what giving creature is this

something like a whispered song

mere touch

her meaning is like the texture of the perfect

my mother has escaped love

that love is no mere enthusiasm

savannah

how comes the muse to the latched-upon artist

swing

she wears galaxies of memorabilia

Monday, December 21, 2015

flight



see here
the virtuous souls
with their still-wet wings
our grounded innocents

'fore they take flight
into the air
of a sky
pushing with the hot currents

we are in their
eyes still seen
as a high shelter
in which to nest

they will abandon
the place
together or apart
to test the wing

abiding
the rules of a higher
regulator
who makes the call

and we consent
so that the nest becomes
a diving-off
place

no urgency
commands their flight
greater than our joined
embrace and our push

it is our
pain paradox
to be selfish and
selfless at once

that of course is
the definition
of mother and father
womb and loin:

give and take
hold and release
harbor and cast off
time and no time

the wind comes nigh
we watch the wings
we turn a back
and they fly

Saturday, July 25, 2015

Glass Child

come with me
she says, but I decline
because I've been told
coddling keeps the child in the cradle
you're old enough to go alone
but the figure she cuts
when she's turned and walking away
head hung, looking at the ground
is as stinging to the conscience
as a February wind to the eyes
my daughter, now turned to go alone
slender and diminished like that
seems as fragile as spring brook-ice
a veneer that can be shattered
with the heavy boot of rejection
thus shamed, i walk with her
 - she taking my hand -
and I consider what has
become of the child we
said would rule kings

the dilemma thus:
in a single day she will spar with
the bullies of the playground
who bait her brother,
the special one we've taken in

but at home she will
become a lupine in
a winded field
bent and lowered
demurred and bowed

she is strength when wanting
upon her own summoning
a solid thing
whose feet on the ground are
as firm as the pillars of Athens

and yet, lately
she has softened to become a watery thing
under certain circumstances
a kind of weak organ
collapsible under pressure

she is a force among those in the world
yet a wilting flower in my palm
brave in the face of enmity
yet a shadow in the crook of my arm
an enigma

and therein I find my clue:
my girl, the king-ruler
has made 'round herself a casing of glass
fired by the heat of a child
not of her blood, but a brother no less

and in so doing
she can deflect the light (as glass will sometimes do)
or let it pass though (no lesser a trait)
whatever circumstance may necessitate
and therefore take her out either way

because she would rather be out than in
her engagement in life being
felt as a distraction to her parents
whose life is now focused on him
out of the reality borne of his condition

where he is weak
and requires our greater focus
she says this to herself:
if i am bad
i am no good

where he is bad
and requires our focused resolution
she says this to herself:
if they see me
they lose him

at 1700 degrees
fire will turn sand to glass
changing the form
the opaque becoming clear
the source becoming forgotten

the same heat that drew us to him
- and by virtue of its intensity
requiring of us to subdue it -
fired something in our girl
that formed panes

i walk with her gladly
unashamed at her weakness
guiltless of my unwillingness
to follow the prescribed
virtues of raising a strong child

because my glass child
is strong
but not unbreakable
weak
but not destructible

i have no fear now
she will be
the ruler
and servant
of the kings

Friday, July 17, 2015

Fire Child



we found a boy
to make our own
who lacked
and desired
and needed
and burned

a special boy
into whom we infused our particular kind
of healing waters
needed to extinguish
the fires of an infancy
set and fanned by others

"he'll be good for us?"
she asked me, lying in bed
"yes"
"he'll need work?"
(more a statement than not)
"yes"

"he needs us; to help him."
(more a plea than not)
"someone should"
i said to my wife, the giver
and then, taking her hand: "yes. us. he needs us."
(more a prayer than not)

and we fell, blind
opened our lives
to a child whose soul was forged
with a brand
whose needs were greater than the vastness
of the core of the sun

he was special, especially
hard
but lovely
but hard, yes
(beyond the horizons of our imaginings)
hard and lovely together: a sun, our son

and we learned
that naivete
is an unwieldy brand of its own
that can burn
the soul of the giver
and the heart of the given

everyone said this:
"saints"
and everyone said this:
"he's a lucky boy"
and we said to each other:
"i'm tired."

but yet we soldiered on
and marched toward a healing
of the boy
tacking this way and that
bearing down
and falling back (or advancing)

never knowing truly
that there is no healing
but understanding
as much as there is no
handling a vibrant coal
pitched from a fresh fire

and some did say:
"it doesn't always have to be you"
and they said:
"he can go back, he's so hard"
and we said:
"if not us, then who?"

for i'd rather die
having flown a passion-winged life
with its heart-breaks and wind-blown meanderings
than a foot-planted life dictated by the head
with its firm logic
yet cold march to the abyss

we found a boy
to make our own
who lacked
and desired
and needed
and burned

the gravity he made - not of his making, mind you
was greater than that of the others
drawing us toward him on collision
and away from
the softly spinning satellites
who needed our balancing pull as much as he

"did we fail?"
she asked me, on a walk
"yes. probably in a way"
"he hates me"
"no," i said
"he can't hate."

but her question was not
accurate, not the way she meant
because she knew a child's defiance
is not a form of hate
but a form of love-wanting
when words do not form well

and without words
there is a betrayal
and without words
there is a failing
and without words
a child burns from the inside out

and his words form less well so
than others
his tongue a tripping thing
that the mind plays games with
plunging him into despair
and fits of hot effusion

the way density and pressure
push upward and outward the magma
in the earth
and the volcanic eruption
a kind of fit
a crying-out in rage

but he does not hate
not our son, the sun
the child with the heart on fire
whose burn we believed we could
douse with a spritz
made from the waters of the heart

our time has become his time
our focus has zoomed
our peripheral crowded in
by the clouds of frustration and dismay
from a special boy's demands
and for that we cry for the other children

we crossed a bridge somewhere
to this land
blindfolded ourselves
for lack of understanding
exempt from the logic that others
seem so easy to wield

a bridge we cannot return across
for it was burned by the boy
with the fire in his soul
the sun, our son
who lights our path as much as he fires it
our douse turned to a feeble steam

but we wouldn't venture to return, i contend
to turn back on the distance we've come
because while the path we saw before us has been consumed
and the new way a thing ablaze
it is nevertheless a way
and we follow the paths our children forge, regardless the pain

