MACON SUN

I pushed my hands into the Tempurpedic and while watching it reform considered the fleeting nature of our prints. It doesn’t take too long for us to conform to things, or for things to conform to us. We all have these things, these contortionist connections that we consider visceral until we are no longer considered.

My wallet always mumbles things about creature comforts. I ask about necessity but it too often hangs out with other wallets. Nauseous when full, it spews what I supposedly earned, what I supposedly am worth, back into some compound of shared debt. The only reason I bought that mattress in the first place was because my wallet peaked from chinos bunched against the foot of someone’s bed. I gathered that it thought I slept well, because a few days later I slept on a similar bed with a similar someone. It all felt more or less the same. Our body heat collected in our sunken imprints and crawled towards the edges of the bed. The guy who sold it to me said something about a comfortable transition, micro-this and anti-that, but I lost him in my dwellings about comfort. Our connection faltered when I pulled away from someone I wasn’t ready to father and fell asleep. Is that our only connection?

We bear children, and bear children, although we don’t have to. It can’t be that difficult for us to just leave. Families are forced. I can disappoint my family, but they will still fake pride and they will still hear my muted self. They will try to keep my sanity because they feel that my sanity is some relative offshoot of their own. Families branch from the same trunk but there are always holes for feral animals, there is always something underneath the bark. The other branches do not fall because of the severance of another, they may sink with what the fallen branch leaves but they do no fall. Family members act the parts that held no auditions. This earth supports families of thespian therapists but there’s nothing that they can say or do that will ever from me when I say or do nothing, or something, or everything in all, or some, or none of the wrong ways. Everyone is eventually left behind.

I don’t ask for any answers.

Like the mattress that swallows the prior night’s mistake, hugging her more than I did, keeping her longer than I would, the Bible Belt, that never kept my pants around my waist, embraces those ethereal comforts of a fourth dimension that also houses notions of love. There may be things in the atmosphere but I don’t consider smog heavenly. Do our souls venture beyond and figure out we were doing it all wrong? There can’t be any truth in the truth we consider, not with so much out passed the clouds that our road trips created.

We talk about love as if it’s not just about fucking.  We talk about fucking as if it’s not just about fucking. We talk about god as if it’s about something more than comfort, something more than conformity.

I just want to keep my mind when and wherever I go, line my coffin with memory foam for the irony. 

Each speck accumulated about the concrete while nerves did the same in our throats. Aerosol spouts leaked potential fines and potential land mines. These are volatile facades with hotheaded decorators wielding flame-tossing aluminum. These are the missives of the pen names, dismissive of the pork chops who should be out with their hooves tied up, rotisserie style, by criminals with so much clout in the streets that they need not mark them. But breakouts sprout up down here, too. The pubescent blemishes of the city are easier to squeeze out than the hardened scar tissue. So they finger around the concrete canvases, the fingernails of the hand that feeds attempting to pinch us out. We sprayed and sprayed and then the lights reflected against the fresh collage of our community so we ran and ran. The swine with badges caught someone as I caught the next train out. From the caboose I watched him try to refute but cue the amazing mace. Each speck accumulated above his cheeks as his ducts leaked the guilt towards his neck. I watched my exhalation mist as I coasted away from the cloud of supposed justice. 

Because I can disappoint my family but
they will still fake pride and they will still hear my muted self,
they will still try to keep my sanity because they feel that
my sanity is some relative offshoot of their own. So they will
sit still on their respective branches as I fidget and fall.

They will act the part that held no auditions.
Families of thespian therapists but there’s
nothing they can say or do that will sever them from
me when I say or do nothing, or something, or everything
in all, or some, or none of the wrong ways.
It likely all sounds exactly the same.

Because I never earned my family.

Acting affluent, a fluency in shopping through sheets of glass,
Acting affluent, a fluency in catalogs but no trust fund, just fun.

Doormen open up the steel pedestals to stale podiatrists and
Oncologists and optometrists, and all kinds of cysts, that’s the gist.

Everything shone as silver as the ‘ware we slurped gelato from,
or some rich custard, the lipid deposits of the biggest withdrawals.

Funds depleted doesn’t mean the fun’s depleted,
Rich bitches whose parents conceded, whose parents relieve it.

And though I was scraping above the peasants and pigeons,
If, in any magnitude, they can be distinguished, as I felt I was,

From the balcony hanging over the bourgeois, scoffing at Jersey City
was the penthouse of the upper crust, of which I nibbled but bit no hands.

I laid my head down and thought that the pillows were just as stiff as I.

