Craig was looking for a quick place to wait for the strange spell of summer rain to subside when he decided to duck into a magazine shop that he passed on 42^nd Street. As he took cover he noticed his new shoes, soaked. He took a deep sigh, and headed to the “music” section. Craig’s eyes didn’t wander to the peripherals, he was focused. He knew the magazine he was looking for and went straight for it. The magazine shop had a few tables where people could sit and sift through the reading material before eventually deciding to buy it, or just place it back on the shelf for another magazine before eventually walking out without every buying anything. That was the beauty of places like this – that was the beauty of magazines in general. You didn’t have to sit down and invest endless afternoons into character’s that were just going to let you down or die in the end, you could just sift through, pick out things that interest you, and then put it back on the shelf. No investment, no attachment. That’s the way Craig liked things theses days. As he grabbed the issue of the magazine he chose and headed to one of tables, his eyes noticed someone else for the first time since he had entered the shop. There was a woman of about 25, Craig suspected, sitting reading an issue of “Bust” magazine. As his eyes darted around to the other tables, he noticed they were all full, so he sat across from the cute twentysomething. She had dark skin and almond eyes and she reminded Craig of someone. She reminded Craig of another life, with another dark skinned, almond eyed girl, in another magazine shop.

Craig was still in college, he was visiting Olivia in the city during her internship. She was going to be a big shot photographer for the magazines and he was going to be an important writer for them. They were the perfect team in every sense. They each were so young and full of passion, it was boiling out of them. They were both young enough to still feel like they had purpose and they thought they could see it in each other. They were running through the streets of New York in the summer, getting soaked from a spell of summer rain when the ducked inside a magazine shop for safety. Craig’s canvas shoes squeaked from being so wet, and Olivia laughed. Craig laughed back. Olivia pulled Craig’s hand as they rushed to the endless stacks. They hid behind issues of MAD magazine and cheap gossip rags and would make up stories about all the squares sitting at the tables. Cindy from accounting was reading an issue of Men’s Health to give her obese boyfriend Randy some diet tips…and to read up on what guys really want in the bedroom. Stan the business executive was reading Under the Radar to impress his hipster niece he was trying to bang, inbred yuppie scum. They laughed and took trashy quizzes in issues of Cosmo. But after a while, they made their way to the magazines they really wanted to read. After a while, each had a magazine and made their way to a table and sat and read.

Then they wouldn’t speak, they would sit opposite the other, intensely reading and looking at the photographs. It was as if they were studying. They read articles and articles and articles in complete silence, each maybe cracking a half smile, or exchanging the slightest of glances to subtly let the other know they had just liked a line they had read or really approved of a photograph they had seen. Occasionally the silence would be broken for Craig or Olivia to tell the other about an article they thought the other would like…but only if they thought the other would like it. Neither would break to share something they merely thought was interesting, for all the articles they read they thought were interesting, that’s why they read them, that was the beauty of magazines. Not only were they specialized already, but you didn’t need to waste your time reading something you didn’t like, you could just invest in what you wanted to. They knew each other well, and would share articles on what the thought the other liked. It was truly bliss. They sat effortlessly, indulging in what each loved and sharing the images and words they thought were most special. They didn’t need to fill the airspace with incessant conversation that would come up in time anyway and eventually fill the air stale until they would choke on it. In those days they could just sit in silence and indulge themselves in their passion, in the things that they each loved, and do it together. And it was perfect. The two of them stayed in there for hours, long after the rain stopped.