Tuesday, July 7, 2015

The Old Man


i've been dreaming lately
of an old man 
that i'm sure is me
in a future that i seem to fear

sitting on a bench, in one example
in some park, looking inward
while casting a gaze out for something lost

i know it's me now
that i think of it because
i recognize the sting of a clenched heart
after a love has been wrenched violently from it

the way a blow hurts in winter:
a wringing crack on the skin
on a bitter day
frozen flesh rapped against stone

the man in my dream looks
for someone long blown away
a girl now years beyond their last
engagement in a sunny field when she was a year old
back then, they sat together in a field
the warmth a rapture
of brilliance on them
her infant head pushed against his cheek in love
she clutched a blade of grass
ready for the mouth
but instead pressed it into his raised palm
as an offering

now his heart leaps at finding her again
among a clutch of girl-friends
all of whom are just barely teenagers
and they preen together while walking his way

he sits taller
and picks at himself, straightening a shirt
and ironing his worn pants with 
aged palms, of course fruitlessly

and she comes, and then goes
they all look - all those fluttering birds -
at the old man fussing with his clothes
and they laugh

they all look - all those fluttering birds - 
except her

he affixes his eyes to her face
which remains bowed in a gesture of shame
the expression of someone who knows
yet desires to be elsewhere for it

and the moment is past
and the search is over for the man
who found what he was looking for:
a girl who became his only ghost

when we were children
my sister and i sat with our father
and made of him in our own way
while he watched television news

 i, sitting behind him on our couch,
combed his hair with his small black comb
(that i always fetched from his breast pocket)
the teeth of it raking a meager thatch  

she, sitting at his feet at the ends of stretched-out legs
untied and retied his shoelaces with a girl's delicacy
the shoes he wore to work as a teacher
 as weathered as our grandmother's face

his presence at our tedious
sessions was the love
that remains undefined 

 children fashion a form
of their fathers, when allowed
(a  father who abuses it is bankrupt)
by using what they have in hand

a comb
a shoelace
a blade of grass

and if the form be made of
beauty and grace
and if the form be made of
love and patience

then the distance of a thousand
years will not
encumber the memory of their
truth

i beg of time this consideration then:
to let the hands of my children
 form something of me
close to that of my father's

so that they, wherever they may be found,
and no matter the length of our time together
will know me
as i know him

and make folly the nightmare-fears
of a someday old man



Saturday, July 4, 2015

A Discussion Among Boys on a Beach


"the water is high,"
my son said to his two friends

and a debate among boys on a beach
was begun

"yeah, but not to god"
the first boy-friend replied. his name, jackson

"yeah. the water wouldn't even be up to here to god"
said the second. his name, nicholas

"yeah, unless he was six years old"
said my son to them, a proposal

"yeah, but he would still be a giant"
said nicholas, arguing

"yeah"
said jackson

"god IS huge"
said my son with surrender in his voice

"the water is still high, though"
said the friend jackson, wishing truce

after a silence
they went back to their water
and i was left recalling days
of childhood debates
myself

dodging and parrying with friends
with the swords of small minds
over ideas about god and the universe
surrounded by the minutiae of our hot summer days

we lost our minds in those debates
no one winning and egos bruised
hurt and ashamed
that we'd not won the argument

friendships seemed ripped forever
and the wounds from those debates
(which appeared they might bleed eternally)
always mended under the balm of youth

when i looked up again
the boys on this beach
were waded out to their chests
the water having washed the slate clean

and the sun in the sky was the center
and the earth revolved around her
and spun and tilted as ever
and the answers to the why and the how

were less important after all
and seemed to exist in the souls of boys
on a beach

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

The Dreamers of Dreams

We have a seasonal site at a campground close enough to home to allow us to care for the farm animals, but far enough away for us to feel escaped from the world.


A good camp is not supposed to close out all sound, just the busy chatter that we've been fooled to believe is important; the same way those old handheld a.m. radios sound tinny and distant. It's the same noise, really. Just not in stereo.

It's your typical family-oriented campground laid down into the woods. People inhabit fifth-wheel campers that are clipped to one long, serpentine dirt road; all-the-conveniences-of-home metal peas in a single looping pod.

At the top of the hill, a camp store; at the bottom, a small beach on a small lake with campers in between illuminated day and night by Christmas lights strung between trees; picnic tables beneath canopy tents; dogs on leashes and kids on bikes. It is as simple as it should be, and perfect for someone like me who grew up summering in a tent or a pop-up with my parents.

As a kid we left our home to spend week-long excursions at campsites in Maine and New Hampshire. We even went to Canada once. But the lynchpin of all camping memories for me is how the unrestricted access to the outside world, which camping naturally promotes, super-fueled the imagination of a boy always stuck inside his relentless fiction-making.

Kids, by their nature, daydream and because I fell into a certain category of dreamers - that of future writer - I hyper daydreamed. Constant was my urge to fold what I lived and experienced into a narrative that transcended reality. I was the kid whose parents were told by teachers that I was always unfocused, always looking out of windows instead of into my textbooks, always not applying myself.

But I was focused. On creation, on storytelling, on pretending. And I was applying myself. To understanding. To an explanation of the unexplainable. To the everlasting power of words. When kids in school brought their focus to their studies, I burrowed into my mind, where the fantastic world was more real than the physical one.

I suppose one might argue that the perpetual diving into one's imagination could be seen as unhealthy; the sign of a child on the run from something, of being incapable of addressing real problems with real solutions.

Perhaps.

I mean, if I were to analyze my youth to find the why of me, I would maybe point to being bullied for my height. Or maybe to my lack of the same social extroversion that made my peers popular. And these things combined (the former feeding the latter feeding the former, etc.) might explain why a made-up world running on the controlled unbroken line of my imagination (no matter how fantastic) was a far better refuge than the tangential nature of the world, ruled by the unreliable forces of nature, and even more unreliable human nature.

