just keep telling yourself…

so here it is.  here I am.  still here.  still in the same town, for 23 years. still in the same mindset.  finally with a chance to change it all.  but really, the chance has been here all along, I have nothing keeping me here anymore, except myself.  I’m just finally opening myself to it.  opening myself to the idea of figuring out who I really am, or at least figuring out the parts I don’t already know.  

because really, how do you find yourself in the same place you’ve always been? the same.  but i’m not happy with it.  well, maybe that’s not the right word.  maybe it is.  maybe it depends on the day.  I’m not satisfied. I want more.  I want to know who I am in a different place, where all of the people and places that made me who I am for the last 23 years are gone.  I want to know who I am underneath them all, without them all…just me. only me.  I want to know about what I’m made of.

but I am so scared.  of so many things.  loneliness.failure.silence.disappointedexpectations.life….really that’s it. I’m scared of the life I want to live. or maybe scared that the life I want to live doesn’t exist. or scared that I will go to the wrong place to find it.

one day it’s the west coast, and I’m california dreaming.  the next day it’s the desert, and in my mind I am rolling down a highway in the middle of nowhere the hot sun blaring.  the next day I’m listening to some George Jones and tennessee sounds like a plan.  but, really, it is just anywhere but here.

so I just keep telling myself that my days here are numbered. to exactly 187. because the more I tell myself that, the more it seems like less of a choice and more of an obligation.  the more I tell myself that the more I believe it.  On that note…

Taken

There is nothing left in this

street except shadow cast,

still lingering,

and a cigarette burned out,

still smoldering

and one breath of discontent.

 

That, somehow I miss some changes in time,

a time before mine,

and a place I’ve never known

but have longed for in the pre-dawn

haze that surrounds

and clouds my vision, reminiscing.

 

I want to be taken.

 

Taken with force and pain,

if necessary,

to tenement buildings in history books,

and oyster shell restaurants flanked by waves,

and waves of mountains,

in foreign lands in dreams

of sleepless nights

with subtitles, terrified

but laughing,

to the mattresses of flea infested motels

of ten cent towns,

mystic and misty back alleys

of blues bars in the country

of promise and prostitutes,

where reckless longing

for midnight hours at midday meet

restless lust for lives and places that I hope for

and imagine exist,

and the most perfect song I can imagine

and have heard skipping in my mind

like an old record.

To this, I raise my bottle and my stakes.

 

I run ahead to catch up with you

and walk alongside you,

still out of breath,

and here we are, ages apart

on that nameless street

with your nameless face

and my full, full heart.

Valentine’s Day and Bad Poetry

So I’m driving to work this morning listening to the radio. Some d-bagger on air decided it would be a smart idea to propose to his girlfriend of three years OVER THE PHONE, on the radio…………………….and she said no.

And I could not stop laughing.

Maybe it’s wrong that I see humor in other’s romantic misfortunes. Maybe I just think that stupid people get what they deserve. Maybe it’s true that misery loves company. Well, I guess that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Because, well, I’m not miserable. In fact I’m quite the opposite- happy, jovial, smiling, even though everything around me at the moment is telling me that I should be otherwise. That I should be bothered by the fact that Valentine’s day does not mean the same thing to me as it means to every other couple in the world.
 
To me, all Valentine’s Day means is bad poetry.

But I don’t know, maybe I’ll write something great this year. The air is full of promise. Maybe it’s because I have a date this year. He’s tall, dark, handsome, Italian, rich, unpretentious, sweet and smooth, and a little rotund. His name, my friends, is Carlo Rossi.

He’s a great listener. Let me tell you. I just talk and talk and talk and he just shuts the fuck up and lets me blab on and on about whatever. He doesn’t judge. And he gives the best advice. I have the best epiphanies when I’m about half deep into a night with Carlo. Life just calms the fuck down and everything seems to make sense.

So my BFF Joe and I started this tradition a couple of years ago that we spend Valentine’s day together regardless of our relationship status. And this year another one of our friends and Carlo are going to join us. You know, to make it an even foursome. So that we can sit across from each other on a psuedo-date at a candlelit dinner at a classy northside italian bistro, and get increasingly wine-drunk, thanks to Carlo, and have loud and inappropriate conversations about anal sex, and religion, and politics, and pretty much every other inappropriate random unromantic thing that we can think of.

Why, you might ask? 
 
Simple answer. I think that to “create” romance on a single specified day is ludicrous. I think that to “create” romance in general is probably the most unromantic thing I can think of. Because to me…it’s not about candle light, or rose petals, or the music, or any kind of bullshit calculated ambience.

It is about the spontaneity. It’s about those moments that look like any other, but that mean everything. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. The little things. A hand brushing a stray hair back into place. A look. A stolen kiss. A finger fitting inside another hand. A night you got too drunk and made an ass of yourself, but you both could laugh about it later. That’s the real magic my friends.

