If I could just grab a breath to clear the cobwebs out of my skull I could maybe even fight back. If memory serves (and it rarely does except to trip me up at my most vulnerable) I had bombs to throw, once upon a time, and I don’t mean a little stockpile, I mean a veritable goddamn nuclear arsenal! but all that drooled out of the first telltale cracks in my glass jaw, and now I’m a dribbling gibbering husk with aridly dried-up fruitless fountains, and the drought just keeps swarming in galloping hordes wrapped in sixteen ounces of synthetic leather. Ring that goddamn bell, my tattered form draws breath still and you haven’t yet hit me hard enough to put me out of my misery.

I’m sorry you wanted of me, SB, I was wired for the honey pot and indisposed to that brand of penile flagellation, though your flattery stood my ego on end for a good while – and believe you me, brother, we are fraternal like pods on a dying vine, our wires don’t connect the same way but trust me they cross and I get your signal on pork-finding radio as clear as the waves we ride on – wish to god you didn’t have to think you were weird, you were made beautiful from a new mould in a new fashion -

none of this is true, I made it all up, but I hid my desire in absurdity, you see? – then I lost my momentum as vomiting children often must – don’t listen to me, I beg you, I stopped having a point when my existence did the same – just another flesh tree in a mildly interesting forest of skin – it was a remarkably poor yielding season -

Drunk at 7:30 on a Friday, he’s telling me the story of how he lost his license; there’s a whiskey haze forming, I ain’t listening too closely.

“…crashed into a lamp post, got out the car and I was drinking another beer! Said my nerves are shot, you know, I’ve just had an accident, but I blew a thirteen point oh, so they hauled me off…”

And you fucker, seriously. I’m swirling rye and whiskey and ice around in my tumbler, it’s looking stormy like my goddamn mood; here’s me not even wanting to drink the fucking poison no more, the way you’ve treated it and it’s treated you.

He’s got this way of laughing, it’s a toothless, drink-drowned laugh: “ah! ah! ah!” is the best onomatopoeic translation I can provide, like a real human laugh reversed on a tape deck submerged in boiling water. Anyway:

“…got out of jail round three-thirty a.m., got home at five – still drunk, ah! ah! ah! Told her I lost my license, wrecked the car; the insurance will cover it, don’t even worry about it. Well, doesn’t she just fly off the handle. I told her ‘you ain’t worked for thirty years, you get a job and you can support us then! If you didn’t bitch at me, I wouldn’t have left and crashed the fucking thing!’ You ever see an angry grizzly bear on TV? That’s her when she’s mad…”

Then the conversation turns to my grandmother and again she becomes strong, smart and vibrant in his memory. It is a welcome change from how she is in mine:
sick, disabled, dying.

ii.

Sick from the drink at 1:30 Saturday morning, I’ve got an old liquid molten brick in my gut and she and I are talking about my grandmother some more.

“You know, she was the proudest, strongest woman, and to end up in diapers and a wheelchair? I mean, come on, God!”

And fists are shaken at the sky,
and human candles snuff out, die.

I feel like I miss her most of all because I only know what I missed.
Everyone else got to be there to see it.

iii.

Fuck.

I miss you;

Is it so wrong that I should feel resentful of others that they got to know you better when they all but tell me I would have appreciated your company more?

Is it so wrong that one kindred spirit should mourn the passing of another before that connection could even be made?

i haven’t even hit my stride yet!

right?

right?”

Sometimes people just fall down wells and fucking die;
I’ve lived my life inside a capsule so I don’t know how that feels;
but I know how this feels,
(and I don’t presume to say it is the same level of suffering)
but it sure as fuck feels similar to me.

What do you mean, says the trapeze artist, there’s no fucking net on this gig?

-I ain’t practiced this for hardly a week! WHAT IF I FALL?

Then, says the circus conductor, we’re gonna need to find a new fucking trapeze artist to put on the bank roll.

And it’s that perfect, most hilarious moment, when the poor bastard has to climb that fucking ladder to the very top of the big top, where all the smoke and popcorn stench has gathered like an inverse wretched cesspool, that he realizes he’s gonna have to carry on with the fucking act anyway, like it or not, he’s got a show to put on, and that drop’s gotta be eighty feet if it’s an inch and the only damn thing going through his mind is “Don’t look down!” and it cracks him up so fucking much

that he falls anyway.