I don't really give a shit. Because, quite frankly, I like dreaming and getting lost and feeling empowered by having worked something up with my mind. Even to this day.

No. Especially  to this day. Because as a writer, with far less ability than most established writers, I am still an equal player. I am still, like them, a creator. I am still, like them, (who are much more successful than I - me? - at writing) empowered with what I think is one the most distinguishing traits of humans, and that is the ability to connect with fellow humans through the use of imaginative language. And not a whole lot of people can do that effectively because they've given up on the childish power of play.

It's like that quote from the Gene Wilder version of "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory":

Willy Wonka: Try some more. The strawberries taste like strawberries, and the snozzberries taste like snozzberries.
Veruca Salt: Snozzberries? Who ever heard of a snozzberry?
Willy Wonka: [grabbing Veruca's mouth and pinching it a bit to hold it openWe are the music makers... and we are the dreamers of dreams.
Which brings me back to camping, oddly enough.

In my childhood world, a small campsite became a wide world. Whether I pedaled along dirt roads or marched through woods, my mind engaged itself in a game of belief-suspending. All things that I observed with my senses were absorbed and reconstituted into a fiction. Not necessarily always a story, with a beginning, middle and end or with characters. To me, I found as much delight in the simple, quick act of imagining a thing as something otherwise as I was in the drawn-out act of coming up with entire universes.

And ever in these states of wonderment, I was found to be staring off - as usual - in thought, with this peculiar smirk on my face and with the eyes of a child who could peer into rocks and trees and people and see their potentials. Daydreaming children and those who turn into writers never lose that look of lost stupor.

So recently, I caught myself there again. With that face.

Gabrielle and Griffin and their new-found friend, Brook, had me trek with them through the woods on the perimeter of the campground. Just a few yards in, far enough away to feel the giddy sense of being on a real hike, but close enough to know where to point your body just in case.

We plod-stepped through, coming across wooded things like thin trees bent completely over to make what the kids called "tree rainbows" and deer droppings that made them squeal and gag and patches of wildflowers that Gabrielle marveled over for their ability to grow in a place that got no sun. At every turn, they transformed what they saw into a definition of what they were experiencing. This is how the passivity of television-watching was and will always be trumped by the actively engaged. A tree forced into a back handstand by a winter's weight of snow is now a tree rainbow. Deer droppings - as disgusting as shit is to any child - became a "group of tiny BBs" to my 7-year-old son. And those wood anemone - those small white flowers found in congregations on the ground - were, to Gabrielle, "too important to pick, because they might save the forest."

I may be 47, but I was right there with them, squeezing myself through the portal of imagination that bridges the real with the unreal. I couldn't help myself, nor did I try. I elated in their easy, almost matter-of-factly assignation of uncommon virtues to common things. It made me giggle, if not in my head.
They led me on with the encouragement that I would soon not be disappointed in coming (they were under the impression that, as an adult, I was hating this) because they had a surprise for me.

And soon enough, they led me into a wide sunny field at the edge of which was a camper sitting on a creaky steal frame and a twin set of flaccid tires. Abandoned years before and picked over since, the camper had been the unfettered refuge of mice and birds. And before they could tell me, I knew it would be perfect for a clubhouse.

And before they could tell me, I knew it would be a place of uncontainable dream-kiting.

And before they could tell me, I knew it would be a place, 35 years or so ago, that I would have gotten lost in.

They made quick work of a clean-up detail, asking me to come with. I did. They gathered soap and brush and broom and paper towel and we all fled back up to the camper. But no one - even me - called it that. They scoured it and chattered about what would go where, and what would happen in it when, and decisions were made as to the importance of it all, with no debate.

I stayed outside, ambling around the large expanse of grass, swallowed up in a vibrant sunwash, listening to the voices of my children and their friend ecstatic in their gorgeous escape, in their manufactured reprise from their real worlds.

By myself, I made the camper into something else. Something of which I'm not capable of revealing the details quite yet. But I can tell you it no longer sat in a field of grass. Its metal body no longer a metal body. It did things and became things that it had never done or had been. The doors were doors, but better than just camper doors. The battery - dead for years now - was a new gadget. And the tires alone - these worn, slack rubber things - were the focus of at least ten minutes of my shooting-star imagination. And for a long time, I was gone.

And yes, I had that look on my face.

Thursday, April 30, 2015

no rest


my son, he jumps off his bike
that his legs and arms are still too small to master
and he bounds across the road
I'll just run instead!
he battle-cries and
gallops uproad toward siblings
his abandonment is a
retreat, a falling-back
from a relentless gravity
that has pulled him, since birth, away
and up an incline
toward something that is not me
on this day,
i love the bike-tossing
for its rebellion against what I hate
this giving-up fills me
with a joy
for a child's world of non-betrayals
a place where he (therefore i)
can do what pleases him (yes, i);
free of the stone-throwers
i love the boy
for giving up just
this one time
and how he comes back
downroad at me smiling
and dodges an imaginary whatever
bounding into a ditch
tumbling head-over;
his body tossing dirt and sand
at rest he scares me
the way a stopped sun
would blow up my heart
he needs to be at-speed
for when he does find rest
he will be gone from me fast

Friday, April 3, 2015

Disney Tripping

We took the kids to Disney On Ice on Valentine's Day, thanks to the generosity of my employer, who received several comp tickets and took pity on me when he saw the family portrait-mural that stretches across my office wall.

"Do you really have 8 children?" he asked.

"Yeah. Yup."

I get asked this a lot and the reactions range from incredulity to pity to fear.  Mostly fear. Like I'm catching. Like everyone except me received the proper vaccinations against doing something as crazy as having more children than vehicles.

"Wow," he muttered, with furrowed brow and a hand over his mouth.

"Yessir."

