me with pumps.
He took my hands and held them up between us. I looked at them, he looked at me. He squeezed my hands twice and let them fall back to the blanket.
"Your bed in God's home ain't quite made yet, brother," he said in a way that should've creeped me out much more than it did. He had my Grandfather's eyes, and I was relieved to see them on this earth again.
"I just don't... there's nothing left for me to do," I said, still trying to explain something that he seemed to already understand.
He shrugged off my total surrender, "Say that when you're my age, brother. I'm 76 years old... took me this long to realize how much I'm needed on this great earth. If y'all find yourself to be 76 years old and you still wanna say them things... well, then by all means, call it a day, brother."

I had the strangest sensation when he said that: I thought he was my dad. Somehow. My dad had died at 76 himself, but I don't think that coincidence is what made me feel that way. And it wasn't his eyes - they were the eyes of my mother's father. What was it? Before I could place it, a thick woman with thick-rimmed glasses entered the room and quickly moved to start everything in motion again.
"Ok, Mr. D, let's let our patient rest now," she said in her brick and mortar voice, severing the space between us to adjust my pillow. He closed his eyes and mouthed some calming words that I could not discern, then shuffled out with his cart in tow.

Two days later, when everything had cleared out of my guts, they let me venture outside (supervised) to get some Vitamin D. I saw the old man who'd touched my arm sitting out under an apple tree at the far end of the back parking lot. He was eating something, and appeared to be talking to himself. I asked the short nurse pushing my wheelchair, "who is that guy?"
"That's Abe, he works in the stock room."
I walked to within fifty yards of him, I could hear he was singing breezily, conversationally even, with his head tilted skyward and his fierce eyes examining the crawling clouds. This is what I heard him sing:
Hymn 6: Lunch Break in D Flat Major

08-05-2016 - The Birth and the Psychic

I don't believe it. I watched it--filmed it even--but I still don't believe it. Every day for thirty-five weeks and two days I mentally rehearsed it, all the ins and outs (pun intended). But I guess the truth is I never really believed it would come to pass. All my life I've created things, many times with the intent of making them beautiful. But I'm suddenly embarrassed by the marks I've left to date. Those things--those songs, that book, that software, those paintings—are ugliness incarnate. I've made something, a writhing, pink and wrinkly gorgeous something, that puts them all to shame. How could God give this power to everybody?! How can I ever create anything again and think of it as beautiful? What a frightening new standard we’ve set.

psychic sampling

Some nine or ten years ago, when I was trying to deal with Life After Keta, I went to a psychic--a British woman named Lori who operated out of the basement of her daughter's house in Warwick, RI. Her body and her face were a tad overly made-up (but in the way you really want your old people to be overly made-up). I don’t know how to put it other than that her face was like a hearth to me. Her eyes were the fireplace of that face, warming me but keeping me at bay. When she began her auguring, those eyes transformed into glassy pools of still lake water, holding me, suspended. These words read like 9th grade poetry to me, but they’re the most accurate words for her. Her eyes literally sparkled. And when she said my name, it sounded like honey: "Gaahvaan." I'll never forget it. Every time she said it, I was a house cat, raising my back to meet her voice. "M'love," she called me.

She told me that she'd had five visions of Christ in her life. She told me the spirit world was all around us and that our loved ones never really leave us. She held my hands like they were made of gossamer while we said a prayer. Then she held my keys and tilted her head towards the faux-everything chandelier, narrowing her eyes into slits and letting her hands dance left and right, conducting some symphony that only she could hear. She spoke to her spirit guides, Running Water (a Native American) and Dr. John Forbes, who were consulting the spirits surrounding me in an attempt to understand my life.

Many times in the reading she said to me, "Your life is shown to me like a jigsaw puzzle. They're showing me the pieces of your life, Gavin." These words were air conditioning in my skull. I was so still.

She told me that I was going to have a second chance with Keta and that one of us would have to choose between two relationships.

