When a Bell Rings

Dad was drunk- we all had ways of dealing with that kind of car wreck. Tommy lit bottle rockets in the backyard. They whisteled up the mountainside, leaving tracks and little pink sticks in the crabgrass.
Sally braided. Her hair. Mine. Mom's, while she re-read last Sunday's post.
She braided the carpet tassles, the pull cords on the dusty blinds, even her ragdoll's yellow yarn hair (some of the plaits pulled away from the head entirely, surrounding her in a little nest).
I carved the words "not" and "working" on eigther side of dad's srying soap bar with the end of my toothbrush. Then I filled his briefcase with the cat's pancake-like litterings, scooped dog shit up in a brown lunch bag and smeared it all over his sock drawer. These were the best Christmas gifts I could give him- ones that I really meant.
Mom started sniffling between the screeing sounds of Tommy's barade. Sally strung the doll's hair on the tree and tried and failed to throw her bald little body on the top point like some sad angel. She lay there, somewhere near the middle, on her side. The shiny tree looked like it was swallowing her, the lights made her look like she was on fire.

Dad was drooling on the kitchen table. I pulled the warming bottle from his outstretched hand, thenpadded back to my parents bathroom in my new slippers and refilled his Old Spice bottle with whiskey.

The whole town thought he was a drunk. Now they'd know he was one. He'd loose his job, and then maybe Mom would brave the stick shift of the station wagon, pack us kids up, and go. A three inch metal lever was all we needed to get us out and away. I wondered if he's miss us. "The whore" and his "nasty little fuckers". I wondered, if we left in the night if he'd sit alone in the pile of ribbons and wrapping paper and regret.

The senior year of College smells like a CD warpper (that clingy kind that sticks to your hand).

That is to say, it smells like anticipation (the overpriced kind).

Three days after her husband left

The wind shook down what she had,
left it all at her feet.
No one wants to be 32 and swimming in pictures taken by
instamatics and poloroids that their aunts and uncles (long since divorced).
This is what happens on a Saturday when the sky is indifferent and, when
trying to escape the hum of a turned on television
a woman plans to surprise her mother with coffee and
store bought cake
but the door is locked and it seems she went away for the weekend
apple picking, with your older and much more lucrative sister
and her lite cigarettes.

So, you go down to the basement with the washing machine that gapes
and dig through boxes-
Half flattened, holiday patterned, cardboard and plastic.
Digging through a life of barbeques, communions, girl scout patches
and the horn-rimmed faces of all your
older brother's old sweethearts.

Where did these girls go? Wasn't this one's name Jane?
Or Sue?
Ghost women, always floating next to a vague uncle, a snack table,
a tinseled tree...where have all those women gone?

The pictures took up the day that
the wind had shaken down from the branches
and she had eaten all the cake herself, leaving crumbs
and crumbs and crumbs

Jane always was so thin.

Humlos

Moon- just wanted someone to trace its craters.
Sun- hadno hands, ran away.
Moon- lost weight. Lost light.
Sun- tore holes in everything, despite lack of hands.

Moon- waiting behind clouds and clouds and clouds.

I am burning the truth out of myself on a daily basis. 

The universe summed up in a sentence:

"And then something happened."

A Man's Man.

While telling me about how terrible the new summer job is that his father set him up with, my best friend admitted to being upset and berated by his new boss who told him he was cleaning toilets wrong. This idea of his body that I know so well and have seen so well and come to love so much for, dressed in a muted green cleaning suit, crouched over a piss stained toilet in an office building somewhere in the city disgusted me in a way...the budding poet of our time. Knee deep in urine and shit and fluorescent lighting.

I told him he should quit. he said he had cried and already decided to never go back.

He said " God, I just hope my father understands."

I said, history would not have happened without that sentence, without that sentiment.

He said, "I just hope my father isn't angry."

I said, now there is a sentiment I know nothing about.

But I do know what an office building bathroom looks like and my best friend Matthew, has no place there.