sleepin at the wheel
it’s been forever since i wrote. i almost forgot how to write. after a while it gets overwhelming to catch up every thought i thought that should have gone on ICYAH. but an end to a piece of my vanity has pushed me along the gutter into the soup and now i feel like it’s safe to scribble some scribble and see what muscal sickeningness is likely to erupt in the postmathems…
which is to say i’ll make no sense rather than make no noise.
and i’ve been too busy preparing everything else in my life to begin to write that i never could pick up the goddamn pen for the weight of everything patiently lying on top of it. and lying it was. i lied to myself repeatedly about this or that thing being the last item on the toodloo i mean too doom i mean to-do list before this time i swear i’m gonna get going on the project of the explanation for everything that came before. but there never is an end to that damn list. i’m like a child who can’t help picking at the sores on my face in the hopes that i will cure by sheer obsessiveness. but the universe smiles not on the myopically obsessive, only on the diligently focused. and so the wages of my mostly blind obsessiveness and occasional relaxed diligence are that i’m still no closer to writing the effin book on what he did before he became the dad everyone knew him as.
and that’s what i got to got2 get to workin on. i mean, he’s been loitering so long it looks like littering. hanging in the wings like a feather about to fall, waiting for the splash, or bump, or at least a grunt to signal the start of the story. he whispered on the pier that the waves were too slow and the sand too still and i didn’t really notice cause i was thinking about getting back to building the fence in the backyard and getting at least one of these hulking pieces of iron running at least a little like a vehicle before gasoline hits the seven dollar mark. but he was quiet after that and i didn’t even notice him skulking, like smoke in the bar in the morning he floated in the corner of the living room while i worried ludicrously about the mortgage bill and whether this customer or that hated me and thought i was a shyster and how bethany was right all those years ago proclaiming i was destined for low tide. it’s been a hard couple days. he’s been hard on my heels in his silent, gentle, loving and incriminating way. guilt is really the gold band around my present, makin it hard to breathe. i’m a middling man, always at the end of some lost era, always on the cusp of some new regret, inventing remorse codes to signal another surrender. ah and the pressure of each admission of mediocrity begins to wear, like tire treads wear, like roads where it doesn’t matter how long it will be before the repair, the woods and sky will accomodate my impatience and my fears of failure. they’ll tell me i can wander forever around these black and white gardens, never reaching any zenith, and it will still be just an exquisite puzzle, turned on itself, hilarious without a punchline, as big as the memory of an echo, dripping steady like the tub but at least there’s water for a hot bath and my manghost will hone and be ready.
