circa1889

[circa1889]

Three Sounds a Bell Makes

The day fought itself to exhaustion as you witness the western sky busted up good with purple and crimson bruises. It is night and you watch her lips form these shapes, a mess of sensuous obtuse angles when she pronounces words like:

Taffy.

Coming.

Fuckboy.

And when she talks, you fall in love with language again. It feels good. But she will never love you like you deserve.

Clue one: She asks about your motorcycle but never about your writing. There is deep water within you, a chasm of worth and subtle movements, but she wants to divorce them from you. She wants to maintain the man in her mind.

In what light is left, you watch your outer thigh scrape against her inner thigh, but a fog has filled her eyes. She is somewhere distant, away. But you still appreciate her, attend to her, care a little more each day. It is this you fear. Lately the fear is expected, like how Dad’s old Harley always fired up on the first kick of the starter, like you knew it would happen, of course it would. Like valve work. Like clocks, you fear.

You could love again, it must be believed you are capable of at least that. Maybe someone simple and decent will plod your way. Maybe they will be nothing special, but they sure as hell will be love.

More perhaps: Maybe they will charm you, calm you, rub your hands every night, or knead their finger pads into your chest as you grab the motorcycle’s clutch lever, toe up to second gear and produce a fresh roar. She will hug tighter to your torso. The helmet will hide your smile. And maybe this will be enough for you, purring, satiated, happy in your years.

But maybe, just maybe, she will be gargantuan in her love. You will be alit again for life, made to breath out bonfire and fumes. She will stay and everything will light up like seance candle wicks scorching. She will be dark and she will be wonderful and her eyes will glare into your own as she mouths those wonderful words. You will get to keep her. She will get to keep you.

And she will ask about your motorcycle.

And she will ask to read your writing.

[circa1889]

200 Miles into the Deep

That night around the camp fire I am avoiding the men who are eying me, scanning my clothes, my posture, when John finally poses a direct question, “How does it feel to be the only straight guy here this weekend?” They are looking and beginning to recalibrate their detectors toward the new knowledge that yes I am straight, and yes I am participating in their 200 mile AIDS benefit bike ride, and yes I had glanced a number of times at their padded cycling shorts but only to read the brand names and admire their team colors. I am a cyclist, obsessively so. Brand and color ways are our Pinot and Cabernet. 

“I suppose it feels like every other day being me.” 

My need to participate in a monumental and awe-inspiring ride had lead me here. Perhaps I was over my head again. Here’s the thing-

I cycle because riding a bicycle is the closest I come to reliving my childhood in a way that does not annoy or upset the other adults around me. My sister had a kid and I watch them at play, clawing at dirt piles, squealing on a trampoline, talking in that baby talk, you know the one. Parents should be exiled to some Parent Island and reintroduced back into society very slowly, maybe after having taken some classes, brushed up on their etiquette, gotten back up to speed on, for example, how to maintain the quiet in a retail store or a restaurant.

Perhaps it is the quality of air that I love about cycling, or the quantity of air moving over my skin. Perhaps it is the speed, or the riding companions I have met. More than likely though what I love are the distances, the peril of venturing out too far and risking the safety of your return trip home. I imagine ocean swimmers face similar trials when heading out into the deeper waters. There is a moment, far away from shore that a true decision about yourself, your life, your security must be faced. The decision is whether or not to stay within a safe distance of the shore, or to continue wading out into broader and lower waters. In the saddle the decision is whether to stay within walking distance of home, bus distance from the city, Ubering distance from any civilization at all. For my friends and me, we bury ourselves in the miles. Because the moment you are a kilometer too far gone, it may as well be two hundred kilometers or more. For us there is a freedom out beyond the point of no return, so we pedal, so we swim. And my friends are there to help guide, support, challenge me, make me feel less abandoned out there in the wild, in the deep.

Marshmallows, crackers, and two pronged metal rods were being handed out around the fire. The topic of discussion had already changed away from me and towards a deliberation about the next 100 miles tomorrow, 5 a.m. 

