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.

prophetic lethargy

ending before starting. scenario doesn't seem possible logically but logically those are the words that describe such gut feeling. potential a realm. a possibility but so is the moon. reaching without movement. mind is itching, involuntary spasms of leap lets. please
stretch. and instead morissey is the skip the repeat singing inside  me hang the dj hang the dj hang the dj hang the meaning any motives left limp at the door shed them a claw hook of shame 
show you won't dance along make no sounds of your own. worth can't assemble
noise before thought.
is just that: coherence to crash. creativity bore such placid snap. i dig that
urge. the pursuit of just enough ego to force words clear among chatter.

& I Remember You & Me Used To Spend The Whole Goddamn Day In Bed

Hey Baby,

I spent this last week working the shit out of myself. I saw your reflection in my reflection and I passed out on the floor with blood boiling in my brain. I don't think my body is in its best shape. I'm feeling pains in parts of my body: my back, my feet. I fucked your sister last week. It was her idea. I don't know why I just said that. I probably just made that up. Anyway I've been working on these things, these publishing things, and feeling like I have a purpose in life again. You know that might be the thing the war takes out of you, your purpose, your direction. That might be what the war won't let you bring back. Who knows?

Just before you come back around, I'm sure that I'll be all set up and fancy with some decent bird. I'm sure that everything will be great just then, and then you'll call or show up on the doorstep, and I'll just know that it's over again, that I'm about to lose my mind again. Or maybe this time things will go differently.

After a few months, I can have Third Eye Blind back.

Anyway, I was thinking about you a little tonight. I wanted to do a thing on the facebook or something but it always feels a bit less than real. As does this. As does everything. I wrote a story yesterday. No lie. Nope, I'm keeping this one under my name. Because fuck it and fuck them, yeah? Probably a lot of those people don't even know what love is or feel the need to demand the right to have something to stay up late talking about.

I'm still buying that house I showed you. Fuck your father and the banking system of America, but I'm going to buy that house I told you about. And then I'm going to buy a new car and then I'm going to marvel at what a fucking citizen I suddenly am. And then probably we'll find a way to throw it all away together. Little powder here, little stupid there; we're never any good until we've fallen off the chair.

Yours,
PHM

When I Was Punk I Was Way More Punk Than You

I don't feel so confident in myself these days, even after victory. I could go outside today and achieve exactly and everything I want to achieve and I would still not be confident in myself, not like I used to be. This is one of the things the army has taken from me. I would also love to blame public thrashings on various forums, but the truth is that I don't care all that much what people say about me.

Other things include the year 2009.

I don't want to talk about the army.

Whatever happened to our little tribe?

We better be careful, doll, or he's going to offer us a ride.

prick.

it's been years since you were
close enough to push
forward
i fell without
moving
a muscle comparison

Non serviam

god might smile same as
mine if only i saw
him
mirror feel
i deify reflection

--MLK

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A girl told me that I am her soulmate. I told her truthfully that I get that (relatively) a lot. She was not okay with me telling her that. Guess I won't be seeing her anymore. I can see how it was a dick move, but I was trying to tell her to slow the fuck down what the fuck? Ah fuck it. Life goes on.

Sobriety

A few days ago, I began a self-imposed sixty-day period of sobriety, in which I would keep a daily journal with numerous entries made to fight the urge to get drunk or whatever. Well, I fell off the wagon, but I am about to get back on, and I will just re-start the journal. I finally got my oil changed. I washed my sheets of you. Things don't matter. So forgive me all my anger, forgive me all my faults.

call me god.

in a dream an unknown told me glenn close had died. maybe a subliminal radio announcer or a cornered television. dreams with specifics: numbers, first and last names, times, should be noted. more than likely ominous.

i awake and onward i stop to get gas on the way to make money to buy more gas and as soon as i open the car door and stand upright i check the outlying areas for white work vans (conversion) or movement in bushes. still. vigilance and paranoia hold hands in my brain folds. i understand that it will be. the one quick run across the wal-mart parking lot without becoming familiar with terrain beforehand yes that would be the one time crime scene scrapes my brains up from pavement. my destiny filled, an evidence ziplock. remember 2002 and now it’s 2010. my boy was six months old in that october 02, when i took him out of his car seat to have his pictures taken at sears family photo. terrified to cross the lot to the mall and all i could think of was and all i could see was in my mind projected, his baby skull splattered by sniper shot and me the momma bear, holding his limp remains thinking why didn’t i keep him home. sears autumn backdrops are hardly worth such regret. but i made my legs move and let my eyes dart quickly and trusted their sights. and it was because i was so afraid and watching seen and unseen that we survived at all. remember what kurt said about being watched and knowing.

now safe at work contained in my cube. finally, the task at hand: glenn close is not the headline news or currently trending yahoo. therefore, she is still breathing and also not in jail or wearing a device to monitor her alcohol consumption. disheartening my dreams hold no power of premonition or elsehow wires were crossed. still. vigilance and paranoia hold hands in my brain folds. i understand it will be.