He backed out of the office with the same look you'd give a frothing chimp waving a razor and a can of shaving cream. He returned to my doorway a moment later and lobbed a fistful of Disney tickets at my head and sprinted away.

"Aww, thanks!" I shouted to him.

"Stay away from me."

I get that a lot.

Anyway, we don't do a whole lot with our kids because we don't really like them. That, and there are so many of them that their collective weight is a gas-drag on our car, which was not built to carry passengers whatsoever. It's more of a driveway vehicle than a roadway vehicle. It performs best when we treat it as a stationary thing.

When we do go out as a family, it's usually short-lived because we get mentally and physically exhausted from the screaming and the fist fights and the name-calling and the eye-gouging and the incessant tattling. 

From their mother. 

I'm driving, so I don't get my fair shot. It's ridiculous.

You think I exaggerate? You haven't lived a day in my 1998 Sebring.

Anyway. Disney. Ice. Dancing. Kids hopped up on cotton candy in Olaf-shaped bags.

We decided not to tell the littles where we were going because, well, we were actually thinking of taking someone else's kids. Some that we abducted from a grocery store in Gray. Kids who are smarter and better behaved than ours. Kids we could leave unattended while the Mrs. and I go shag in the car while the kids watched the show. Our kids cannot be left unattended at all, which means we have not shagged in a car for years. Even in our own driveway. And it's really starting to grate on me.

Either way, and what-for, we are evil. And we love surprises. Like telling Gabi and Griffin they're adopted and Bailey is our natural-born son. Boy does that piss them off. And confuse them. And give them nightmares. Well not Bailey. He doesn't understand any of it. He thinks babies come from the microwave after you've called it a "piece of shit muthafucka" three times. Same way popcorn is made, as a matter of fact.

"It pop and you take it out?"

Yeah. Something like that, Bailey.

We live an hour from Portland and, with the show starting at 11, we had to get up extra early to get everyone ready. And when I say early, I mean half-past Corrine did it all.

Valentine's Day, if you don't recall or have chosen to gin-and-coke the memory from your mind, was -13 degrees at 8 in the morning and blustery. The kind of cold winter day in Maine in which everything, including your tear ducts, crackle. When walking and breathing at the same time hurts. When you stop yourself from yelling at the kids because opening your mouth will kill you.

Corrine wrangled the three older littles into the back seat with the broken, jagged end of a broom as usual, while I strapped down the baby in her NASA-inspired, front-facing-back car seat, standing on her shoulders while pulling straps up and clicking straps across her chest and checking to see if her pupils had exploded and that she was still breathing. She gave me a little baby thumbs up. All systems go.

And we were off.

Rumbling across the perpetually uneven, tax-wasted, poorly plowed roads of Otisfield; onto Casco, whose fire station is the biggest building in town; into Raymond, whose walkers take their side in the middle of the road; and through Windham, which has a cop-to-minivan-driving-soccer-mom ratio of 6 to 1 it seems.

The kids sang Christmas carols, the same three carols they'd been singing every day since Christmas and just as poorly, therefore once and for all rendering the argument "Practice makes perfect" the biggest bullshit lie ever told.

Once we hit the border of Westbrook, 55 minutes later, the car's heat started working, which merely replaced one complaint (We're freezing to death!) with a different complaint (We're burning to death!). Because no car ride, in the history of my family, has ever gone without the conjoined outcry of deeply wronged, near-death children. Their cries of injustice and end-of-life wailing rose above the screech of the tortured heat fan and the volume of the acid rock station to which Corrine affixed the radio dial 30 minutes earlier. The noise gathered above my head and came down upon it like the jack hammer of God. It clenched my jaw, rattled my spine, and put murder in my heart.

Corrine turned around, finally, after stewing and after the veins in her neck began to vibrate and her hands shake.

"If you wake that baby...! Shut! It! Now!"

The baby woke.

"That wasn't our fault," Griffin offered. More as a defense witness than an accuser.

Corrine snapped back around, her steely gaze clamping his mouth shut and therefore trapping whatever other comments were about to escape his chapped-lip mouth. Gabrielle tended to the fussing baby by making strangling cat noises. Bailey sputtered something about peanut butter and looked out the window.

The Cumberland County Civic Center is where, at 17,  I saw my very first concert - Simple Minds -  and where I witnessed a couple fornicate in the men's bathroom, where beer was spilled on my shoes three times by the same man and where the pot smoke was so heavy that I thought it was merely a part of the pyrotechnics of the show.

Now, 30 years later, I was returning to the same venue to treat my kids to a Disney show and it dawned on me that the progeny of that fornicating couple could very well be in attendance with their children. Which really made me want to toke. Wicked bad, man.

As you might expect, the concourses were jam-packed with humans. Most of whom were under the age of 10 and without adult supervision. I was convinced all these kids' parents had dropped them at the door and gone back to their own cars to shag. Lucky assholes.

These kids were all wiping snot on the sleeves of the Disney costume that they insisted their parents let them wear. There were Cinderellas and Snow Whites, Beauties and Beasts, but mostly Elsas and Olafs - the two most popular stars of the latest craze, Frozen. If you've not seen this show, or heard the music from it, how was Uranus? Did you enjoy your stay?

At once, after entering the building, the kids were instantly high. The walls were lined with Disney-colored booths selling Disney products just screaming to be abandoned and stepped on and broken in children's bedrooms across the state.  Disney music bombarded the airwaves with its mind-weakening subliminal "Disney is better than Jesus" messaging. And the smell had a peculiar carnival-chili-dog-after-a-Tilt-O-Whirl vibe about it. It made you want to vomit blood but also eat everything within a mile.

The kids insisted, of course,  on stopping at a booth to buy something. Anything. They didn't care if was a pile of dog shit in the shape of Pluto. They had to have something or they would dieeeee! And, feeling in the spirit, I treated them to a bag of cotton candy each.

"That'll be forty five," said the overly happy girl in the Minnie Mouse hat.

"Minutes?" I asked dumbly. "You have bags already made."

"No."

"Yuh-huh. They're hanging right there. I can see them next to the battery-operated overly phallic Little Mermaid tooth brushes."