A man to my right twirled his mallows upon the licks of orange fire. He leaned toward me and whispered, as if it were a secret, that I was in fact not alone on this journey, that I was not the only one.

[circa1889]

The Better Man

Sometimes I feel there is a better man inside of me, howling for liberation. Often times he is quiet, patiently waiting his turn to speak. In rare times, like the day of my Grandmother’s wake when Dad cried for the first and last time I ever remember seeing, moments when people are at their most raw, the better man inside me appears. He is me, but meeker, more servant like and apologetic. He is me but stands up for justice, is more truthful and contains more love. 

The timeline is not important but I have been seeing this woman for perhaps one month now, and I have an acute sense that as we watch our cozy horror films, as she piles mounds of popcorn into her mouth instead of picking petite pieces from the bowl, that I may grow to someday love her. The better man in me approves.

When the slasher scene erupts, I am laughing at the gore. She is burying her eyes in my chest, squealing. The top of her head smells like a concoction of fantastic memories I have once lived, bunched into an effervescent herbal bouquet. The better man in me stays silent, relaxes his eyes a bit and smiles.

I have been known to be vulnerable in the past, vulnerable to loving too soon, trusting too soon, buying all-in to another too soon. Lately I have felt as vulnerable as any time before. When we are together, a terrible amount makes sense. When we are away though I wonder about our pacing. I wonder if we kissed too hastily that first time, knowing that door cannot be shut again. I wonder if she appreciates my humor, if I appreciate her humor at all. I wonder if I am ready for the next stage in which I ask her what our next stage might be, the conversation I truly fear. Overall though it is myself I fear, my decisions, my judgments, my sense of right/wrong/future planning/ ways of the heart. Fearing yourself is the wrong way to live. I love knowing that the better man in me exists, somewhere, hidden, pacing his efforts thoughtfully, knowing that he will again emerge when needed.

I think the better man in me should speak up more often. He is quiet, caged, and he is hard to reach, but I trust him more than I trust most men, and I am here, waiting patiently for his advise, for his escape.

[circa1889]

Only the mountain

Never lose a race to a lesser man, and when asked to specify who, tell them: all the ones who attempted to master me.

The front rider’s tire spat a rooster tail of water into my teeth. I was blind and chewing sand when the cyclist to my rear roared past my left shoulder blade in a dastardly sprint. This grunting barbaric beast nearly breaking the pedals from his bike with every pounding stoke. The race was on.

I reacted, bit the side of my lip for the pain and chased down the lead. What were once the fixed pistons of my legs had succumb to a horrible sideways bending at the knee. The handlebars shook under my weight but I was following him towards the line, hiding in the draft.

It was a false flat, that is, a bit of uphill in the road that cannot be seen in the eye, but felt in the legs when the climbing begins its low, slow pitch upward. He was slowing. I would not, and the momentum of my body, one hundred and seventy pounds flat out at 37 miles per hour would further the gap between us and the break away. We rolled the last bend and began the climb up towards the base of Alp D’Huez. I was metering the end in my eye.

It would be a sprint finish, and at the line I could see an expanse of road spread forth like sheets of glossy wrapping paper unrolled over the piles and peaks of France. Beautiful, yes beautiful. Then there was no race. There were no other men. None I could see.

There was only the wind 

and the suffering 

and the mountain.

[circa1889]

There were moments in my life when the books and the literature had eaten me, and perhaps, except for a few brief days scattered throughout when I imagined I could escape its clasp, I found that genuinely I had wanted to be eaten, ravenously.

[circa1889]

Wrestling matches, no spandex

Is this what syphoning petrol from a tank tastes like? There is something foreign in my mouth, I spit it out, and the spitting sounds something like this-

Later that evening we watched a movie, crammed together on a filthy couch in a filthy apartment, our shoulders pressed together and aching a bit from the squeeze. But instead of the movie I was staring at the wall behind the television screen. It was not a solid color. It was flashing like disco lights. Like horizontal stripes staggered blue, green, and red. They would flash and I thought, well this is what color tastes like. In my life I have recounted this story to a few friends and they all wonder what the hell was in the weed. Just weed, I say, just a virginal first time weed deflowering delusional experience. I was fifteen. They say that I had probably just forgotten to breath, which was the cause of my hallucinations. Maybe I forgot to breath, or I was holding my breath. Lets go back to the thing about the bowling alley now, remember, the story is as follows: it was the time of my life and I bowled a perfect game.