Submission to an Internet Asshole

(written at 1039 Harlem Avenue in 2007, published in Here Lies An American Dreamer, and now marking the first random sore to pop on this particular/new internet asshole)

Until it happens that I'm fluid and lucid, blank paper. Trying too hard. I've become lazy. A good sentence is a fillet in a sea of fat. This room should be clean. Colder days should not be forgotten because I'm always two steps from more of them. May the music fade to background. Everything should be as free as air and time's more valuable than any currency.

I dreamed in detail of a revolution this morning.

Consider this hand exercise. Masturbation. Guess that's both. I think I'll refine this and send it down a dark internet asshole. Haven't even got the internet at home—I currently operate on a war-torn laptop and at the library. I'm definitely refining this into one of those pieces whose only quality is the allure of the spastic mind, then submitting it to an internet asshole for publication. I maybe should delete that sentence but I won't. I don't think my newfound laziness is the result of things being too easy, I think after a period of continual frustrated failure I began to lower my standards of good until I wound up in this basement room. Pretty sure my jail cell was bigger, and that didn't cost anything. Someday I'll be famous or infamous. Jack Kerouac or David E. Winters or someone, anyone, who didn't fail forever. Motivation is a fleeting flighty whore when you live on the bottom—memories of rich guys who recognized our similarities but never our disparity in starting point sicken me. Had I been born with loot, it stands to reason that by now I'd have stolen more from this society of dedicated slaves. I'd have been successful. Since I was not, it makes sense that I have three two-dollar bills and three one-dollar coins and eight pennies and some food stamps. This song's rhythm always stimulates pen-to-paper. I wonder sometimes how many are actually alive. I write long-hand first, even unto stillborn novels. The current dimmer brilliance is about losing friends when losing psychological stability.

This town could be worse.

If Beth calls, I'm sure I'll leap back on track. Keeping promises and losing weight again. Fat rolls bother me.

Eighth draft of a very ridiculous piece of writing, but I have someone in mind for it and at least I'm doing something right now. Eight drafts, though.

There are days that I just smoke, get munchies, and stare out various windows. Marijuana should be more abundant or simply eradicated—there's never enough of it. Even though it's murder on the work ethic. My balls itch and my body aches. Money baffles me. I'd rather recycle it for loose-leaf paper—there are madmen who kill over the stuff. Also: dirt and oil.

This page is blackened with ink. With the ash of Winston Cigarettes. That was an earlier draft, actually, but here lies an American dreamer. Nonetheless. I've always had faith, even unto the days of squatting and eating from dumpsters: I always believed that war stories could somehow culminate in an end worth the struggle.

Earlier I considered the concept of an ampersand.

Bohemians and pseudo-intellectuals are neither attractive nor any better than real intellectuals. Language has its limits; a smack can sometimes do all of the talking.

A former room-mate was fond of pissing in bed unto the point that he was kicked out of the damn place. At least this roommate's got the dignity of making it to the steps before letting go. I'm too young for this.

Midnight is a full seventeen hour day.

Pricks like me need another person to succeed, an outside reason. Otherwise we just bumble along, doing nothing in particular, until someone or something injects person in us; we're good for military service or surviving potato famines, liberating populations or fighting revolutions, and not much else. Shamrocks might be beautiful, but we're retarded. We'll drink ourselves to death over people we never even thought of loving.

I hate bending my neck. People with stiff necks tend to bother me. I'm over two hundred pounds right now.

It's never been this hard to smile and I've been losing focus for months—the fucking bastard cops really nailed me to the cross this time. Twenty years I've been exposed to money. It still makes me laugh—people actually take this green paper more seriously than life itself even though one bill looks like the next and they all burn at roughly the same temperature. Society is such a beautiful museum when you're poor—a life spent munching table crumbs and window shopping for ways out.

Schedule: Today—fuck off and pretend I can write; Tuesday—work hard for disgusting-but-cash wages; Wednesday—crawl out of basement, go to regular job, step and repeat until Monday: my weekly dream of life in California.

welcome to head for the coast

This is a blog for whatever. I'm going to invite everyone I know who blogs and see what they write. The purpose of this blog is to head for the coast in your head, or to head away from it, or something like that. It's a Saturday afternoon nearing the end of 2010, P. H. Madore is drunk on Seagram's cheap-ass gin.