paramnesia

by the time i decided to ween myself off prozac i was having deja vu once, if not twice or more, each and every day. the repetition of that eerie been there feel bored so often it lost all mystique.
with each fleeting moment of pause: to grasp for frame of reference, was this a dream? was this before? builds until the pattern of occurrence holds more relevance than the memory. false memory. false past.

foggy nights indoors. that huge drafty house that creaked with ghosts. he was two and never stayed up past ten then. keeping the t.v. on in every room i tricked myself into feeling surrounded by the real world while i lived in my head. i would shuffle into his room and stand over his sleeping sound. i would check to make sure he was breathing. i could not handle his leaving and keeping him alive was more important than cultivating his life. as a mother, all i could shoulder were the basics.

his childhood should have been sacred. it was my duty to mark the stepping stones. rungs on a ladder. pencil marks on a door frame. i muddled every milestone. i can’t separate what smile he gave me, young and pliable, from the many screams the many many desperate cries. i wonder if i really said ‘i love you so incredibly much’ as often as i thought the words - or if i only held you close in dreams. in sleep in wake in between. the lines are fuzz.

i had lied through my teeth when the doctor asked how much i drank each day. i had nodded knowingly when he mentioned liver damage and stomach ulcers. what could be worse than seeing your son die multiple times in a day? how could i know that my mind had such powers of premonition, that i could picture so many scenarios. car accident. gunshot. lightening strike. all involving blood, gushing from his tiny button nose, from his baby ears, sometimes a seizure, sometimes he’d cry out and say, momma help me. i couldn’t bare the thought and yet i could hear it. excruciatingly. happening every goddamn day.

and now he’s not so little. now he comforts himself with junk food and television and i let him. as a mother all i can shoulder are the basics. his lethargy, his apathy, his total disenchantment i can't bare to accept my fault. i tell myself this must be a phase before finding his true grown self, i shudder. i remember a time tousling his baby blonde hair in sunshine and his abandoned laughter, something with rainbow swirled bubbles rising above our happy faces. i wonder if it was a dream. i can’t name the place or time. it’s been four years since i woke each morning to drop that white and blue pill down the back of my throat. still no gag reflex. still no definitive line between reality and the world in my head. living an uninspired memory. leaving a unreflected life. cat’s in the cradle and i can’t remember the next line. hell, i can’t even remember why we were singing.

tonight the frontier has failed us
there isn't any light to see the way
we are high on moonlight
soulshine spastic perfume

meet and greet.

hi i am so fucking stupid. i have been known to drink mike’s hard lemonade. this makes me a sellout and reaffirms my citizenship.i am a slob. though somehow i forever find myself picking up after my son who hates me and himself you’d think he was a teenager with his loathing and self pity and emo face all the time but he’s nine/my son inherited my most prominent characteristics. also i am jealous of successful suicide attempts i want that kind of freedom. 

i have been told i am incapable of happiness. internally i am very aware that i am a hot mess, emotional and constantly attempting to link to another human being in a genuine mutual coherence however i come off a total bitch like i hate you and everything you stand for which is nothing. happiness comes from within.

 
i am cold. ever held a conversation with a wall?

 
i am so blinded by my rage towards christianity that i cannot accept a saved soul.
if you mention something about loose ties to any such theology holding dear to your heart i will instantly demote you to retard status in my mind. in my defense my hatred was hard earned having spent my childhood entrenched in a southern baptist wolf pack. i was atheist from birth and these gods were thrust upon me. i didn’t speak their language and could barely withstand the force of such dogma but i was a child who wanted so much to be loved and understood that i gave god my all and cried out for him often in between bouts of cursing his silence. 

writing is how i communicate the white noise i carry. white noise maintains the indecipherable.
i would have lost my virginity at fifteen but i was deathly afraid god would make me the next mary and impregnate me with the second coming if i so much as looked at my own vagina.
i am incredibly self centered. pay attention i'm not worth it. you’ll notice this entire jabber is all about me no one is listening no one is reading no one me me me.