It has been two years since I have written anything at all. The above is the first in two years. I wonder if I am still the same man at all.

I sit to write and instead I start thinking of the relationship that disintegrated with the woman who shared my apartment for the two years I have been away from all the writing. And I think about never again investing in a relationship that takes creativity from me, instead of feeding it like fire. Did you know that when a piece of metal is polished, the tiniest of top layers are being removed in order to produce a shine. What I am trying to say here is that often times people promise they will polish us into brilliance and glow when actually we are being diminished away, slowly.

This writing work is not easy any more. It is forceful labor, it is exhausting, but it is my work to do. Maybe I will leave this all in, unabridged, hit the Post button and let it ride. I want to be the type of man who begins practicing letting it all ride.

Then came a hard transition back into the middle of the previous story. 

For our main character though, the walls didn’t flash the first time he got high. His friend Goodwine didn’t change shape or turn into some non-human entity like an old H.P. Lovecraft manifestation, nor did the mountains transfix their ten ton gaze on his failures as a man. The wind simply felt crisper, softer. There was no paranoia or shallow breath. His breaths were slow, full in his stomach and emptied as if his naval could reach back and touch his spine. He wanted night to come faster. He wanted to watch the stars. He wanted to watch them twist around the Earth like they did for the aboridginal people of this country when there was no light pollution or electric humming in their ears, overhead wires, underground wires, wires in the walls. 

He yearned for a time when man was kept drunk by his fantasies, sober by his mortality, and every evening was spent trying to outmaneuver the two.

[circa1889]

Ten water

The orchestral melody of deep mountain springs which trickle, dribble, and weep

I witness warm, energizing rain on a sunny ninety degree day

Or icy, fresh, clear river water emerging from a crack in the Appalachian rock

Beads of water dot an iced tea pitcher, frigid to the open palm of your hand

Or an elbow placed directly on a table’s water glass ring.

Iced cubes clink like piercing bells in a skinny glass when stirred

Like shrill cracking of iced cubes in a warm drink, recently poured

The screech of wet sneakers on linoleum tile

The GALOP sound of galoshes sinking into and rising from puddles

The booming massive volume of hydro dams penetrating the green woods

The liquid lips of a lover, split just so delicately slow

[circa1889]

Trampling the Antique Gods

You are here when you are not. Blonde whips of thin hair loom themselves into the carpet threads below my heels. This lets me know you were once present, walking the length of my floors. 

I find the hairs in my shirt weave when the laundry is stacked in neat, colorful bundles on my bed, waiting to hang. I miss you, but you have departed to no where. I love you and it is something like this-

The stresses in my head, daily, make simplicity a ghost of desire. Nothing is simple. Nothing is clarified, boiled down, congealed, or sober. Every twinge of pain I feel is scattered about my brain, echoed amongst the nine hours of work, the two hours of commute, the one hundred fifty two dollars in veterinarian bills for my Adasonian pup. A sick dog. She is a sick, sick dog. And you wander towards the red rear entranceway of my apartment through the black gate which refuses to lock and it is raining, or it is not, and I can’t remember just now, because once you arrive, nothing else matters. The pinballs knocking about my eardrums begin to rest. You do that to me. I wonder how.

