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igobacktomay · 5 years ago

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alright lads we’re starting the year off strong with three poems already written, lemme now what y’all think if u have thoughts to report

1. no title yet!!

the forsythia is budding early this year, I notice with a creeping dread as I walk the dog. all alongside our warming driveway, dead nettle and smartweed bloom brightly in the morning sun. it’s January again, and the dog is frantically eating grass, pulling at the end of her leash in pursuit of a purging. her message is clear: we take relief where we can find it.

but not me, not today, when I’m barely able to stand the sight of a couple of metal trash cans glinting in the sun without crying. everything is so beautiful before it goes away. I try in vain to warm my toes, dress myself in false flowers and remember to brush my teeth. the dog merely sits by the window without complaint, gnawing on her own paw.

2. also no title yet!!

eventually it all came down around us like an ape shot off a skyscraper, and the only thing left to do was go rubbernecking in the ruins. another flattened volkswagen, another birthday card signed with a name since replaced.

wandering the wreckage i tried to extinguish the fire with my mouth, produce a soaking, sooty thing and lie: “it’s better like this, don’t you think? once it’s tamed? when it’s over?” all the while picking that god damned gorilla hair out of my teeth.

it didn’t work. my reconstructions couldn’t bring it back, the drums pounding in the jungle, the old excitement of the chase. there was only a woman screaming in a bedroom far away, and the taste of ashes.

3. “enoch emery takes a cab downtown” (thanks flannery o connor for ur boy as a subject)

just one more lasting look, as the crowd moves around me again like oblivious fish. one more second standing here in the court of the shrunken king, one more reverent breath and something will come to me, I know it: a plan, a plot, a blind man in a clapboard house. a quickening in my veins. my daddy’s blood runs in me. it drags my body here then draws me back like moon-pulled waves that leave me gulping seawater. so there’s been no illumination in this museum yet, nothing set in motion but ordinary legs hurrying somewhere else as if they’re already late. walking home through the city I dream about swimming pools full of ice cream, streets overflowing with zoo animals & unattended children, mummified monarchs unlatching their own glass cases and leaping into my arms. I dream of a sky that isn’t broken yet, of shaking the hand of a fellow man and seeing, at last, a friendly gorilla inside him.

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igobacktomay · 5 years ago

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i know i’m a clown who posts writing twice a year with the preface “this isn’t finished yet” but: this isn’t finished yet, i wanted to share it anyway. sharing personal writing sleeves me out a little but it’s also the only kind of writing i do, & often the kind i like to read, so it follows that i have to share it sometimes. this is called “cappadocia, south carolina” and it’s a true story but the names have been changed

Curled in on myself on the cavernous and unfamiliar bed with my knees to my chest, I tried and failed to steady my breathing. Avery’s breath was hot and wet in my ear, and some part of me somewhere in the back of a warehouse was saying, This was where you were when it happened but I did my best to shake that off. I tried to focus on the warmth of her chest on my back, arms wrapped around my arms that wrapped around my legs, her legs curled loosely up towards mine, a firm crescent moon around my smaller body. I tried to come up with something to say and couldn't. It was like someone had smeared Vaseline on the lens. All my thoughts were gone. All that was left was feelings, simultaneously hollow and all-consuming, a wiping of the slate, a disconnection from myself, a fear of something, a painful memory hovering just out of frame.

Avery rubbed my hands slowly as if she was waiting for me to speak. I only shivered in my fog. I had no words. Eventually she asked, "Hey, if you could live in a colony on the moon or in underground tunnels, which would you pick?"

Her voice was light and curious, testing me for a response, so I screwed one up out of somewhere and asked her if there was natural light anywhere in the tunnels. My words came out slow and dream-like. I pictured them sliding into the corners of the room and kept my eyes shut, lest I see it.

She seemed to think for a second before she answered.

"No, I don't think there's natural light."

"I still pick the tunnels."

"Why?"

