Feeling like dying is one thing, separate
from feeling like wanting to die.
Dying is probably another thing
entirely; like something that just happens,
like a twelve-year molar wiggling out of a gum socket.
I went out tonight
and my head felt like a school of fish.
Athens is still wildly the same.
Different waves, tender ripples
here
and there -- and even
under the moon,
brilliantly lapping on the bank of a murky pond.
My thoughts tend to drift like little heaps of junky rotten brush.
my dead grandpa -- and how he always had
some kind of grime --
grime under his finger nails
and in between the fleshy pads of skin
of his palm
looping and threading
the fishing line round and round
up through the knot
twisted three times
and tightened.
Most of the time,
time would pass by so slow on that lake. so slow
I wouldn't care and leave the pole in the mud.
go around and round
make up my own country
look at ants
throw rocks and garbage into the water.
The drag would snap, though,
and he would reel in a fish
with its gills gasping
in and out
and in --
pierced through the throat
cut with the hook that it swallowed.
When I threw down a large rock,
the fish's misrable head
looked like a smashed
candy wrapper
looking into nowhere.
Everything moves so cloudy and dreary tonight,
Hands on my arms and arms tight,
naturally shivering.
I never want to see this night again
asleep, awake, or in a photograph.
The streets are as dry as chalk
and if you close your eyes
everybody's voices and
footsteps
blend together
and sound like something being swallowed
by something huge, tireless,
and patient.
2 comments:
cool beans, man. christomazic.blogspot.com
be cool
She's a beaut in many ways. Complete and quite taut and not too tautological (oh that's shit; I just wanted to use that word).
Seriously though, "huge, tireless, and patient" and just swallowing it all. I am reminded there of "The Theif of Always", Clive Barker's first real kids book. There is the Holiday House that behaves quite similarly with time. A murky pond there as well.
I love your head, a school of fish, and Athens, making noise like a murky pond, draws a fast and true parallel to that place of youth where you made up your own country. Much the same wherever you go in life. You make up the place you live in, inhabit, visit. It's all about where you've been and what you've seen, and it's all just waiting to be snapped out on a line, and gushed for what may seem like naught, but if for naught, naught matters if not.
And your grandpa too: your head that night like a school of fish, and he a tireless focused fisherman with hands of grime. He snaps your mind out of where ever it was and into memories of him just as deftly as he snaps the fish out of the pond.
Ahh, it's quite hard to have this conversation to a computer screen. I look most fondly on those late evenings we had discussing song lyrics or poems, or simply spent in the silence of our own thoughts - perhaps Shakespeare warbled through my mind and your latest creation in your own. There was a power in those evenings and that apartment at that time.
See email sent today 9/27 for further fun.
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