Laxidasically I begin the next sentence with an adjective to lead the reader confidently towards another strong sentence to follow the first. This trick is cheap, but effective, like Gypsy pick pockets asking strangers for a quarter dollar, and upon rejection, humbly accepting the entire wallet instead. “I will eat your asshole if you’d enjoy the sensation, but I don’t like strangers touching my face because of the germs.” She says this and the expression I make requires a mirror to describe accurately. When a man depicts his emotions with such acute definition, with a bending of the nose, an expansion of the lids of eyes, a gnarl of the mouth, then the man has no secrets. I am such a man. We read to each other this night. We complete crosswords together in bed. We devour each others stories of growing up suburbanites to a major American town. I swoon. She moans. We eat everything of one another that night, and we love it. Could partnership and love and romance be so simple? Should it be? I am unaware of the next step. I doubt my happiness because happiness has betrayed me in the past. Where did that old confidence go? I want it back- the seventeen year old unobstruction I once possessed, that possessed me. Completely. We are new men, every one of us, tired of the old ways but missing them all the same. We grow, one passing month into the next year, and we are different, somehow. But I mourn nothing.

There is more about her I have to spill. The burnt leaf breath of marijuana coats her teeth and fingertips, but her migraine has finally subsided. For now. We are on alert for any flaring pains that may need our attention. With the stiffened knuckles of my fingers, I knead the base of her skull. Eventually her jaw muscles become slack, teeth showing, tongue heavy in her mouth. I work out the demons. And with a lull in her easy voice, she says ‘I love you’ and she sincerely means it, the way a delirious train crash victim thanks her rescuer for pulling them from the wreck. And she is beautiful. Are you understanding now why? I am the wreck though, and I have been saved.

The blonde, bleached towards the tips, dishwater hues at the roots, deposited a few stray hairs onto the pillow top as she lays beside me now, after the crossword is complete, and says, “I’ve come to a decision.” “Ok” “I’m ready to not sleep with anyone else.”

She will not say ‘girlfriend.’ The word is a trigger for her. The way the word ‘nigger’ twists up inside us when heard. Or read. (did you say that word aloud in your head when you read it? Was it in your own voice? How did it feel?) Adulthood cannot be achieved without a personal list of our trigger words. In the tumultuous world we find ourselves in, they are our rite of passage.

It feels calm lying next to the blonde, walking amongst it in the carpet, unthreading it from my beard. We grocery shop and buy my dog a new leash. She walks ahead of me in the pet store aisle and makes suggestions, placing them in my cart. Parking the car, arriving back home, we exit the vehicle and forget the leash. It is tucked between the center console and the passenger seat. She lets out an ‘oops’. I unlock the car door with the fob. She retrieves the leash and we continue the silent walk home. Leash in her hand. Groceries in mine. Wordless, relaxed. And this scene is so important. The romanticism I feel here is found in the easy way we casually exist with each other. That is all. The way we define our time. We watch John Oliver and eat avocado. We drink from each other water glass. We laugh like backstage comedians do. We argue like old wise friends. We show care, attentively and promptly. We fuck like sojourners and barbaric beasts.

I want the blonde to stay. I want the human I am becoming to become. And I feel it will.

Someday men like us will rise, but it is not today. That day is arriving though, and it is a joyous juggernaught against all the old fears.

[circa1889]

Duvall, Frankenstien, Berman

Midnight passes into those late night hours when the sun is closer rising then it was to set, when nothing matters and nothing in the morning will be remembered but the feel of her skin when you are walking her to the car, needing an emergency visit to a 24 hour pharmacy for her migraine medication. She is drunk and I am drunk, but after so many hours of whiskey it is difficult to tell the difference between sober and not, so, convinced this car is drivable I turn the ignition key and soldier to the main road. She is gorgeous in the bright lights of the passing lamp posts I drive under and I remembered my Walt Whitman- “We were together, I forget the rest." Then this-

It arrives in the same matte brown cardboard box every gadget has arrived, poised upon the door, that familiar Christmas excitement glowing, even like this, even in summer. The arc welder is here. Four months I have spent custom fabricating this vintage motorcycle; I have found a need to teach myself welding. In pieces the bike sits in the yard covered by one stiff sheet of glossy, forrest green tarp. It is wrapped tight like a sausage with cables and elastic cord. These projects of mine, they aid the rolling of one year into the next many. And when I am welding, I am not writing. Months pass and I scare myself thinking too the worlds I am not creating. When I am fixing guitars for friends, I am not writing, and when I am advancing my career, not then either, or if learning computer technology, or training my dog, I am not the writer. Nothing new is happening here, and when our past accomplishments begin to define us, we are nothing but like old Presidents, still alive, but dethroned Kings.

