Milo Remembers

    I remember the radio was playing a slowed-down, strung-out cover version of Get Happy as I entered the neighborhood near the Seattle airport that first night. “Come on, forget your blues, get happy…” I remember the city roads full of bandits and highway men. There were seedy strip clubs, children’s massage parlors, and perfect prostitutes that would walk up, knock on the door, and turn green under the neon and streetlamps– just like that, every night.

    I went to school with serial killers and other uneducated alcoholics, the whole mentally gangrenous generation. I went to church at the chapel of drinks and parties and it was there that I learned to hide

    But you knew where to find me, didn’t you, Darling?

    I went to work straight away. I sold liquor and fireworks for five years, condoms, porn, and beer for slightly longer. How long those awkward years – waiting for an opportunity to prove myself by asking inopportune questions about guns, and gangs, and alcoholic crime, and the women’s prison beatings – all of which occurred without the interference of the local police.

    What were you doing there, Darling? Surely it was no coincidence?

    I knew how to run and ruin the virgins then, when we first met. I didn’t burn them all, nor their contact information. I knew the voyeur struggle, alone. I knew the critic thinking. I knew the empty home that cost Jesus his life. Faking a porn addiction as a way to overcome the bad times. Often sorry. Acting out, like a script, dark and dangerous in dangerous positions. I could have died and scorned the shame.

    You read it all, yourself, once we were married, Darling. Why do I revisit this?

    We walk on and work through the mess, the specks, the planks, and piles of stones. Death and life. Life and death. But now? Now, how does it end? The two of us together, Darling. With Sibelius on the phonograph and dinner on the stove. Life and death. Death and life. We walk on through the mess.

Everything’s Back to Normal
One Life and One More

    I don't quite know who these two people are just yet - where they live, or what they're doing. They just started showing up in my writing and I've enjoyed finding them. I expect that I'll see a bit more from them. 

Gravemouth

    “A life so perfect! A life so free!”

    Gravemouth was born with a bifurcated tongue and lives a life of toxic lies. Nodding off now. Downing caffeine-based beverages to stay awake all night. With headaches, heartburn, twitch and slur. Aggressively high blood pressure. Gravemouth is cognitive decline.

    “The AntiAmircan Dumocrats hate me!”

    History deep and dull must be warped, distorted, and denied for Gravemouth to keep control. He becomes increasingly chauvinistic under intense criticism.

    “Shut up, Piggy. Bitch!”

    Overbearing and boorish. Angry and harsh. Just another child of God in the Christian MAGAnation. Using abusive language with the staff. Screaming at subordinates. Quick tempered and harsh.

    “They were off message. Now they’re unemployed! This will be the defining measure of success or failure in my administration. Loyalty or I’ll put you in the wood-chipper myself!”

    Gravemouth is the perpetual bully. A domineering bulge. Blind, indifferent, embittered. At war with the world.

    “I know we’d be there for them. I don’t know that they’d be there for us with all of the money we expend, with all of the blood, sweat and tears… They’re not there for us. I can tell you. You can’t trust them. And if you can’t trust them, you beat them.”

    Plagiarism. Crudeness. Egoism and an unseemly consolidation of power. He is a vulgarity born of burn out. Disintegration. Standing and falling apart. Burn down the office. Gravemouth will burn the world to eat the ashes.

One Life and One More

    A lush tone poem by Sibelius played upon the phonograph as Darling sliced vegetables in the apartment kitchenette. The light of a hazy sunset filtered through the flag that hung in the window. She could feel the lush orchestration and soaring melody thrumming inside her.

    “Darling, are you okay?” Milo asked from the door. She was standing at the counter, with peppers and onions on the cutting board and knife held loosely in her hand, but she wasn’t moving. “You seem distracted.”

    “Yes, Milo” she said and then, “No, my love.”

    “You are distracted,” Milo said. He said aside the drafts and drawings he carried and, stepping into the kitchen, relieved her of the knife.

    She clenched her teeth and, looking silently about the room, shook her head. She saw her reflection in the window and again in the cracked mirror on the wall in the living room. “Not distracted,” she whispered.

    “You’re shivering,” Milo said. “Cold too. What is it?”

    “The death of so many. I could not. We couldn’t.”

    Milo led her to the couch at the center of the living room. “Sit, Darling. Sit. Please. Let me get you something.”

    “No,” she said clutching his arm. “I want nothing.” She looked into his eyes. “Just sit with me a while.”

    He sat on the couch with her, and it was a comfort. To them both. A comfort to know that she belonged to him and he to her, in equal measure. They sat that way, together, until the sun was set and the room was dark.

    "We don’t know what we’re doing, do we?” She said later, during dinner. Not really. Your art and my travel. And yet we cannot do nothing. How can these little motions stand against so many lives?”

“If we can save but one,” Milo said.

    She’d fallen in love with him years before, slowly, over occasional conversations and walks to the market. He was patient. Always patient.

    “One life,” he said again. “And one more.”

    Gunshots erupted in the night – as they had most every night that month. These were not so close as some of the others. Perhaps at the train station down the street.

    “One life,” she whispered back.

    “And one more.”

Everything’s Back to Normal

    I don't quite know who these two people are just yet - where they live, or what they're doing - but I've enjoyed finding them and expect that I'll see a bit more from them.

And Say, Amen

    Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world
    which He has created according to His will.
    May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days,
    and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon;
    and say, Amen.

    To life, a blessing. To life with grief. A life of questions and too few reasons. The complexity of purpose is beyond us. We are too weak for these heavy weighted conversations. We are more suited to pleasant reminiscences and the laughter of games.

    May His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity.
    Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored,
    adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He,
    beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that
    are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen.

    Shade the window and light the candle and, with head covered, recite the remembered prayers of our grandmothers and grandfathers.

    May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us
    and for all Israel; and say, Amen.

    Remember that time in the park, when the sunlight filtered through the oak leaves and we rolled upon the grass, our clothes still wet from the stream…?

    He who creates peace in His celestial heights,
    may He create peace for us and for all Israel;
    and say, Amen.

    An angel of the sun rises with the steel of God in his hand.

All I Know Is Darkness – a Psalm for Palestine

    A song of sickness and native-born suffering.

    Look, it is night, it is dark, but look, shuttered windows and boarded doors on the street, unfriendly faces leering from suspicious shadows, and the message you receive, loud and incessant, insistent, if you’re listening, is: help, oh, God, help me!

    I’ve been filled for so long now, time, times, and half a time at least, with misery, living on the shores of Sheol, numb and numbered with the ones hanging upside down over oblivion, stalked and hunted and left for dead, all strength is stripped from these arms, like one of the slaughtered tossed into a ditch with no protection, unremembered, even by you, no flowers, no grass, only stones beneath the grave, not a place for anyone, only depth, only darkness.

    Drift

    Like a man from the black, friendless, defiled, grotesque, wheeling, spinning, thrashing but no escape, trembling hands a prayer for return, but the dead see no miracle, no sign, no wonder, only shadows rising with no praise.

    Drift further

    With the door closed behind, the room is black and dark and silent, do they sing here? Love songs? Hymns? Do the spirits sing spiritual songs? Do they know your wonders in the void? And still I’m here, weeping in the dust on the floor, every morning, every evening, though those words mean nothing when you won’t even look at me, I was born too close to death, wounded in birth, I bleed to death, shifted weight and slipping foot, I carry unfinished terrors in my wretched body, and all I know is darkness.