"There's these tunnels in..." and I trailed off. Got lost for a moment thinking of a photo I saw on a Wikipedia page somewhere, of sunlight coming in through thin alabaster to illuminate a partially-underground room. I tried to stay focused on the image, which was comforting, until I could remember the words for what I was trying to say. It was also possible that I had invented the picture, or that somewhere a few archaeological sites got mixed up in my brain. I couldn’t tell.

"Fuck," I whispered, "I know this. Hold on, I know where they are, I just--" and putting my thoughts into words was like trying to make noise underwater. I started to worry that all that would come out was air bubbles and all that would come in was drowning. The water poured into my skull and carried off the rest of the thought, leading me back into the empty moor of dissociation, further away from the woods and the lake and the cold bed. But Avery continued to stroke my hands and arms and the feeling was distracting, and thinking about how it was distracting suddenly let me break a hole through the gray curtain. I saw the impossible stone window again, and for a second its light shone through me.

"Cappadocia,” I pronounced carefully, still clutching my legs to my chest as tight as I could. “They're in the Cappadocia region of... somewhere."

"What are?" Avery asked. I blinked. How long had it been?

"What? These tunnels I’m telling you about. They're like, hundreds of... maybe thousands of… years... I don't know. They're old, and they uh, they're in the desert somewhere, and I'd want to live in one of those. They look nice."

"Oh. That sounds good.” She paused, and the part of me that still knew where I was knew that she was running out of things to say. I hoped she wouldn’t stop trying anyway. Though I was largely unable to communicate it, I was convinced her conversation was the only thing keeping me from slipping over the edge into catatonia. The animal of myself was drifting back to the Ice Age, warming its illiterate hands by the original hearth fire in my mind.

“If you lived in the tunnels, would you fall in love with a mole person?" was what she came up with. I gave it some consideration.

“Yeah, probably."

"Would you have mole babies?"

“I'd have a mole abortion, Avery." She didn’t laugh. Could I blame her? She continued to stroke my hands and breathe evenly on my hair, but didn’t ask me any more questions. I had the feeling she wasn’t sure what to do; I was not in the right condition to illuminate her.

Since pulling away and curling into a ball, I hadn't opened my eyes for a long time. I knew it would be dark in the room if I did, but I still couldn't face anything. I feared stimulation. I only wanted to be comfortable and still, to exist away from myself. I could feel the core of my body shaking involuntarily, even though I was warm and knew I wasn’t in danger. I started worrying that I was going to forget who Avery was and stop feeling safe because I didn't know who was holding me.

Instead, I suddenly recalled in a flash my memories of fifteen minutes earlier, looking down across the flat plain of my stomach at thin bare legs sprouting out of a borrowed oversized sweater, her rolling the condom on and me waiting on the pain and the pistoning, and I felt terribly anxious and sick. Not over Avery. It wasn’t her fault. I felt sick with myself. I had felt the blankness replacing my arousal even as I consented and participated, as I looked at our tangle of legs and wondered vaguely which belonged to me. I had hoped I could somehow stop the feeling on my own, already sensing the difficulty of the words coming out, and so said nothing in protest. I couldn’t stop the feeling on my own, and halfway through a handjob she had asked, “are you okay?” and I had whispered, “I’m sorry, I feel really weird,” and slowly folded myself down onto the duvet.

Now the guilt rolled in. Guilt for my inability to speak, to stop anything from happening when I knew I should, guilt for putting Avery in a position like this one: having to stop consensual sex three minutes in to comfort her pained partner like a child & question her own actions. I didn’t want to worry her while we were on vacation. What I wanted was just to have a good time with my girlfriend, and now I had failed step one for both of us.

Why can't you work? I pleaded with my body. Christ, why can’t you be normal for once? Nothing that bad even happened to me in the first place. Why am I so fucked up over it? There was no real urgency to these thoughts, but they were carried by cloudy waves of overwhelming discomfort that made me want to cry.

Just as I was starting to spiral and squeeze myself tighter together, Avery started talking in my ear again. I could tell by her tone that she was telling me a story to help me relax, and I stopped following the thread of my fear long enough to force myself to listen and breathe slowly.