"Dollars."

"Really? Can we just fornicate in the bathroom and call it good?"

I looked down at my children, who looked up at me expectantly, wearing not Disney costumes like all the little fuckers running around us whose parents were all from Cape fucking Elizabeth, but instead wearing the clothes we bought them from Oliver Twist and Huckleberry Finn Clothiers, Ltd.

"Ok," I said and handed the woman the last of my food stamps money that I was going to use to buy beer and cigarettes and porn later that day. But, this day was not about me after all, and so the kids came away with a lesson well learned: In a public place, Daddy becomes a pussy.

So here's the thing about the show itself. It was actually fantastic. In the sense that, for the first time in quite awhile, I was able to enjoy watching my kids experience something fun and engaging that didn't involve throwing things at each other in the woods.

They sang the songs (poorly) with absolute abandon. They danced to the music. They shared their cotton candy and popcorn. They actually liked being around each other for the two hours we were there.

And yeah. I got a little teary eyed when it was finished. Happy to have made them happy, after a long horrible year of badness.

Friday, February 6, 2015

This Is The Motion Picture Soundtrack of Our Lives


where is our gloaming sky
where is our rising tide
the one that washes happy heroes
to a sandy shore, alive?

where is the swell of strings
the vibrant song on wings
the same that lifts embracing lovers
and all the life it brings?

are we really only seen
as lost and sadly ever been
left jilted at the glittering alter
of all those silver screens?

don't you want a single chance
to make our simple, country dance
something worthy of shining greatness
that leaves all 'goers in a trance?

to be the lyrics of the songs
that all the world would sing along
and assuage this intrepid life of ours
and ease its painful, ugly wrongs?

let's take the carpet for just a day
and spin like stars in our own way
and pretend we belong in a brilliant fiction
to keep our truths at distant bay

and then come down from that white stage
the simple lovers of our simple age
a leading man and leading woman
whose song once sung was all the rage

Saturday, January 24, 2015

Fun Fragments



Hammer Time


Corrine's high school drama club participates in the state's one act play festival this March and I've been building the set for their production. Recently, I brought the hammer down onto my hand.

"Fucking cock-sucking whore!" I shouted and then threw the hammer across the stage and into the wings.

"Really, Dad?" Griffin asked me. I had forgotten he was with me.

"What?!"

"You had to throw the hammer?"

Lactose Insolence


Gabrielle insists that Abraham Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd, died from what she calls "drinking too much milk."

"No she didn't," I corrected her.

"Then what did she die of?"

"I don't know but it wasn't from drinking too much milk."

"So you don't know."

"Gabrielle."

"What? I'm just saying."

"Drink your milk."

Naked Junk


Standing naked in our bedroom after a shower, I had to hop out of the way when Corrine opened the door to enter for fear of being seen by the kids.

 "Relax," Corrine said. "The kids have seen your junk before."

"Junk?" I quipped.

"Well?"

Return of the Naked Junk


At work a few years ago I texted Corrine like a horny teenage boy.

"Send me a naughty picture of yourself."

"Ok," she texted back and I sat waiting.

After a few minutes I texted again, "Well?"

"What?"

"Are you going to send it?"

"Shut up."

"Huh?" I fired back.

"I sent it to you."

"I didn't get it."

"Shut up!"

"I'm not kidding. What is it a picture of?"

"A picture of me holding my boob."

"Didn't get it."

"FUCK!"

Apparently in her haste to send it to me, she had selected her daughter's name - Alyssa - in her contact list, rather than Andy.

Wait. It gets better.

Alyssa had lent her phone to her boyfriend that day, who had received the picture.

"I am never sending naked pictures over the phone ever again," she said later that day.

Revenge of the Naked Junk


In a foolish moment of juvenile delinquency, and a perfect case of short-term memory loss, Corrine and I took a picture of ourselves in the buff standing in front of our bathroom mirror. I asked her to send it to my phone. It never arrived.

Months later my mother and father came to see the kids off to school for their first day of school. After the bus left, my mother turned and said "I saw a picture of you naked the other day."

Thinking it was a picture of me as a child that she had unearthed in her trove of family pictures she keeps in her closet, I laughed it off.

"Oh yea?" I smiled blithely and started to head into the house.

"Yeah, you're standing there with a hahd on," she said, snickering.

"Um..." I said, scowling. And then light slowly dawned on marble...um...head

Corrine began to laugh. I began to shit myself.

My mother produced her phone and there, on the screen, was the picture Corrine and I had taken.

"Well, a sem-eye," my 70-something-year-old mother teased.

"Dear Jesus," I said and crawled back into my house, from which I didn't emerge for seven months.

It seems, in her haste to send it to my phone, Corrine instead had sent it to one of my siblings, whose names also start with the letter A.

Speaking of Bad Dreams


Lately the kids have been telling us of their nightmares.

In one conversation at breakfast, Gabrielle said she had had a dream where she was being chased by animals who "used to be my friends but then became not my friends anymore."

"Wow," I offered.

"Yeah, they got mad at me and chased me, then they ate me."

"Why did they get mad at you?"

"I don't know. I think they were sick. But hungry, too."

Griffin then chimed in, as is often the case when not wanting to be outdone by his sister.

"I had a nightmare too," he said.

"Ok," I said.

"You were a zombie and Mom was a zombie and Sissy was a zombie and everyone was zombies!"

"Well that sucks," I said.

"Yeah and you chased me. Everyone chased me and then bited me. It was so scary."

"Bited you?"

"Yeah. Here and here," he said, pointing to both sides of his neck.

"Were we zombies or vampires?"

"Zombies. You were vampires last week."

"Bailey?" I asked our red head.

"What?"

"Did you have a nightmare?"

"I not do it," he said guiltily.

"I didn't say you did anything. I asked if you had a nightmare."

"Yeah. I had a nightmare," he said.

"What was it of?"

"What?"

"The nightmare, Bailey."

"Oh."

"Well?"

"What?"