But that was a different lifetime ago, Craig thought. The thirty year old bachelor defined love much differently these days. But then again, perhaps that was Craig’s problem. These days Craig had a pretty set definition of what love was, he put it in his terms and he demanded them. But perhaps this was a result of Craig’s job, so it wasn’t completely his fault. Back then, Craig didn’t really define love, he didn’t have to, and it just kind of happened to him, it unraveled like a ball of yarn. It was defined through those moments, so in a sense, love became defined through hindsight. It was difficult to communicate in words; they saw it through gestures, in passing moments. Through the perfect silence at the table, exchanging the infrequent glance and indulging in a photograph. But they were young, and not blessed with hindsight. So instead of putting these moments in mason jars and appreciating them like fireflies, they let them pass each other by, tossing each perfect moment away in hopes of the next fleeting moment of bliss. They didn’t pin it down like a butterfly and marvel at its beauty, fully appreciate the elaborate symmetry and patterns on its back. Instead they were careless with their love, like all young people are. And eventually it fizzled and cracked and dried up.

Craig looked up from his magazine and noticed that the beautiful woman across from him had gone. As he looked towards the door, he saw she was on her out of the store and that it had stopped raining. Craig stood up, put his magazine back on the rack and went back outside to the cruel streets and back to work.

Midnight spaghetti.

In your absence I've returned to some of my old habits. Coming home to a sleeping, disquiet house, stumbling and burping and singing the Pixies off-key in the empty kitchen, dancing with frozen feet on the wet tiles, huddled and rubbing my hands together over the pot of boiling water. Just a few drops of olive oil, and then I delight, stoned out of my mind, at how they dance and converge and separate again.They are like amoebas. We are like amoebas. We are all from one singular nothing. Return me to me this blissful simplicity: spinning drops of olive oil in a teflon-coated pot of boiling water. . . .

But I am not completely alone without you, my dear. He keeps me, for the most part. While I'm eating over the stove, he's threading between my legs, purring loudly, and biting at my jeans to mark his territory. Eventually I must succumb to his demands, and we climb up the stairs to my bedroom, and slam into the wall - grabbing at the air after an involuntary "ouch!"

What looks will the morning bring? What blood-shot eyes part and widen when the trumpet sounds at sunrise from the humming, coughing, hacking bathroom? There is no sleep to be had anywhere in this house. My bed is shared with him, and his nocturnal wont for arbitrary kicking and clawing. Loneliness is a thumping bass drum, a closed door framed in pale luminescence. Love is an arm deprived of its blood, ticklish hair that stays in your nose, and stifled giggles in the quiet night. I fit somewhere in the middle, or in a closet between the two.

alone is best sometimes.

Beyond all the shit, there's something undiscovered.

Hawks (the first part of a story about hawks)

Wiping the trickling beads of sweat with the back of an already moist hand, forced to gaze up there at that big thing losing itself. Unexplainably. And not without the reticulate sprawling across the swaddling blue of the city’s midday sky, falling apart. I didn’t know what to think at the gargantuan tree blatantly crumbling, dismantling in front of me. The synapses running across my wet brain were desperately searching all plausible outlets for some sort of reason. But could find none.

The hulking base of the tree, a seasoned oak of some sort, had split in perpendicular lines from the ground up. The hugest limb had fallen onto the sidewalk, blocked it entirely. It was Rick Leedy’s favorite branch. The dark bark on the ends had given way to the much lighter wood showing from the inside, like the white stuffing spilling out from a burst seam of a teddy bear. This tree was dying and I was watching not only the physical characteristics deteriorate, but could perceive its essence ebbing away, too. There were quiet sobs contained in the leaves’ rustling, directly in time with the slow cadence of death’s overtaking.

Soon I could take no more and turned to go inside. The low moan of the screen door. I was dripping with sweat, so I immediately made my way to the kitchen and ran some water over a sullied rag and generously dowsed my face with it, eyes closed in the minute rapture of the moment.

It didn’t seem that out of place, the tree’s inexplicable and unmitigated demise, not after the couple days that I had had, you know. I opened the refrigerator door, I was breathing loudly, and was met with a cloud of cool fog from inside. It dissipated around my hand as I reached in, opened a chilled beer with granules of ice careening down the sides. Plopped myself down on the orange itchy couch, stared at the green glass bottle. I was in Texas earlier that morning, the bleeding guts of Texas. Dead shit all around me. It was almost forty-five full degrees hotter there than in this place; I couldn’t understand why my sweat glands were giving me such harsh problems about being in this comparably very cool climate. I was gushing, though. Hot from the inside out. Felt my organs boiling. I listened for Rick Leedy upstairs but didn’t hear him. I let my thoughts grow to drape over me. The green glass of the bottle grew in my mind, as did the dismantling tree outside. And it hurt me inside. I shut up my eyes, gulped the bitter liquid down. Went over it all.