Highbrow hipsters strut the Aves with slouch bags
toting fifty-plus hours of residue
just below the eyelashes once masked.
Mostly sober minds yearn to restitute.

Sweet & Low lies kiss the bottlenecks of
low calorie beer. Low caliber lore
drips snarling and vain from deep in the throat
where starlet spent a regrettable hour.

Every glowing weekend rears behind the blinds.
Daylight lethargy flushed by swank lattes
with swirly styling’s of barista blends.
Fifty hours leave an unabashed trace.

Intrepid carousers, they face the week,
But, of good intentions they cannot speak.

“Sometimes She’s Everything”

Sometimes she’d have those stark tan lines
that were socially acceptable before today’s solar coffins.
The borders of her midriff yield the slightest curve:
A slope’s subtleties yearning to be carved
by wandering hands, whose owner wonders in silence
if this is the path less traveled.

And then there’s the bodacious curve,
out of midnight the silhouette is faintly carved,
the stars pick up her honey glow in silence.
Locked in claustro-intimacy, nestling in our coffin.
Sopping together in a bedroom sauna, any and all lines
are circumvented or broken as the spilling ebony oil travels.

Her body’s architecture, the arches, I’d deconstruct in silence,
By whose blueprint was she drafted? By who was she carved?
Those legs, twisted about silken disarray, should never see the inside of a coffin,
I’d perish if it meant preserving the way those appendages curve.
My lips drown in anticipation of what direction they would travel,
Artistry with gall, I’ve got words for each and every one of her lines.

But there are always felines and feed, and unanswered phone lines,
And with waiting I’d ponder her pending availability in silence.
In a game of fastballs, she’d tease like the elusive curve
that one would swing at with futile abandon as it carved.
Bohemian adulteress, she thralls in her one-night travels,
She would shudder at a resilient partner, monogamy likened to a coffin.

Sometimes she’d kiss red cups and I’d kiss hers, tasting the curve
that rounds out the sharp witted gall of any suitor – stuttered lines.
Her drunken jocularity infectious as the brewed courage travels,
sloshes, and capsizes butterflies that would’ve fluttered you into silence.
She’d be the weakened knee of Atlas, the voice boxes turned coffins.
A specter in the dating circle with many a man’s tombstone carved.

On some mornings she’d wake up from her slumber travels
with her face lathered in the wake of my drool, bodies carved
into the mattress, pretenses and precautions void during our silence.
In the Antemeridian, giddy, my fingers would stumble about the curve
of her hips, my stubble would linger about her jaw lines,
and this bed of mine, I would think, would be a suitable coffin.

Sometimes my body’s architecture would be built around her lines,
Sometimes, whoever she was that day, we’d plan our travels,
Sometimes, she’d say everything in silence.

It’s a shelter in the traditional sense, in that the place provides shelter throughout the day. There are no overnight stays. There are few rooms altogether, let alone vacancies. The listless folks mingling inside aren’t there for lodging, there are other places throughout the city for that. This is a unique place of refuge without a laundry list of chores or strict timelines. There is simply the time when doors open and then later on when they close. I stop by every week just to listen and observe. I take notes, but only mentally. Homeless people are riveting. They’ve all got stories to tell and they’ve all got the time to tell them.

Conversations range from failed relationships to the machoism and bravado of “professional” wrestling. I snidely found it comical that one man could rattle off all of the movies that wrestling stars have appeared in. I felt that that connection there was obvious, but I can’t knock him for liking what he does. I pulled the weight of our two-man team of pseudo-consultants. There’s nothing about us that rings therapist, but the conversations are therapeutic enough. They are for me on the listening end of things, so I assume that it’s reciprocated for those unveiling. 

I was apprehensive, internally, to try and pose as a pseudo-therapist in plain cloth. Although that’s not necessarily what we were there to be, I felt that we would be perceived as an intrusive “helping hand.” The same kind of superficial help that patronized the homeless. I felt as though there were pretenses jittering about. I thought that they felt we were just book kids: sheltered, spoiled, not yet disillusioned, disenchanted. I’ve overheard some vexing muttering: ”I was better off in prison,” “What are all these normal people doing here?” and “I wasn’t going to talk to those mother fuckers.” I tried to ignore it all, ironically the exact opposite of what we intended to do during our visits. It’s amazing how quickly these folks can stuff your tail between your legs; it’s something they’re often prone to, they know what it takes. Judge slowly, get to know me. I felt myself wanting them to hear my story, too. But their stories are better and told less often - a novelty, a bonus feature, deleted scenes.