"Aww, Jesus Christ, the nightmare, Bailey. What was your nightmare about?!"

"I forgot."

The Hitched Hiker


On my way to work this week I picked up an older man on the side of the road holding a sign that read "Windham."

"Mighty nice of ya," he said, hopping into the front seat. "How far ya headed?"

"Westbrook," I answered.

"Well, that works perfect for me, don't it?"

"I suppose it does."

I swelled with pride in having given a fellow human some assistance on a freezing day. I was uplifted by my own act of benevolence. I saw people in high places bestowing upon me the highest of civilian medals and Jesus himself shaking my hand and leading me to the head of The Line when my time came.

Within minutes, however, I was breathing onto my window and scrawling my suicide note.

A mile from where I picked him up, he launched into a monologue about his married life, the darkness of which was so deep that I was swallowed by its infinite despair.

He went on for miles about the vagaries of marriage: the unexpected twists and turns that had come with being "with the same woman for ovah fahty-five ye-ahs." How she was never appreciative of his toil, his service in the army, his head injury, his sacrifice for the sake of her contentment, his love of corn out of season.

Yes. He even claimed she did not appreciate that he loved corn in the winter.

On and on and on he preached, for miles. And not once did he sound angry.
 
"My wife don't even eat suppah with me no more," he said at one point.

"Wow. Well, that's so...I'm really sorry about that," was really all I could offer him and my hand was on the handle of the door ready to spring myself into a snowbank going 65.

Of course, in the back of my mind I wondered why he hadn't already buried the shrew in the back yard of their home when he said this final thing:

"But, you know, that's why I love her. Heh heh."

Really?

I let him out at an auto-parts store in Windham and he ducked his head back into the car before closing the door.

"See me on the road, be sure to stop, ok? I'm outside every day, same time."

"Ok. I won't waste a second to stop. See ya later!"

 I drove away, happy in knowing that my wife is appreciative of everything I do.

I have pictures to prove it.

Wanna see 'em?

Thursday, January 15, 2015

The Kemsen Crush

My 6-year-old son is in love with my teacher.

I mean his teacher.

Who used to be mine.

No, I don't mean she used to be mine. Not mine mine in the leather-jacket-wearing, hickie from Kenickie kind of way. I mean she used to be my teacher.

But I used to wish her to be mine in that other way. 

Well, no. I don't mean I'd wished she'd given me hickies. I don't think I knew what a hickie even was when I was 13. I just mean she was my first teacher crush. My only teacher crush, for that matter.

Her name is Kemsen and I wanted to marry her.

And now, it would seem, my son is similarly smitten.

Granted, I was in junior high when it happened to me, while Griffin is merely a first grader. Clearly his Kemsen Crush affection thermometer mercury level is much lower than mine was. Lower meaning that crushes in a 6-year-old still hover around 10 degrees while when you're a teenager they rise to a boiling point.

Now, for Heaven's sake, don't run out and Google every reference you can find about 'teacher-and-student scandals' and try to apply it to my situation. Relax. This was an innocent crush, and in no way was (or is) Kemsen anything more than a pure-as-the-driven-snow teacher. And neither was my crush on her anything untoward. I was a 13-year-old, 68-pound dork who attended the Church of Christ. I didn't start entertaining impure thoughts or slow dancing with girls or start masturbating until, like, a year ago.

This is merely my G-rated, crush-on-a-teacher story universally experienced by just about every student on the planet. Including, it would seem, my son. Poor little nearly-toothless bastard.

I met Kemsen for the first time while sitting in the fourth row, first seat, of an English class on the second floor of the Oxford Hills Junior High School in 1982.

I was 13 and wore a pair of tan/brown/light-colored (how the hell would I know?) corduroys that my mother had purchased during our typical last-minute school shopping trip to K-Mart in Lewiston the week before. I remember the pants because it was the first week of September and our school classrooms had these monolithic, almost cathedral-sized windows that converted sunlight into raw energy that was further absorbed by my pants. Aside from the whiff-whiff-whiff sound they made whenever I walked, I always smelled like burnt hair.

Most everyone else in my class wore non flammables that breathed. I wore haz-mat chic and got the same kind of withering glances from my peers that one now casts upon piles of dog shit. Or Wal-Mart greeters. They chattered about their summers, who they were dating, and how they were all going to the Auburn Mall that weekend to see Fast Times at Ridgemont High, even though it was rated R. I was not allowed to watch rated R movies until my first child was born 10 years later.

It was then, while avoiding any eye contact with, or addressing direct questions about my pants from, my classmates, that our teacher entered.

Kemsen floated into the room that day to the sound of Air Supply's  Lost in Love, with her Farrah Fawcett feathered curls and her brilliant Colgate smile. She crossed the front of the room clutching books that she laid down on her desk with the delicacy of a new mother putting a child in a crib. I think she even patted them.

I knew then, and there, that she would be a special kind of teacher. Because none of my other teachers cooed at dictionaries. Or smiled. Or liked kids. Or smelled like a swath of wildflowers in the fields of the Lord.

Shut the fuck up. I'm not exaggerating. 

"Hi class," she said. And that, I believe, is the only thing I recall her saying that very first hour or so of English class. Which is ironic because, while I believed myself to be fluent in the native tongue, I swear to God her voice triggered some sort of chemical anomaly in my brain that blocked any cognitive language comprehension whatsoever.

She would talk and her words would flutter out and over me like happy butterflies, but would make no sense. I watched her lips move. Intently. Trust me, I stared at them all the time, trying desperately to understand her. I turned to my best friend, Ted, and scowled. He was opening a book to page 4. I looked at Kemsen, who was still talking, but all I heard was the gibberish of muted vowels and underwater consonants, while the erratic hummingbird pulse of my heart scared the shit out of me.

What was happening to me? I wondered if corduroy could reach a high enough temperature that, at a molecular level it could eventually break down and pass through skin and cause blood poisoning and lead to eventual brain-swelling. (See: Sylvester Stallone)

The class ended with the bell and everyone gathered up their things and left, including me.