Funny, right? Black comedy? Funny? No? Okay.

“Look, uh, I know this sounds pretty fucking whiny and I’ve had the whole world in my hands for a really goddamn long time but, I really don’t know what the fuck I’m doing and could someone just pause this fucker for a second so I could figure this shit out? Hello? Please? I mean it man, I’m fucking dying here, what am I gonna do for the rest of my life, file taxes and buy a house and shit? That’s not my game, man, I got off at the wrong stop, I need a fucking map! Help! What do you mean, ‘figure it out myself?’” and so it goes; like I said, pathetic, right?

Don’t laugh, don’t fucking mock, that ain’t fair, you were there too or you will be, and don’t fucking tell me I’ll be alright in the morning because for once, I know I won’t be.

my head pounded.

i guess i dimly remember you announcing your intentions but now that’s forgotten like everything else, lost when my mind exploded all over my good work pants. and you lapped it up, didn’t you? and you lapped it up, didn’t you? and you lapped it up, didn’t you?

i wake in frenzied breaths, afraid that what i’ve lost while sleeping might never return, and every day i am on the precipice of another loss.
every. time. i. fall. i. never. grab. on. in. time.

patterns and words that used to come to me in spring fountains are now droughted dying poison-parched cisterns; i am listing; i am not listening; you took my ears too. what once branched so plentifully i could follow just one path is crippled with blight, crumbling in the light, shadeless and insecure.

are these my final days? is this the steady step to the nadir?

was i only ever just a roman candle to a quiet sky?

.

will you remember me?

…

is anyone still listening?

my body becomes a shell and brittle-cracks to brittle-shards

smother
pants too tight. sexual frustration.
worry about warts. worrywart.
bipolarbearsextinctinmylifetime.
better find some way to unfugue the fugue
’cause fuck, even the walls are laughing at me now.

Okay.

I forgot:
they need to be nutritious to those that read them,
not to mention digestable;
they need to be print-worthy and so I can’t just
cover the page with agitated nervous-vomit
(how do you transcribe “chunk, chunk, smell of bile and apple pie, chunk”?)
they need to be about REAL THINGS that happen to REAL PEOPLE
but they can’t be FUCKING BORING like REAL LIFE REALLY FUCKING IS;
they can’t just be the word “ennui” repeated one hundred and thirty times
(yes, i have one of those)
but most of all
in order to tell them,
you have
to
be
able
to
speak;

something that’s avoided me in the past few months.

(You can consider this my “slump”, “nadir” or “downward spiral”.
I know I do.)

This is not poetry.
Nothing works.

My joints choke with rust, more with each passing grind.

I’m still waiting for the epiphany day.
I might sooner be waiting for the day I die.

Every step is a new punishment.

Language is meaningless.
(I’d write you a poem but you wouldn’t get it and neither would I.)

I am Diogenes the cynic, incarnate;
flinging my shit at you because it’s funny;
all other reasons are void

and at the end, I’m
stripped of everything,
even the words

whatever the case,
the cancer was making itself a lovely home
while we were focused on
your budding dementia;
and then we had no time at all.

i can’t think of you
without also thinking of the end -
it hurts the worst of all hurts,
wind in the deadest trees
through the deadest years,
an exit wound
too small to complain about
too large to ever heal
and with that comes a desire for
(and you’ll forgive me)
a more sudden end to my days
and all
the
rest.

god, i wish i knew you better.

i can’t sit

on the couch

in the television room

with the labatt clock

that hasn’t worked for years

and the pictures of me

on the mantelpiece

above the fireplace

stuffed up with old newspaper

and the cathode ray monitor

perpetually on mute

without feeling like

i’m in your space.

your paperbacks haven’t moved from the tray.

your voice still holds vigil on the answering machine.

they tell me -
we would have gotten along famously

you with your scathing wit and i with mine
(apparently it’s where i get it from)

they also tell me -
i remind them of you

for the (s)words you gave me
for the way you tempered them
i am grateful.

but i am most grateful to you
for the “them”
and the “they”
in this poem.

i love them all,
and i love you,
but

i know you only by the bent spaces
around the hole you made when you left -
you speak to me only through loss.