i watch the jersey shore religiously. most of what you say to me goes over my head.
the lights are on but no one is home.i got married once because my parents told me to.
at sixteen i was diagnosed as ‘oppositional defiant’. when i am introduced to new faces they more often than not think i hate them i don’t come off well cause i’m really trying to make a good impression and be liked well that’s my intention. i generally dislike most people i meet. statistically speaking that means you. and the people i do like i love and love harsh like love did me i will love you to death (this would be goth) and i will try to hold you too close you interpret my holding as pushing away somehow i have never understood how i work like that all alone and in the end well in the end you end up leaving for somewhere (someone) warmer.

u&i

I tell you to e-mail me
because I know we are
the last of the last
generation for whom
e-mail was once new
and that you have trouble
turning your machine on

landing.

on a train bound for solace, our ultimate incline, i stumble cross harlot's dinner car. scuffled my knees a bit but pride took punches like cabbage patch kids adopted by catholic priests. plastic dimples and christ limbs to chew.
back to the shuttle bus, double-decker. my seat was awkward between two layers. the have-knots and the knot-haves. spiral. i kept my head balanced with site sees like mind drones, willing to cut switch run. and then there was all the dazzle, the side tracking glimmer of the life that appealed to my whimsy. the window ultimately sucks like cups all memory of this ride. watching all you fuckers pass by. cornfields and exit ramps one by one.
and as quick as the choo-choo blue, i was back on still canvas from said film strip. this is what i can't recall of the before and in between. i mean the boxcar and the spot where the presumable x lies in wait. see, solace hides deserving souls searching wildly for reception. results in man e. faces. only three but two too man e.
back to the bus stop, i caught my name on poster board above all the grabbing heads. to my total "fuck, i saw this coming" he brought a black permanent marker down from his face and scribbled me out (and bubble letters are so cute). hindsight exhales relief for potential in dumbingdown, default remedy.
The depot is filled to the brim; they mass all around me now. smug cause even though they've all got off at the wrong stop - all their welcome wagons got the memo. so until when i'm just mingling, not really concerned with names and trying not to make eye contact with the conductor. he's insisting this trip is round.

(this is the first -december 2008- blog post i ever did write and surely no one has ever read.)

You Were My Bruised And Broken Fence

[news: Ryan Sheffield & The Highhills have an album by the same name of this blog, and it is superb.]

These days I don't get so nervous. I type with my eyes closed. I sweat most of the time. That's not true. I hardly sweat. I feel like dancing, I feel like telling you something you don't know, but you know everything, you knew everything, you, you feminine you.

You'd love me to believe that everything's going to be alright. I'll tell you this about hard work: it doesn't always pay off. Brewing a pot of coffee, though, that always pays off. Stop breaking down. Stop breaking off. Stop coupling with those who'd prefer you dead.

There are those who are bad for the world and perhaps they are alive because it's inappropriate to kill them.

a scientist can't just say because.

you had no way of knowing how incredibly drunk i was or was capable of being and still standing on my own two feet. you hadn't seen me in two years or talked to me in three. i was free for the evening a total runaway and you could see me and speak aloud instead of just a wink across the produce section at walmart. i fucking hate walmart but bargain shopping is all i can ever afford.

sounds crazy sure but by the time we picked you up to scout for a bag i had downed at least eight beers and that was just the past hour and a half. back then my consumption started at lunch, even at work, a miniature collection of rumplemintz in my bottom back filing cabinet. it was normally sometime between six and seven that everything would go blank. a normal weekday i would make dinner feed the kid put him to bed and wake up surrounded by ripped loose leaf scribblings and broken cassette tapes in the all too sick morning having no memory of anything other than getting behind the wheel to pick him up from daycare around five. i wonder still how no one ever smelled the drunk, called me out, called the cops. guess i have inane powers of concealing total dependence.

i vaguely recall sitting on your lap in the back of a mutual friend's corsica trying to chew back the vomit from breathing in stale cigarette from fifteen year old upholstery. you were running your nicotine stained fingers up and down my thigh saying you're so cold get warm and me thinking for fucks sake i'm about to die of heat exposure spare me your worn game. but drunk turns your mind round quick and your pitiful play made me want you to run your fingers higher and hang around that's my downfall rooting underdog at my own expense.