"Listen," I told Ted while whiff-whiff-whiffing down the hall. "I think I'm dying of brain swell."

"What?"

"I didn't understand a thing she said. Not one thing. Her lips moved but all I heard was, well, Charlie Brown teacherspeak."

"You have a crush on her."

"What?! No I don't! That's, like, gross!" I scolded him, but I suspected deep down that he was right. My own father had worked as a teacher and a school principal for all of my life and I recalled stories he told of star-struck girls who used to hang May baskets on him. Boy did that piss Mom off. (And soooo make me want to be a teacher. That and getting summers off.)

I tested the theory. I returned to school the next day because, well, that's the law. I took my seat in the fourth row, the row closest to the surface of the sun, and a foot from Kemsen's desk. I braced myself for her entrance, expecting her to do so on a silver-laced cloud, or in the escort of angels, or singing directly to me in French. (On the news the night before there had been a story about Jeanine Deckers, the Singing Nun, and I had Dominique on the brain. What? It's catchy and cute.)

She entered under none of these conditions, of course, because, let's face it, what public school system in Maine do you know of would allow teachers to be creative unless they paid for it themselves? Taxpayers don't pay for clouds, dude. Or angels. Or Belgian nuns with guitars. Or basic supplies.

Of course my heart started in again. Then came the breathlessness that arrives with anticipation and really cold weather. And confusion. And lack of focus. And a desire to break out into a rock ballad that has a pretentious orchestral bridge.

She stopped me in my tracks mentally and physically. I was in some sort of shock, yet I knew I was enduring it at the same time. A cruel dream-within-a-dream kind of emotional apoplexy. The kind of feeling you get that is so shattering that your mind embargoes its explanation for a minimum of 30 years. All you know, all you recognize, is the fact that you've been struck by something you don't understand.

In other words, love.

Please spare me your picayune postulations on true love verses infatuation versus admiration versus passion versus like versus obsession versus desire.

I was 13, for fuck's sake. Someone had just detonated a grenade in my soul. I was feeling something bigger than me. With all of its fuzzy, inexplicable, knee-weakening definitions. Get a law degree if you wanna argue semantics, you parent's-basement-dwelling, formula-fed loser.

Sorry. Anyway...

On accepting the truth of my condition, everything around me now became infused with her likeness. Songs I heard on the radio were naturally written for us like John Cougar's Jack and Diane. Or Waiting for a Girl Like You by Foreigner or Chariots of Fire, because every romance needs an instrumental. (Um...Duh. Hellooo??). The lead characters on my favorite television shows were now replaced in my mind by Andy and Kemsen. I was her Remington Steele, she my... my.... whatever the female character was in Remington Steele. My imagination was consumed by images of sunsets and songs, eternal love and lots of slow-motion runs on tropical beaches.

I loved everything about her. Her name. Her way of diagramming sentences. Her really cute one-shoe-sole-is-thicker-than-the-other trick. The fact that she used to be a cheerleader at the very same junior high school. The fact that she didn't ask me if I was visiting as part of a field trip for third graders.

She was, by her smile, the valentine that came when girls in my class conveniently forgot my name on their lists of cards to be handed out. Her presence was the lighthouse in the stormy pubescent seas of junior high school. Her's was the face that helped me realize that the faces of pretty girls were not to be figured out, but simply admired.

I spent that year in a fog. But as it turned out, I learned to love everything to do with English and reading and writing. The point is, I survived. I worked through my crush and came to understand something about the Human condition: we are supposed to be in love, we Humans. We are OK if we love our mentors, so long as its innocent. And, well, the music of the 1980s was awful, but that it's okay to love it nonetheless.

Now...what to do about Griffin.

He has Kemsen for his first-grade teacher and whenever he mentions her name, he glows like a bulb on a Christmas tree. It's adorable, really. And not lost on me, who came to be illuminated some time ago by her magic.

When I saw her again for the first time in years she had popped her head out of her classroom at the kid's elementary school. She'd migrated to the lower grades years before, I guess, but seeing her face still made me blush.

"How are you?!" she asked me and gave me a hug. Something I dreamed of getting so many years ago, but never did, to her credit as a professional. I think I heard angels, but I might be wrong.

"Hey. I saw...that...you. Teacher. Nice. Weather on the outside," I stammered.

Another couple stood a few feet away while Kemsen explained that I had been a student of hers "many years ago."

"He still blushes," the woman said. And I was. I could feel it, clearly.

I don't mind all these years later. I can appreciate now the effect a good teacher has on an absorbent student. Had she not entered my life at that moment, I may not have come to love what she loved: the written word. I find myself cooing over books all the time, as a matter of fact.

And what's more important is that Griffin loves her, whatever that means.

I think I do, and I think it's good, and pure, and cool as hell that he does and that he gets to see her every day.

Lucky bastard.

Thursday, January 8, 2015

It was the best of dimes....

I paid for three gallons of gas the other day.

In dimes.

I don't know what the most humiliating part of that day was, to be completely frank with you. Was it the actual act of handing the woman behind the counter 80 dimes? Or was it the fact that we even had 80 dimes in our house? Or how about the sphincter-tightening ride into town hoping to not run out of gas? Or the fear of running into someone at the gas station with whom I graduated high school and who drives an SUV with vanity plates that read YALLSUK?