She told me that a more lucrative career (back then I'd somehow gotten it into my head that I should try to be a musician!) would rise up and challenge the one I was in. She told me I would have to decide. But she warned me that God gives you talents, and if you don't use them, it's like throwing them back in his face.

She told me that I shouldn't move west until the middle of the following year.

She told me that my grandfather almost died when he was a baby and was only saved "by the grace of God."

She told me that my cousin's husband's friend would hurt his knee in a skiing accident.

She asked me about Florida, and then Boston, “What do they mean to you?”

She told me that my guides wanted me to concentrate more on money than my love life for a while.

She told me that Keta was flying to the Orient soon with a friend or sister, and that she was very nervous about flying, but that she would land safely.

She told me that my mother would "have a strong love one day. She may not want it, but she'll have the opportunity."

Then she told me that I would have a baby girl.
When she said this, there was a knotted lung deep in me somewhere that finally exhaled. I never knew it was there, but when it finally let go I realized I had been holding that breath since I was fourteen or fifteen. And I thought: "huh. ya. a girl. of course." Truthfully, it had never occurred to me somehow, but it was the answer to everything. I'd always been stressed about the relationship I would have with my son. But having a girl seemed like a completely different (and much simpler) ballgame. Daughters LOVE their dads.

When the reading was over, I wrote her a check for $50 and thanked her profusely. I bound out to my car, weightless. I remember thinking that I would've paid $400 for that feeling. It didn't matter to me if the whole thing was a farce; I didn't even care if she was truly British. It only mattered that for those fifty-six minutes, in that little house speckled with knick-knacks and New England Patriots paraphernalia, I was able to zoom out of the pit I'd been in. I was able to believe that there was this other perspective from which to view my life--one where you see the whole thing, beginning to end, and muse about the highs and lows of it. You don't get so caught up in any particular valley because you can just take note at how it climbs into a peak over yonder. Maybe it was less Slaughterhouse Five and more One by Richard Bach, but you get the idea.

I just remember thinking, "I have to hold this position for as long as I can. I have to keep this aerial view of things." It was only days later that I came crashing down from that lofty mindset...I can't remember what set me off. No, I can: that guy Keta was with at the time...Ben? Ben. Got a record deal. Haha, a "record deal." Geez. Had the psychic only said a word or two about the future of the record industry, I would've realized that I couldn't design a more fitting revenge for that guy than a record deal.

And now my little Zoey is finally here: ten potato bug toes, ten inchworm fingers, two tiny seashell ears, two eyes that refuse to let me in yet, and one nose that is clearly my fault. And for the first time in ten years I feel like I did that day I left the psychic's house--weightless.

Micropoem: The last mouse in the house

I would've preferred a more cordial adieu, but you ignored my Reese's Piece offering.

04-14-2014 - Meddling

I should have known something was amiss the way she launched the call, "Hello, darling," arcing the phrase so that the "lo" syllable was accented. My mother doesn't say those two words in sequence like that. She'll say "Gavin, darling" if she's patronizing me, and just "Gavin?!" to start off a regular phone conversation (always as if maybe someone else could be answering my cel phone). She never says, "Hello, Darling." This was notably abnormal, but I was on a deadline, so I barely noticed.
"Hey, Ma how goes it?" I plugged in, spinning towards my desk to turn the internet down. "Gav, are you doing ok, with... work and stuff?" she asked.
"What? Ya ---" trying to swallow the disgusting nutri-bar I'd pushed into my face just before the phone rang, I coughed out, "Ma, you there? What's up?"
"Gavin? You there?! Hello?"
Now this was feeling more normal; my mother somehow mistaking a coughing fit for satellite interference.
"Mom, ya. I'm here," I said in a slightly agitated tone, turning back to the laptop to continue the styling of my flyout menus.
"Are you... Gav, are things OK with you and Sarah?"
"Ya, yes. Mom, what? What are you talking about?" I was suddenly confused as to how exactly she intended to segue this into a tech question about her iPod. I leaned back in my chair, waiting to witness her mastery of the non-sequitor.
"Gav, Keta called me."