we scored a seedy dime bag and you hid me home not mine but yours and i was happy to balance the drunk swirl with a smooth high plain i wanted desperately to be more on top of my obvious misplaced lust chance. did you lead me to the bathroom or was i already there? or you knocked on the door like can i join you me like let me wipe first? how did you kiss me there leaning up against your rusted sink complete with crusted toothpaste spat or did i totally switch on the whore and invite you in as i took a long drunk leak non aware. and just before i realized the mix of weed and st. ides had fucked me for you i felt you yank at my belt loops. tugging down. i always hated that nasty shit. st. ides/drunk fucking your call.  i hate both but i take what i'm offered.

nomatter you were there and he was somewhere else and lord knows i had waited so long to be free and here i was straight getting fucked over a toilet. no idea where exactly except that i was ghetto somewhere i was never supposed to be and hoping helpless that i would be graced with total lack of memory of this fake fuck moment. 

i woke up drooling on the bathroom floor some five hours later smelling the yellowed piss film that circled your commode. you offered me toast or coffee which was hospitable considering it was the twentieth and food stamps are hard to make last. you said you'd call me a cab you couldn't pay for but the only thought in my head was that sparks tastes kind of like orange juice and that would do for breakfast how long would it take me to stumble to seven eleven i had to get home by lunch time make pigs in a blanket for the kid.

I Wore You Like A Sweater

The day of the Valentinean hordes nears. Candles burn in the corners of a thousand rooms, patchouli oil burning and haze of lust quenching everything looming rooming -- broken hearts and bitter pills. We don't, we don't, we don't. We find ourselves in bars the country wide, coast to coast, fairly madly scanning the horizon for something, anything, nothing. The darkness brings in that kid Tony. He only comes out at night. I'll smoke another cigarette in memory of his map of the world. He figured on something new. He figured on this and he threw away all of that.

You would love me to believe that diet soda is now bad for me. The soda companies are just trying to see if this will increase sales of non-diet soda or not. I still mix my whiskey with it.

Pretzels and trail mix and pringles and pizza and boxes thereupon. All of it gone last gone; you think I don't know you, you think I don't know what I'm writing about any longer.

Evenings in February
when the weather nerves me up
& I think of little besides the past
when the bottles empty themselves
& I bury the dead again (at last)

this radio doesn't catch your wave
I lost your signal doll & I don't
anymore know how to apologize
and plus nobody wants to try too hard

I stand hunched over the dresser
wishing you were alive again
to forgive me (again)

we broke down every one of their lies
we knew these moments were precious
we metastasized everything in sepia

they forbade you from me
we forbade it all with lit cigarettes
& flash in the pan madness

I still think that lipstick wasn't your shade
I still wish you had worn the aqua green

let's not pretend for even a second
that I'll ever have that house in the country
or that I'll ever be a sculptor long enough
to build a statue in your memory

I know you didn't mean it
I know you didn't mean it
I know you didn't mean it
I know you didn't mean it

I tried to drown myself several months later
& lied about it when they found me
my grandmother gave me some pain medication
"to try and get back the feeling"

60 Cigarettes Later

I am not a lost soul.

I still love her.

I forgot what's right.

I've learned how to make money. I am making this computer buy me a new computer so that I can use that computer to pay off my incredibly incurable and unforgivable debts.

Few things are right. There remains little to nothing common about sense.

One time I was good at selling dope. My grandmother and my cousin died that year, and I lost my mind. Don't ever envy me.

Those who aren't lying are simply full of shit.

Roughly 90 days and I can put Texas behind me. It felt good that night talking to her. She said I should call her back later, and I was so wasted. I just said that probably wouldn't be a good idea. I'm not sure if she believed me. Then again I know she believes every word out of my mouth. It's a responsibility thing.

So I'm definitely going to buy that house.

Mark Zuckerberg is probably not a very good person.

I like my wrist rest. I like my foot rest. I like my coffee grinder. The cup you gave me. The car I wrecked. My precious Ray-Bans.

All of these things are destined to be dust in the wind.