So fuck Valentines Day. Fuck Cupid and his arrows too. Fuck Hallmark. And fuck all the bad poetry that previous Valentine’s Days have subjected us to. No, you know what fuck that. I’m going to embrace that. Just this once.
 
Ode to Carlo, My Love
roses are red,
violets are blue,
your love is hearty,
like pasta with Ragu.

you are the best,
red, white or blush.
when I gulp you down fast,
you make me feel flush.

maybe Sangria,
if I’m feeling kinda frisky.
one more glass,
and I’m clearly a little tipsy.

all the answers I need
are wrapped up inside you.
you’re my little pick me up
when my skies aren’t so blue.

roses are red,
violets are blue,
you’re love is sweet,
like a new pair of shoes.
 

That’s all I got.

the old man and the sea, white christmas, and gone with the wind

I know what I am looking for, but I haven’t found it yet.
That is it. In the simplest terms, in the smallest words.
I am waiting for something extraordinary.
Call it hopeless, call it hopeful, call it romantic, call it insane…
but you, and you, and you sir, are not it.

I am finally on the back end of the pendulum swing. I only miss you now, and recall with fondness the few bright memories we shared. Your birthday, the first time you held me, that night I gave you a wedgie and you ripped my underwear to get back at me, the way that hole over your heart felt underneath my hand. As I knew it would be. I knew that what you hurt could be, would be, healed. We were friends before we were lovers. Now, I picture you sitting on a pier, sometime around sunset, drinking canned beer, sunburnt, laughing, younger for some reason. The way you looked in all of the picture albums I helped you pack right before you left. The way I hoped you would look again someday.

Oh, how I envy you! You, wandering spirit, above all obligations and commitments, as free and easy, yet, as controlled and dependable as the waves you sought after and chased, and now breathe in.
So, I’m here still searching. Returning to old ways. And maybe that was it all along. I was searching for something you already found and all I wanted was for you to take me to it. To show me the way to see it, and feel it, and reach out and touch it for my own. But maybe you knew. Because you were smarter than me, after all. You knew that your secret could not be mine, and yours would never do as a substitute. You knew that I needed to find, to experience the journey, all on my own, and that ultimately it would lead me to my own destination. So, I thank you for that the only way I know how. In anonymous word, in indirect, abject, insomniatic prose, that you will never read.

You know the night you left. New Years Day. So long ago. I was busy with my brother day-drinking, and watching White Christmas. I hastily awoke from a carb and booze induced coma to bid you well, say goodbye, see your face under the bar lights one last time…well, I suppose it wasn’t that dramatic. We both knew that it wouldn’t be the last. But I know it will be years. I put it all aside. Everything you left unsaid. Everything I said too much of. I told myself I was being the bigger person, the ”mature” one,  and I kept it together for exactly 43 minutes. And I soon as you turned your back, before you even walked out the door, I lost it.  I drank 13 beers. I drove myself home in the most sweet, drunken oblivion I have ever felt. Home to an empty bed, an empty heart, and for that moment an empty head, save Bing Crosby crooning away.

I don’t know what it is about old films.

Will there ever be a morning when I can wake up next to you, and not picture the same morning 15 years in the future? Complete with mom jeans, and minivans, and pta meetings? It’s like I can see it all in that morning half-asleep haze, and it jolts me into reality, gasping for air under the weight of those thoughts. Because there is a part of me that thinks that maybe all I need is that stability. Someone to show me how this whole grown up, responsible, adult world works. And maybe if someone could do that for me, and that someone could be you, that I could finally give up all my fantasies of some thing more. Something extraordinary but also irrational.  I could stop pining for some sort of counterintuitive love, and all the places that I dream of that just might lead me to it.  But ultimately, I don’t want to. And suddenly, the tables are turned, and you are not enough for me.

Will there ever be a moment when I can look at you, and not see you the way I saw you the first time I saw you?        When we were pure.   Not individually. Neither of us have ever been a saint, or an angel, but our slate was clean.  I know I should see the dust and dinge and weather-worn age all over the broken record that is our song, but somehow I just love to hear the skips and the white noise.  It’s just a melancholy reminder of how things used to be, old records and old movies, like they just don’t make them anymore. All the players have since passed into another realm, and it could never be that simple or that real again, but you just have to watch, you just have to listen, to hang onto that time, that it could’ve been that simple or that real.  When it was all drama and lighting and camera angles and Clark Gable, and it’s the happiest ending, but somehow you find yourself trapped in the strangest bitterweet nostalgia and the credits roll, and suddenly you’re crying, and you can’t put your finger on exactly why. You just know that it aches inside you, and you don’t want it to be over, and you just want to hang on, and you just wish you could go back.