Certainly I've had my share of public shame and embarrassment, but this drop-kicked me into a far deeper level of Hell. By way of comparison, for example:

  • I've stood in line with a box of tampons, vainly over-stuffing my arms with every male-seducing checkout line impulse purchase I could find in order to hide the Stayfree logo. Listen, you can never have too many 300-count Slim Jim value jugs.
  • I once went to reach for something across a teacher's desk and accidentally punched her left breast. How did I know it was her left breast, you ask? Because she was our health teacher, and we were learning human sexuality. It's a good goddamn thing I didn't punch her in the right labia majora. (What? You think I was born tall and then shrunk?).
  • I was yelling to myself in the car while waiting for the light to change when I turned and saw four varsity football players staring at me from the car next to mine. I quickly pretended I was listening to Kanye and even flashed the Rock On symbol. Only to realize it was the hand sign for "I Love You."
  • Just recently I was on the stand in a court proceeding and was asked how long I had been married to Corrine. I went pale, looked at Corrine's face for an answer, and finally said "Uh...um...er...six years?" Under oath. Justice is blind my ass. Now I'm blind from the look I got from my wife. Of six years. Who I love. And whose breasts or labia I've never punched.
Dimes for gas is a far different stool softener. Far different. Principally, tampon purchasing, tit-punching, and public contempt of wife fall within the arena of mild humiliation. Paying for your gas in dimes, however, is a clear sign of abject poverty and therefore beyond mere face-blushing embarrassment.

I suppose I've denied myself, all these years, the possibility that I could be poor despite all the signs being there: The long succession of $500 cars whose mileage began at 500,000; the 12 volumes of Betty Crocker ramen recipes; the non-designer wear from Goodwill Industries; the savings account passbook so unused that it still has that new bank smell. All legitimate indications pointing to a certain personal financial propensity, but ignored nevertheless.

But dimes for gas? That was the wake-up call; my Grapes of Wrath moment. Standing in line at the convenience store, I experienced a flash moment of clarity and saw my family, like the Joads, being forced to live in a boxcar. Or the 2015 equivalent: an abandoned UPS truck, since I would have no clue where to find a boxcar these days.

I pulled into the station and unclenched my teeth and my buttocks at the same time. The relief of having made it into town on the vapors of gas and whispered prayers was quickly replaced with a new fear.

I looked down into the passenger's seat and stared at the plastic sandwich baggy full of the dimes. I looked up again at the store. Foolishly I had been aching for the possibility that no one would be at a Cumberland Farms on a Friday morning in Maine. That everyone had somehow forgotten that it existed or had slept in or had overdosed the night before on their own fucking vomit.

Instead, every pump was being pumped; an 18-wheeler of fuel stood on the tarmac with the driver frigging with hoses and yacking at the local folks like they were friends from the war; the store bustled with early-morning coffee wranglers and toothless scratch-ticket whores. The line at the counter was 10 deep and I screamed at the side of the passenger window "Don't you fucking lowlife, degenerate, crack-smoking, shit-for-brains have anything better to do?!?! My problems are real! I got a bag of dimes here!""

I grabbed the baggy, dumped the dimes into my hand, got out of the car and let the coins fill up my pocket as I walked toward the store. Once inside, I took the last spot in line. I clutched the dimes in my pocket with an oily palm. The bulge so pronounced and the fiddling with the coins so audible that I just know everyone there thought I was trying to reassemble some sort of semi-automatic with my right hand. Or really loud at masturbating.

Gradually, painfully, the line moved ahead and just as I neared the counter a man took up residence behind me. I turned, cleared my throat, looked out across the store and said, "Oh. Yeah. Forgot sumthin'. You go on ahead."

"You sure? I can hold your spot," he said.

"Nah. No. It's big."

"Huh?"

"What I'm getting. What I forgot. It's big. Take a while. Over in the...that...big items section."

I stepped away and walked among the aisles of overpriced cereal and toilet paper and dog collars, every-so-often peeking toward the counter to monitor the line. It took me 45 minutes to finally catch a break.

I got to the counter and, with ironic pep, said, "Hi. I'll take 8 dollars on pump 3," to the attendant, who also just happens to have graduated high school with two of my children.

"Hey. How are you?" she asked. A line was beginning to form behind me while my intestines started to weave themselves into a French braid.

"Goodandyou?"

"Are you still living in Buckfield? I loved that house. It was so, you know, like, old and full of character and had all these creaks and groans like it was haunted or something, but not in a ghost way, in a good way."

"Um. Nope. We moved."


"Awww. That's too bad! I loved that old house. And the pond out back, did you ever swim in that? I can't remember, and the horses! Corrine still ride? I would love to ride a horse someday but I can't because I've got spine issues. So, eight on three?"

"You did where?"


"Eight dollars in gas on pump three?"


By now, the line behind me was long and everyone looked like they blamed me for why they had to come to Cumbys braless or in their night pants to get cigarettes because their goddamn good-for-nothing significant others were too hungover to do it themselves.


"Yeah. Yup. Eight bucks."


Slowly I dug deep into my pocket and produced a mound of silver.


"Hope ya like dimes. Heh heh. Heh heh. Heh heh," I flirted.

She looked back at me like I'd punched her in the labia. The woman behind me sighed windily, her breath announcing the coming of the seven angels of Satan on seven black horses. And from the corner of my eye I detected the shifting of others from one foot to another.

I thrust the coins into the attendant's hands and said "It's all there. I know. I counted it 76 times over there in the motor oil and donuts aisle."

She nodded knowingly and took the dimes and dropped them into her register.

"Say hey to Harrison and Alyssa!" she said brightly. I grunted and waved, then navigated through the gauntlet of glassy-eyed men and women I just knew had spent the previous night fornicating on their plaid couches in the pale, flickering light of a not-wide-screen television that showed a Downeast Dickering marathon.

How had it come to this? I asked myself as I pumped my three gallons of gas. I'm better than this! I'm not one of them.

But, alas, I was. 

I had to admit it. I was poor.

But, do you think I let it get to me?

No no no.



Pulling out of the convenience store parking lot I cranked the radio and began singing and drive-dancing in celebration of a gas-level display that read 52 Miles Before Empty. As if that was some great thing in a car that gets 25 miles to the gallon.

The way I was throwing down Anaconda, with my Dollar Tree shades on, you would have thought it read No Man Measures Up to You, Big Guy.

I guess I was elated because I had not fully failed. I had certainly gotten close to it - close enough to hang my toes over the edge - but I hadn't gone completely over.  I had not run out of gas and had to push it the rest of the way to the pumps. You know, like those real losers you see every so often.

I may be poor. I admit it. But I got dimes, baby. Just enough dimes to make me not pathetic.