Mind blistering, feeling hotter than ever. Eyes darting from point to point, no focus no point of reference determined. I was standing in the longest line, getting chest rubbed down and dick jacked up by this young girl with eyes bigger than a squid’s. Prettier, too. She was chewing gum, just like you’d expect, rubbing in a circle with one hand, tugging vertically with the other. I could smell the citrus emulating from the gum, fake like a car air-freshener. The jelly she was rubbing into my pectorals made them this bright orange putrid color, like the itchy couch. She made occasional popping sounds with the gum, like spoons clicking, but didn’t speak. I didn’t speak, either. A lot of the other guys standing in the gigantic line, they were stammering away. Nervous, bashful, pompous, that and more. All sweaty. I got pissed off. Just shut up, you know? They all had girls, too. Pretty girls. Pretty like lined dolls in a tiny kid’s room. I twirled my head around ballerina style and saw that some of them had coaxed their girls into suckin’ them as we waited. I wasn’t going to try that, though the urge to have my beast buried in something warmer than this squid girl’s clammy hand was very hard to counter. Seeing all of that kind of made me sick; made me think I might have come to the wrong place. They had this blazing guitar music playing over the giant PA speakers, and normally I like blazing guitar music, you know, but not something like this slop. It was all squealy-noted and the drums had tons of reverb on them. Fuck that.

The orange bodypaint mixed with that music made my stomach start to bubble up. Felt a little queasy, so I gently suggested to my girl that I was coated enough.

“They will tell us when they want us to stop,” she said. “I gotta keep going till then.”

“I guess you gotta do what they tell you to do,” I said. I ran a hand across my lips to catch any spittle, then ran it through my hair. “I’m just startin’ to, uh, feel kinda not good.” She smiled up at me, chewing.

She was chewing, still rubbing, still jerking. Some time passed. I could tell she didn’t mind the silence, but I did. The bubbles were building. I wasn’t accustomed to these things, it was my first one. I didn’t know how it worked. So, being ignorant, because that’s what I was to these things, I faltered:

“What’s your name?”

She just stared, chewed, rubbed, jerked. Stopped all of them when she heard my question. Clicked her teeth like she clicked the gum.

“Desire.” Started all of them again.

“No, your real name.”

“Desiree’”

“Oh, one letter. I’m John,” I said. Shouldn’t have, though. Felt ashamed for the first time there, even though I wasn’t wearing any clothes.

“Is that your real name?” Sad smile.

“No,” I said, “But I guess you don’t use your real names for these things anyway. I gotta think of a new name.” She forced a chuckle faker than the tits on the girl blowing the guy behind me.

She stopped what she was doing. “They say you use your middle name, and the street name from where you grew up.” I tried to visualize it in my head.

“Ryan Coventry.” I showed her some teeth.

“Not bad,” she said. Her chest rubbing tempo increased. So did her jerking. Torso began to tighten up.

“Easy,” I said, “she’s not even out here, yet. I’m gonna blow up if you keep it up like that.” She chuckled again, but this time it was something else. I felt her drape herself in the blanket of humanity for the first time. She turned the color of a piece of uncooked chicken.

“Sorry.”

“That’s normally something that I would never criticize someone about. I’m just saying that you are really good at your job.” Her humanizing laugh had opened this iron gate to her real appearance. Big bug eyes, big blonde hair, big caked-on make up. Trashy. Not very far from straight ugly. I didn’t care. It had been a long time since a woman looked at me in that sultry way. It took what the little blood that remained in my head and flushed it from there completely. Her eyes bulged and dripped with some nectar that I found to be especially nourishing in the moment, igniting my usual proclivity for any attentive creature. Or it could have been the fact that I was being manually stimulated to an orgasm by her preening hand. I felt some sort of affinity for her, a primordial feeling I was really used to by now. Thought I was falling in love again. Going through the motions, at least. “Just be delicate,” I said.