Tristana does not ask for a sample of my writing but I have taken that action. I am handing her the five small chapbooks I had constructed years ago about the breakup, about the booze, about the girls.

“I am not going to fluff your feathers you know,” She is wide eyed and speaking at me, “I am not going to say it’s good if it is not.”

“This is not for your critique,” I tell her. “It’s just for reading. You say I never open up. You say I am the definition of an emotionally unavailable man. This is me opening up.” I hand her the books from my collection, hand stapled, printed on cheap bleached paper from the inkjet printer in my apartment. “I want you to read this. I want you to know me.”

“Fuck you Higgins.” Tristana days later is crying and texting me like this in a grocery store aisle under the humming florescent tubes. What have I done wrong? I text her this question and she responds. “Nothing. You’re writing is just so good. I am not reading a friends writing, I am reading an author’s novel. Fuck you so hard for that.” She is distraught, and upset, and she comes by it honestly. Five years she spent with Jim, engaged to marry actually, and only weeks ago the engagement, the relationship, her love, had disintegrated. Five years does not quit when five years is up. New furniture cannot wash a lover away, nor new apartment keys, nor medical marajuana taken to excess. Five years stays in your throat like a head cold now gone, but that cough still lingering inside your lungs. Jim is there, inside Tristana’s throat and lungs when she says to me, “I care for you in ways I am not ready for.” and “You are amazing to me.”

We spend a Saturday night into Sunday morning, talking and fucking, holding each other and listening to old Soul on vinyl. We watch the rain, and it is good. Tristana tugs the rope with my dog. I am watching her thin framed body heave across the carpet as she struggles to pull against the toy. I sip my whiskey, smiling, and pleased. On the couch that night, she cries a bit once, talking about Jim, watching the water stream outside, but she is also horny as I hold her, whispering words into her neck, and then she orgasms inside her denim jeans when no one is touching her. She is shuttering on the couch, fully clothed in my arms. I have found an astonishing woman.

In the morning, her black bra is draped over the oatmeal colored lamp shade beside my bed. Tristana is seated in my living room, awake, alone, petting the dog and reading one of my books. Her tank top is draped loose like some flag after Fourth of July weekend when the morning air is now lazy, placid, and cleared of it’s bombs. Her nipples are showing and she makes no adjustment, simple looks up, smiling, and hands me a taco left over from our feast the night before. She is surely an impassable woman. 

Nothing is resolved this weekend. She is still weary of me. Scared to love again. And I am unsure of what I want. So I focus again on the task at hand, hoping that time will clear the muddled piles. The arc welder is waiting for me to lay its first slag bead across the practice, scrap steel. The welds are messy. But the welds are mine. And isn’t that how it goes? Give it time, I tell myself. You will get the beautiful welds you want some day. Patience, and time. And I say, just enjoy the work for now. 

Because when everything becomes easy, when everything is one day understood, you will never get those days of healthy struggle back, ever again.

[circa1889]

Me and Irma, Starved Rock State Park

[circa1889]

My bell

She asks about your motorcycle, but never about your writing. This can be for us, clue one that she will never love you as you deserve. 

It is night. The day has exhausted itself. The western sky is busted up good with purple and crimson bruises. You watch her lips form sensuous, obtuse angles when she pronounces words like: 

Taffy. 

Fuckboy. 

Coming. 

She talks and you fall in love with language again, and it feels good. 

In what light is left, you watch your outer thighs scrape against her inner, but she is not looking at you this time. A fog has filled her eyes. She is traveling away now, somewhere distant, staring at your left bedroom wall. But you like her. A little more each day, even though tomorrow she will find someone else; she has found someone else, just when you were beginning to open like you never never do.