What she started with was, "Did you know how cigarettes got their name?"

I took one deep breath before pushing the words out. "No. Tell me how.”

"Well,” Avery said, snuggling her arms closer around my body, “Once there was this man named Sigur. He was a really tall, and uh, lanky man, and he always wore a white shirt and kind of... tan-orange pants. And he always carried tobacco and rolling papers with him wherever he went, you know, he was a smoker. And when he would roll his tobacco into the papers, he would make it so the ends were tan-orange and the rest was white... so it would look just like a little version of him in his outfit. And, so, he called them Sigur-ettes, as in, smaller Sigurs! And that's how cigarettes got their name."

I didn't respond very much to the story, except at the end when I said, "I'm glad, he's... good," and then trailed off.

There were several minutes of silence, during which I spontaneously and uncontrollably pictured what I might look and feel like in the event that I were able to carve out all of my internal organs and sell them on eBay. I forced it back down into the blankness. My usual visualization of my brain as two hands that plucked information out and dispensed it had been replaced by the conviction that those hands had formed tight fists and curled towards each other with their backs to me, like two small cats settling in to sleep.

"We can go back to the way we were before if you want," Avery said from behind me, pulling me a little closer and rocking me slightly onto my back, as if to guide me to roll over so we were face to face. The animal in my brain didn’t like my body being moved by other people but the animal would not move my body by itself. These were words I couldn’t speak. I mumbled back a vague protest.

"You don't have to do that, this was fine."

"Hey, maybe I like the other position better,” she said. “I might have. C'mon."

I couldn’t find the energy to resist her gentle tugging, or a reason to do so, so as she pulled at me, I slowly let go of my legs and stretched them cautiously towards the end of the bed. My shoulders relaxed a little, and the next thing I knew, Avery’s blue eyes were looking into mine in the dim room, and she was steadying my shoulder saying, “There, that wasn’t so bad, right?”

I still closed my eyes against her gaze and responded without words, but she was right, it wasn’t so bad. In this new position I could feel exhaustion finally seeping into me as my muscles started to relax by increments. As I calmed down and counted my fingers and returned to myself, I started to regain the part of me that felt embarrassment and shame and was stricken. It was the worst kind of hangover to have. Every time I found my way out of that space, the first part of me to come back was the shame.

“I’m sorry this always happens,” I exhaled into the hollow of Avery’s neck. “I wish it didn’t, I mean, I really, I hate it, I didn’t want--”

“Hey,” she said softly, and my heart almost broke. “You don’t have to apologize. I’m not mad. It’s okay.”

It’s not okay, I thought, even if you aren’t mad, but I didn’t say it. I let her reassure me, keeping the blankness to myself as it shrunk back into its own corner of my mind.

“It’s okay,” she said again. “It’s not your fault.”

Eventually her hands in my hair compelled the rest of the terror to let go of me, and I fell asleep beside her, not cuddling but facing opposite directions on our own sides of the bed, as was our way.

In the morning when we woke up and reached our hands sleepily towards each other, the room was still cold and the sky outside was gray and misty. We dressed without talking very much, and I wondered if I was supposed to offer her some kind of explanation for my behavior. I decided against it; downstairs there were friends and blueberry pancakes and coffee and gospel, and a four hour drive home ahead of me. My night fears had ebbed away and left me tired, but no longer too foggy to think. I ate breakfast and smoked a clove cigarette over a steaming mug of black coffee in a deck chair, next to chatty punks wrapped up in quilts like caterpillars, and felt quietly grateful for all the people I loved. Avery’s best friend asked us how we slept when we made it down the stairs, and we both said, “fine!”

After we all got home and I was by myself in my dorm room again, I googled photos of the tunnels in Cappadocia, which turned out to be in Turkey. There was no image of a room with a thinly carved stone window. No images of light glowing through such a thing. The picture must have been something my dissociation invented, a new safe place to hide. I pictured it and tested its capabilities, and liked what I saw.

#do not reblog please and thank u #pr

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