The room was cavernous, looked like it was once used as an airplane hanger of some sort. There were yellow jibberish letters stenciled across a couple of the unkempt walls. Enormous lights mounted across the ceiling, looked like searchlights. Emitting loudly halogen fuzz and drenching the place in it. I hadn’t ever been anywhere where they made pictures before, but I had never imagined it was in places like this. I had a feeling it usually wasn’t. It was hard getting passed the smell of that jelly being rubbed into me, but once I did, there was a definite lingering odor of dust and mildew and fine sand wafting throughout the place. I thought about all of that being stuck in the tiny spaces between my teeth. Thought about all of the other oily bodies around me inside my own, sliding around, through my intestines, skating my bones. The contemplation caused a sputtering cough to churn in my stomach. Felt it bubbling up.

She broke my foray into revulsion: “Well, there’s gotta be something special about you, John, you’re number one. You know every guy here wants to be number one. How’d you pull something like that off, being an unknown and all?” I did not like that she had used my name.

“Unknown? I’m fuckin' known. Just not down here.”

“An amateur, I mean.” She was scared I was mad. Her eyes showed it. Her chewing slowed. Her ruby lips curled upward fearfully. She kissed the tip of it, let a thin strand of saliva hang off the head. My shoulders arched with the natural rapture. There I was. Being fluffed. There I fucking was. Number one in the Houston 500.

All I want is to be happy again.

It's just dandy.

(tenatively) Sibyl and a pile of leaves

(posted before, but I added to it)

I decided to write you a note
A story told in plain speech
Without too many words,
or big ones
That have too many syllables

It’s a story for the people;
I want its message to ring through the streets
To resonate in the hall,
Pollinate the ear drums

It’s a story by the people;
Chiseled from bone and steel
Dripping with sweat,
Coughing with black lungs,
Hiding its pride like a bruise

Birthed in the same dried up garden,
From the same prickly cactus
Same angry, trampled hole in the ground


Oh, our mother.
Is she not at the heart of all our great tragedies?
Harmonizing over them like a wailing Siren

She is blowing like the wind,
She is picking fruit off the tree,
She is changing the seasons,
She is dying the leaves.

She is moaning a cautionary tale –

She is arranging the oak leaves,
Forming constellations of our fates outside her cave

It tells of shattered glass
Of sea-foamed shores swallowing entire cities

Of bruised buildings collapsing at their heels
Toppling like a house of cards
Ill placed by the Master Magician

Of slithering serpents sneaking through gates
Tempting young virgins with ripe fruits


They tell of people becoming pansies for the picking
No longer fit to survive
No longer quick as the carpenter
We are lined up
To be pinned down

And there we rest
Like ill-fated butterflies
Our perfect patterns resorted to collecting dust and awkward glances
Pressed behind glass
Framed on the wall

Drowning in the waters
We swim against the current
Just to survive
Our scaly, limp bodies flailing wildly in the foaming rapids


But her call falls to deaf ears
As we shuffle along, dirtying our hands
Working for a clock that bends, but never breaks
Working for a man that grins, but has no face

For the wind has blown away her leaves
And the pattern is lost

That old hag never gave us anything but a spider web to get tangled in
A jar to get caught in
A river to drown in

