mother’s hobby: snoops on the soprano next door. married to the mafia. bugged the office: she thought she was his prostitute. I caught him listening. loaded questions & accountability for breaking windows. she caught me lying. finger-smiths and night workers. mayday mayday. WTO. & she kept a journal of how big he was each time.
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dilate marinated spirals of beach glass. brooms of witches and warlocks in star-hawks wing. she asked me to become the nun that kneels through the night. with defiance i sipped and slept and dreamed what he was thinking so that we could know without a whisper. the iris was never the wiser nor poorer for the refusal. why then the disciplinary passiveness when my passion flies east instead of west. why do i still disappoint when you already threw me away. how do we inspire others to move forward so they will cease to limit us. how can they accept that i was on that pirate ship in that bottle upon her shelf. the lesson being that the only reason i am here to tell this tale. swimming in pure spirits: melting the chains of tears & employing the middle finger. a well-paid finger indeed.
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I was told by someone I have never met that I was out of line for not asking them permission. Security culture forbids the words from exhaling: imprisoned in the lungs with parched lips immovable. My hands printed the lines that defined an idea that he drew in the afternoon in the house under watch and in the sun. She sold the experience at the table for fame and fair fortune. Blondes have more fun, yet Demian’s shadow laughs last.
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a situation of ill-legalist rhetoric that lies and leaves you with a headache of a lifetime award. mind erasure of the safety on a gun and the true feelings never revealed. photo shoots of suits and black-eyes and sisters spreading blood and whey like a shell that broke open in the comfort of a burning world revived. match books with phone numbers asking if you really think I would dare love you more than the fire than burns between us. that we would betray the nothing for something more than the ash in my mouth, and the Ballantines that reminded me that there was water to cleanse the stagnation of heartbreak. no time like the present…
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The first time I went train riding I went with a brand-new pair of shoes. The ones that I had been traveling with were wore out and holy. The new pair were a standard issue military boot I got on the cheap and that I thought would hold up. The blisters from walking and running in them were all I remember from the trip. I didn’t want to get out of the boxcar, and it made landing difficult.
I remember when I got my first “real job” at a library in a major metropolitan city. Before that I had been working restaurant, screen-printing, and odd jobs. These required the crappiest shoes possible, while still maintaining comfort and support. When I got on that elevator on my way to the 11th floor Human Resources office to fill out my hiring paperwork, everyone on the ride looked down at my shoes. They were cheap and stuck out like a sore thumb. I was unaware of these nine-to-five shoe expectations.
I keep things for a long time. I can hold onto a pair of shoes for around a decade. In tandem, I have wavering dietary choices that have landed with me being vegan. In this moment of liberation, I feel a heaviness about my footwear. My shoes that I have had for almost five years are leather. These shoes could survive for another three if I approach the marathon appropriately. Many of the local vegan restaurants discourage people from wearing animal products into their cafes for obvious reasons. This aside, the energetic awareness of wearing murder and torture as a pair of wings on the foot is overwhelming and discouraging. Do I throw away the violent shoes and replace them, or honor that there was sacrifice and decision prior to me and my proverbial community’s lifestyle choice, knowing that there is seething judgement with every footfall.
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I lived in Asheville 20 years ago when Hurricane Katrina devoured New Orleans. Friends and friends of friends came here as a place of refuge. Tent cities popped up at the punk houses across town. In the evenings there would be campfire stories about people stealing cars to get away. I lived with someone that had lived in New Orleans for some time and put zines out specifically about New Orleans punk culture. When the Spike Lee joint When the Levees Broke came out, we rented a motel to watch it as we did not have a television. The documentary seemed the only connection to the real world. I was not here in Asheville for Helene, but that motel was destroyed in the storm. Also, that friend basically drank himself to death after returning to NOLA. Last I saw him I was in New Orleans and took him out for a drink. When he left the bar, the bartender asked if I knew him and that they were worried. Saying that I was the only person they had seen him with that he seemed close to. He was underground punk famous at one point, as were so many others. I think he had falling outs due to changing politically correct requirements, and bad boundaries with the new upcoming generation…and maybe a few of the old guard.
Post-Helene Asheville is different than the one I visited in the summer of 2022. There is a vacancy is people’s eyes that is unexplainable. There is a silent violence in the abandonment of the southern Appalachian people, similar to that of the people of New Orleans during Katrina. Lack of infrastructure has made space for drugs and nationalism. Bars I use to frequent are now dens of sin and competition for turf. They all seem to also work for FEMA during the nine to five, at least they look like that one guy I saw in that big truck. -
clues to the past in movement that loiters for the sake of passerine nightmares and coffee crystals with texas toast & cigars meant for the noise. bubbling sauce with turtle tomato noses and a generation of silence remembering that we are nothing without the seed on the wind. adopted ancestorial intent left in graveyards and parched mowed lawns. their dreams become our own even if only in a song.
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in solidarity a letter on the wind to a friend lost and not found we search for the streams and rivers that hide behind forest glens and bat caves with violin songs for moms. i was never one of you in the sense that i never said the right things and did not know the lyrics to the song. conforming to the outsider is not the way one shifts gears into a different reality only to have to prove that you are more punk than me. paper cuts from prison tv phone calls and school photos stalk a ringtail into the night. tarot acts as the compass rose for who’s to blame. they refused to fix it due to a bad gear case. going nowhere boy, except where you’re going.
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Words fishing with forked tongue. Left hand of darkness cloaked you stealing my wallet. It was for the just cause of it. Marshmallow peeps & candy cigarette chewing gum. I was asked to be accountable for being an individual, as if it were a crime against the commune. It was no longer my credit card, and I was a criminal for going my own way. He fell in love with the idea of her being me. I let him believe it was so. I did not want to break her heart. The credit is now hers and I am punished: exiled. Moments of misinformation become fact in the history books. Primo Levi rolls in the graves.
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I have been away for 20 years, with occasional visits. There are people that I could not call. No happy hour due to social tensions and fall out. When you leave it is like you hit a pause button. When you return everything fast-forwards into the future with no framework as to why you are no longer friends. Resentments and betrayals from mutuals left unexplained. It was more than me growing my hair out and removing my nose ring. He had become a completely different human encased in the same body as before. His lighthearted thirties transformed into judgmental cold fifties. Some high-school reunions are stolen moments poured out with the gin.
derive of environs 