You get to wondering if all anyone really wants from you is nothing in the end, because you are always left with those exact rations. Every time. It is expected. Like how Dad’s old Harley always fired up on the first kick, like you knew it would happen, of course it would. Like valve work. Like clocks.

You could love again, it must be believed you are worthy of at least that. Maybe someone spectacular will wisp your way. Maybe they will be nothing special, but they sure as hell will be love. 

More perhaps: Maybe they will charm you, calm you, rub your hands every night, knead their finger nails into your chest hair as you grab the clutch, toe up to second gear. She hugs tight trying to not fall off the bike’s rear. The helmet hides your secret smile. And maybe this will be enough for you, purring, satiated, happy in your years.

But maybe, just maybe, she will be gargantuan in her love. You will be made to breath mystic tarot fate and bonfire. She will stay the night and the bedroom will light up like seance candle wicks scorching. She will be dark and she will be wonderful and her eyes will glare into your own as she mouths those words. You will get to keep her. She will get to keep you.

And she will ask about your motorcycle.

And she will ask to read your writing.

[circa1889]

takearideonthewildside1

[circa1889]

NhghtmWthtHr

It is one A.M. on a Tuesday and they are drunk, loud as fog horns in a midnight harbor. Their cigarette smoke is eating the clean air alive with grey bile and mouth smog. The fumes are putrid. I fall asleep in my bed, three stories above the street. Even the dog on the floor is coughing in her sleep. 

The band is playing a grinding, ratcheting noise. The tones filter through the plaster walls. I can decipher only power chords and a snare drum, popping. It hits like a broken metronome, like far away fireworks or perhaps gun fire on the block. It’s hard to tell the difference when you're awake without warning. But it’s the band, it is mostly always the band. Thumping away like a rock and roll lifestyle they will never achieve or become. 

Perhaps I can text her, get a word on the wire. Perhaps she’s awake too, the woman, thinking of a man like me. Waiting for a word, or a signal, or a savior. I could be just that savior, if she believed in me enough, or asked. I pet the pooch and rub one out in the dark but it burns on account of my chapped hands and I savor the pain afterward for four seconds and a half, before it settles upon me that I am actually, really alone. 

And the cigarettes smoke is residing. A willing wind whips upon my legs. The bristled hair there finds cotton and imitates its softness well. I smile and think of her. Then I do not, for a while. I walk backward through my day until it slips into tomorrow. The dog is faithful and needs to pee. It is morning, somehow. She will shit her little pants before the sun rises. Did I forget to take her out last night?

I spin through the following day. There is bread in the freezer (how long has it been there?). Bald rubber tires have more traction than me. I do not have time before work to defrost. Hungry. Maybe more than hungry. I pant with my tongue out until it is dry. 

And I remember the days I was once alone and regretful. Also- 

I remember the days I was paired to her, and just the same.

[circa1889]

[circa1889]

[circa1889]

Irma Lies Beside Me Now

One day ago I was drinking you like water, forcing liquids down my esophagus, lapping up, and now you do this.

Two more shoe strings chewed up by my dog, she lies lazy as a Mono bedside water glass.

Three more Advil and the pain in my Fuck You might go away.

Four days into July I will see fireworks that you outshine, no, now no, outshown.

Five fingers, two inside you, one was never enough to make happen that uproarious moan, three left over, I wriggle one into your asshole, a bigger moan, but one finger I have saved for sternly pointing the way to the front door, the last is for flicking you off as you leave, you have left, I am alone again and wondering why.

Six bullets in a cowboy’s gun, each one worthy of me.

Seven layers of skin I have watched pierced on you like holy tattoo needles making God out of our flesh.

Eight balls never cared much for lying, I was too old to bother with the superstitions of youth but should have listened anyway.

Nine years old when I was twenty one, my lord you kiss now like you have never had one.

Ten ways to say I care, I cared, I care now only about myself.

[circa1889]

Count um, 3 hand blisters making major progress on the '77 Honda restore.