Existence

He died years ago when he lost himself. Hoping to be reborn through others hearts and eyes.
Constantly wanting and needing the love, appreciation, and attention of the living.
Acting as if his treacherous and tragic past didn't lead to his insanity. Believing fake smiles, and facade relationships and scenes kept him sane.
The world is the way you see it after all.
He always believed he would never let himself be a victim again, no matter what it took.
Never realizing the deterioration of himself.
He was happy for a while. As much as he allowed himself to believe.
He got sick the day he realized it wasn't a life he planned on living. The day he realized it all wasn't real, and no matter how hard he fought, it was all fucked.
He tried to fight the sickness and put up with ridiculous and horrible behavior from others. Still believing in love and friendship.
It seemed every time he tried for the littlest bit of positivity, laughter, or fun; misery followed ten fold.
He knew he was miserable and sick, but he wasn't ready to give up.
He enjoyed the little things. The lack of television, the music, the stories, the feeling of being part of something so much bigger.
He put up with lies and worries unimaginable. And never understood how he was the only one to see it.
He held onto the faith. Deep down, it was this beautiful piece of art that just needed love and support and friendship. Things only he truly understood.
Something he will always believe, no matter what was done.
He kept getting sicker.
Laughing in his head how he became the logical, reasonable, responsible, mature one after so many years.
Still not given a chance by others. Still caged in this box, that no one would let him out of, or even take the time to glance in.
He changed, He wasn’t 19 anymore with an intense feeling to kill himself and that the world would be better off if he did so.
One winter week, when everything was positive, and he felt so loved by so many, the world came crashing.
It didn't end for weeks. Each week gave news of some other devastating tear at his heart and his belief in the world.
All of his hard work to never be who he used to be, all of his change and knowledge and love, simply didn't matter.
He became sicker.
No test or doctor or piles of medications could cure him.
So He ran.
He was reborn. He was himself, and didn't have to fake anything.
He could hurt and smile, and laugh and people loved him the same and he finally loved himself.
Hi realized life is much more than an elitist bunch of people and the belief that everyone is better than he ever would be.
The problem with running is that you eventually have to come back to where you ran from.
He got pulled back into hell. He was stronger, but not strong enough.
He has been bed ridden for a month now.
Feeling the murky sickness creep its way back through his veins, in his stomach, and covering his heart.
He doesn't understand the negativity, the loneliness, the pain, the silence, the judgment and the betrayal.
He can't move on here. He doesn’t even know if he wants to.
Through what he believed was misery, it was those little things that kept him well. It was the faith and belief, and the amazing amount of love he has always been able to share with the world. The one quality he has always had more than enough of.
He's friendly, nice and understanding. Empathetic. He doesn't judge. He's incapable of hate. He dies a little with each and every negative aspect of the world and human society.
So here he is again. Sick, deteriorating, Stuck.
Watching everyone acting as if he never existed.
Did he?
Does he?
Something needs done.
He wants to breathe again. To feel true laughter, happiness, and love. To get rid of all of the anxiety, pain and blackness.
He wants to get better, to not be sick anymore, to start over and be born again.
But how? Is this even possible? Or is it too late?

He felt like he had been moving back and forth more then he wanted at that time, which Nick thought was strange. He usually loved the road, but these days he was just feeling tired and burned out and desperately wanted somewhere consistent to recuperate and feel better. He was tired and beaten and bruised like a dog, and even though he was going to his hometown, it wasn’t comforting this time, just a reminder that he had graduated college and still didn’t have a job. It reminded him how he spent his parents’ money and was thousands of dollars in debt because of living expenses and expensive summer internships that were supposed to put him “head of the pack”.

He realized that college was just a task. It was something necessary to complete in order to function at the professional level. Not to say it’s necessary to get a college degree in order to function or be a part of society, but rather a necessity for him.

So there he sat, wanting to scream, “I’ve graduated world! I’m ready to conquer you!” Isn’t this what the teachers told us they were preparing everyone for from the first day we all started? Nick felt that all those teachers never really prepared him for this. Never prepared him for disappointment; for consolidation of student loans, for the economic collapse, for the industry he wanted to enter to be completely dying.