I was quiet for probably too long to support any downplay of my discomfort.

"Oh, ya? ...H-how's she doing?"
"...Gavin"
"She still with..."
"...Ben?"
"Ya, Ben. They doin' ok?" Within seconds of saying it, I knew I'd sold myself out: the most natural reaction, when your mother tells you that she's been contacted by the girlfriend who left town with another man three years ago, is not to ask how she is doing. It is to ask, "Why the hell did she call you?"

"Well. Gavin. I think you know the answer to that question." She was articulating her words now, sharpening the knife on each syllable. I made one last pathetic attempt at bewilderment, "Mom, if this is about your iPod---"

"Gavin, you need to stop breaking into her email."

I was silent for an entire minute. The embarrassment was so total that I floated above my body and outside of it, looking down at this strange blushy shell while musing at my mother's eccentricities. I thought about how my mother never seemed to think we were experiencing any satellite interference when she had me on the ropes.

"I'm... not... doing that," went the autopilot of my mouth - denial denial, even beyond any reasonable doubt.

"Gavin, listen to me. What you're doing... I don't---you have no right to be meddling with them. I know that---"
"Mom, I'm not 'meddling' it's not that sort---I wasn't 'meddling' mom. I'm. I was---"

"Honey, listen to me: I'm not telling you this because I'm worried about what you'll do to her. You know how I feel about her. I'm calling you because I'm worried about what you're doing to yourself."

"...."

"Are things ok with Sarah?"

"YES! Mom! Why are you saying that?"

"And, Gavin? [sternly] She wanted to talk to Sarah about it, but i talked her out of it. But I gotta tell you --- honey? She has every right."

"TALK TO SARAH ABOUT WHAT?!"

"...This creeps people out, Gavin."

"Mom, I KNOW. I know, I know, I know! I'm not 'meddling'! I just want to see what... I just wanted to see how she was doing."

"She said you were reading all her emails to Ben."

"Mom! How could---"

"Gavin, you're 35 years old. You can do what you want. But this doesn't look good... you've moved on, remember? We've talked about this so many times. You are happier now. You want the best for her and the best is to let her move on as well. This was YOUR idea."

"Mom, she was my best friend. I..."

One of the benefits of birthing someone is an acute detection of their breaking point. She could even hear it in the absence of a predicate. "I know, honey. I'm sorry. Gavin, I'm sorry," she said in her lowest voice, the first sound of mercy since this massacre began.
I held it like an unhatched egg.
She waited for the sound of hitching breath, but I had the mouthpiece up against my temple so it never came. She bluntly asked, "Do you love her?"

"..."

"Gavin, are you in love with her? She said you told her years ago that you'd fallen out of love with her..."

"she TOLD you that?"

"Are you?"

"No I'm not. I don't know... I lied to her. I mean, I don't I'm not in love with--- I didn't fall out of love with her. I just... forgot... I don't know."

"Don't you love Sarah?"

"Mom. Sarah is the best thing that ever happened to me. She's"

"---Gavin, you need to figure out---"

"I forgot how to love anyone.
I think.
I think.
I think when she left... everything was so

new

that I just
forgot

how to do it"

My experience with Jefferson Starship

I had the good fortune of hanging out with Jefferson Starship this past weekend. Here I am with them.

Micropoem: Lumas vs. Laptop keyboard

Your hair, son, is choking every letter of my life.

Micropoem: The first trout of the season

I saw you, pushing your trout face up the Mochassuck towards fatherhood.

Day 7: Remote recording of African Drums

Whilst back in Providence for some shows, Rob Pemberton, L-boogie and I tracked african percussion with Issa Coulibaly in the boiler room of Monohasset Mill. He played multiple tracks on seven songs in one five-hour session, and the scenery was quite fitting. Let's take a look:

Ghosts video

I can watch this all day.