Gothic

I see the shadows from your dreaming coming unstuck, ripped from their seams at the heels, like Peter Pan`s but iridescent in cobalt, a neutron star, the blues, the forgiveness that comes with that which is not accomplished.

A thousand archetypes came in for drinks last night. They arrived at midnight and were greeted with pills. There were warnings on their smiles, portents foreshadowing something... else. A missive from a thousand nightmares, received unstamped, unstuck, sidereal.

I went to bed with spiders crawling on the inside of my eyelids, sticky gossamer webbing pinch-hitting for slumber. We pierced through night`s hymen and broke into daylight with irrelevant effort, and without too much expectation.

500 posts!

Mark asked me the other day about Cat`s Cradle and I had to actually Google for my own comments, my own post on this very blog from a few years back: Man my writing sucked a frog`s ass. It has, thank gawd, somewhat improved since then. From a literary… bookshelf-y perspective I`ve taken that natural leap from Vonnegut to Pynchon, from Salinger to Kerouac, from Batman to, um, Sylvia Plath, somehow. Then straight into the oven with that punchline.

I remember feeling old when people started calling Ben Kenobi, Obi-Wan, by the vending machine. I remember sipping from a vaguely coconut-flavored McDonald’s shake in Salvador, Bahia as tiny, frail wooden fishing ships bobbed up and down by the horizon line far in the distance and there were coconut shavings bobbing up and down in the glass in my hand like plastic chips in a cheap Christmas ornament. I remember forgetting the cookies I`d bought for my grandmother back aboard the airplane as I boarded off and got into a taxi, then entered my very own apartment for the first time, and late at night and it felt quite, quite what the fuck-ey. I remember girls, and the discarded hearts and condoms that inevitably ensued, though not necessarily in that order. I remember when I woke up one morning and when I looked down past my knee I smiled such an open pearly white smile when I noticed the ‘37’ I`d had tattooed to my calf the night before to remind myself I`m supposed to be the good guy because the world`s just filled to the brim with the opposition. I remember the champagne and the nightclubs and the endless piles of comic books as a panacea of little value against being bored to death at the office. I remember the Springsteen concert in New York City, 2009, Madison Square Garden and thinking I was coming back to next day`s gig as well and it felt like my Life had peaked at that exact moment. I still like to think it did as I forcefully ponder the mystery of the empty seat next to me.
Also of writing about Cybill a couple of years ago and then, fast forward two years into the future, and what do you know.

The typing now stops for a couple of minutes, though, in trying to come up with some real clever metaphor for Time but by the time these words hit the paper they will have all melted into something else entirely. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers are playing Free-Falling in the radio right now and I`m thinking of this one time back in my hometown, early 1998, just before I got into College, driving back from Gwen`s stepmother`s in my father`s car, when the stepmother was away…

(Am I really attempting to suppress a smile from myself?) -- The aftertaste of eating up a river, I guess. Or the choking from the gorging with the sand and the broken glass.

All in all... I wish I could write better poetry. I wish I would write a short story and get published. I wish I`d finish at least one goddamn screenplay for crying out loud.

I wish this blog to go on forever.

Sea (a poem for Cybill)

‘Sea’


Like a sailor, you have tattoos
though you choose to wear yours
as scars.
Those are medals.
But you`ll never understand that,
princess,
because the port
you want to reach is like
the sunset by the sea.

And you`ve sailed under
stormy skies, riding
the maelstroms, the
ill-winds, clinging to
that masthead of your dreams
for dear life, for tomorrow,
while lightning bolts zigzag
down all around, alongside
your imperatives and
recommendations,
those written down
in bold typeface--
--a Sphinx,
to save face--

Its figurehead perched from
high above the rostrum of
your aggression,
aimed at the halo of my digression,
from atop your
naked shoulder blades, with all
its secrets to keep but a few
to betray, a telltale from
your big brown eyes,
pleadingly so,
in the bedroom`s half-light.

You do not daydream of flying,
but you do not believe in mermaids
either. That leaves me in
a very difficult position:
You`re much stronger than you`ll
ever take the credit for, but far
more fragile that you`re willing
to accept.

Your presence makes waves.
Your absence has the gravity pull
of a star.