But there Nick sat, still having to face the world and all these situations, through no choice of his own. So perhaps, Nick thought, there is a lesson to be learned in this after all. You can try all you want, you can work hard and prepare properly and say your prayers and double knot your shoes and look both ways before you cross the street, but sometimes it just doesn’t fucking matter. Sometimes, you just get hit by an 18-wheeler going 70 miles per hour, regardless. However, instead of being gracious and wiping out an entire generation of jaded cynical self absorbed tweeters it seemed to paralyze everyone into a zombie-like state of post-graduate depression where everyone was wandering around some unoccupied space between hometowns and college towns, ingesting substances and drinking things that gradually numb the pain of getting mauled by an 18-wheeler that was completely out of their control. We all looked both ways, Nick thought, well…some of them did.

Nick blamed it on the 90s, being raised as part of the uber-optimistic Clinton era, the days when kids played sports and at the end of the game “everyone won”…the days that everyone displayed their 5th place ribbons proudly.
And then everyone became teenagers and would turn on the TV and see children getting BMW’s for the 16th birthdays from their parents and a hundred of their “closest” friends, dry humping like rabid farm animals all on the TV network’s dollar, ah yes…now this is what the real world is like! This is what the generation was bred to strive for. These were the rich, the powerful, the Gatsby’s, if you will. This is why, Nick thought, I went to college.

These dark and upsetting thoughts littered Nick’s brain like a car crash you want to turn away from but can’t on the news. He knew he wanted something better, but even in these lowly moments Nick knew he could deal with it. Jackie, however, couldn’t deal with the pressure anymore. He didn’t even know why Jackie’s name crossed his mind at this hour, especially given the status of things between them now, but he couldn’t help but feel moved and empathetic towards her. Reality had been slowly getting harder and harder for them all to deal with, but for Jackie, it was becoming a task difficult to wake up in the morning for. Her family was falling apart and her inability to get a job was all mounting into a rising tide that was becoming harder and harder to swim against. He tried shaking it out of his head, but Jackie stuck.

Nick observed the similarities between their situation, both longing for the same thing, both dealing with personal problems that were mounting to a unfathomable height, however the same post-graduate depression that ate away at Jackie day and night seemed to wash over Nick with a more tranquil, soothing numbness. He was angry and sad, sure, but the booze and drugs did make it go away. It seemed so logical.

see you Friday

In the late eighteenth century, English nobleman Sir William Pultney, after having just made a gigantic land purchase in the newly founded United States, commissioned the house to be built for Scotch civil engineer Thomas Telford’s son, Caleb. Telford and Pultney were close friends, and after Telford’s adolescent son expressed an interest in emigrating to the United States, Pultney agreed to have to the house built and some adjoining land set aside for the boy, allegedly as a drunken favor to his friend. Pultney passed away in 1805 right after construction had finished, right before Caleb was supposed to leave for the States. This coincided with Thomas Telford’s career as an engineer enormously taking off, namely in his contracting to rebuild the London Bridge. Telford pleaded for his son to stay in England and help with the enormous workload, and Caleb abided. Caleb focused his efforts on the Caledonian Canal while his father set to planning routes for over a thousand new roads in Scotland. Years passed, and the estate was left barren and unlived in, aside from accommodating the crew who was in charge of clearing out the acres behind the house. Finally, the Caledonian design was finished and Caleb’s father had grown dejected at his rejected proposal for the new London Bridge, a single iron arch spanning 600 feet across the Thames. Thomas had taken up heavy drinking and his son decided to follow through with his original plan in 1813. The Erie Canal was well into being constructed, and Caleb intended to seek a fortune in the burgeoning trade industry in the area. He spent the next decade assembling a fleet of ships for his business, and when the canal was finished in 1825, Telford Shipping made its debut and quickly rose to prominence all along the eastern seaboard as the region’s most exquisite tobacco shipping agent. Caleb never married, and after many years in the house, enjoying a life of success, suddenly vanished from the area in the late 1840’s. The place once again became a barren area, with the Henrietta townspeople claiming the house and surrounding land had eerily swallowed Caleb. Thomas had long since passed away, and with no other kin to divide the assets, the estate was put onto the market, his earnings liquidated into a communal fund for the continued flourishing of Henrietta and its people.