His hips were the hips of a boy, his eyes the eyes of an old man. An impossible moon graced his father’s shoulder, one of many transmissions.
How it turned green in the passing, that orb. How it highlighted the similar bone structures. How the snake draped across the boy’s shoulders glinted in its light.
Denim is manly. Or not. The moon is not. A snake for a boy signals not rising kundalini, but the rising sap of manhood. How will he hold his lover’s hand through the hail? How will his lips find another’s when the elevator jerks to a stop, no clear exit?
And will he remember how sturdy, how firm a father he had, the day his dad gave him the moon? Or will it, the moon, cause the boy/man’s bangs to stick up, cause a troubling ruffle in his chest where something someone is missing, not his mother exactly, but something someone close?
The snaps will be undone, the head shaved, hallowed music swayed to, meteors hitting the grey still hills on a night he least expects it.
And somewhere someone draws the man/boy a bath.
SoulCollage card as a prompt.
Writing note: once you begin writing, the prompt doesn’t matter anymore. I was tempted to post the poem without the image, but I couldn’t resist sharing it.
The man here is a the founder of Mitchell hair products, entrepreneur, and billionaire. Thanks, as always to magazines for their fertile images, none of which are being sold.
Later: can’t believe I found the guy’s name: it’s John Paul Dejoria.
Get it out, the theory has long been. Get it out and you’ll feel better. Rage, sorrow, bitter resentment, or whatever other emotion burbles just below the surface — as if to articulate say, fiery anger, was to put it to rest. But that’s not how it works, is it? At least not every time. Sometimes to spell it out and spell it out out loud lends clarity (think: Audre Lorde saying that ‘anger is loaded with information’). But along with clarity might come a bend in the amplitude, one that offends family, neighbors (if it’s summer and the windows gape open) and sends the dog slinking away to a remote part of the house. How is that helping anyone, including the one with bulging eyes and spittle on her chin?
Some tyranny tiptoes in and robs you of breath just by being silent and unbudgeable. That’s what I married into. I try to think of it as a style, to lesson its defeating force. In the face of such brutal passivity, it’s tempting to view the expulsion of rage as somehow virtuous. But it’s not. Or it’s not necessarily.
Today anticipating more big wind, more torrential rain (one might say the weather is offering its own testimony of outrage), I prepare for fury. Have I ever done this before? Maybe. Maybe the summer the black-robed liars overturned Roe v. Wade and because of a leak, we knew it was coming. (Actually, we knew it was coming listening to feckless Susan Collins’ assessment of Kavanaugh, but skip that lest it sound like bragging, even though every sane consumer of the news knew it was coming).
Let me get right to the point. Why don’t the powers that be care about my outrage? Is it just that our side owns fewer guns?
I prepare a bed to kick and jump on when the Supreme Court of the United States hands down an opinion not worth the paper it’s written on — an expected ruling that, no, Colorado does not have the right to exclude an insurrectionist from the ballot. It’ll be some bullshit about the 14th Amendment, Section 3 not being self-executing or the president not being an “officer.” Or maybe they’ll straight up dish out policy and opine about the importance of uniformity, stability, or whatever, instead of doing their goddamned job which I don’t need to remind you is to interpret and UPHOLD the Constitution.
In not doing their job, the SCOTUS will be signaling that the rage of one set of people, all on the right, matters more than the sanity of the rest of us. The “pitchfork exemption” as Timothy Snyder calls it. To rule in fear of violence means violence wins. Talk about tyranny! No tiptoeing here.
What if I start breathing fire? Climb up a water tower and let loose? Or maybe travel to Maine where some extremist is buying up land and settling in for some siege or other. Who do you think you are?
Meanwhile Justices: Don’t you dare think that ruling there is no absolute presidential immunity (an absurd and ridiculous argument) will get you off the hook on reading the Fourteenth Amendment as it was intended and as it is plainly written.
Originalists and texturalists, my ass!
The rain is expected to fall hard and in volume. The last big wind took out the Internet for three days, offering a revealing lesson about routine and connectivity that might be worth looking at but I’m not willing to do so at the moment.
What is here today, on the page, out the window? Always a worthy question and sometimes all the remedy strong emotion requires. I’ll be hungry later. There will be dog hair to swipe off the floor with the side of my hand, cooked farro to add to soup and reheat. Bath bombs arrived and that means I’ll enjoy a fragrant bath, one with orange-tinted water.
Sometimes there are glitches going from my laptop to my phone. Today was such a day. So let me try again.
The prompt was to write about something ruined and/or improved. My response follows.
I don’t know what to believe anymore — the selling of swatches of his so-called “surrender suit” seems cheesy and crass enough to be true — but auctioning off fifteen-minute private meetings with his blow fish almost daughter-in-law?
In the photo her mini dress has two flaps that overlap but not nearly enough, so that the opening points upward to you-know-where. Her strappy platform sandals — one toe turned slightly inward! — are covered in silver glitter — not in this instance a nod to Beyoncé, just an assertion of her trashiness. “No Kissing” says the caption and again I wonder if it’s real because of the ruined face above the décolletage, the lips inflamed with filler such that the comparison to blow-up masturbation dolls is rather on point. Who would want to kiss those lips?
Those lips are often parted as she honks out her MAGA message. Can’t we all still hear her hollering out in triumphant shouts: “THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”
Being who I am and given what sources I have collected, of course I’ve seen her “before face,” back when she was married to Gavin Newsom, before she was trying to outdo Elvira with the slutty garb and black eye shadow. She was cute! Attractive. Had a normal face. Perhaps she also had more normal politics.
And then don’t get me started on the Mar-a-Lago photos! You’ve seen them, I’m sure. Photo after stilted photo of big-boobed women in revealing dresses, wearing stilettos, flanking Orange Jesus holding up those god-damned thumbs — another quotidian thing he has ruined, along with red hats and our fucking flag.
I ask you: why is at least one of them so often canting her torpedo boobs into the demented wanna-be-dictator’s rib cage? I yell “Gross” every time, but that doesn’t quite capture the revulsion does it? Because it’s not just lascivious, tawdry, weirdly uniform sexual posturing, it’s also the attendant brainwashing.
It’s everything that makes these ruined women say, “He’s my man,” or “I like his policies,” or these days, “Biden crime family.”
Their delusions are uglier than their pouty lips and reconstructed cheeks, scarier than all those waterfalls of fake blonde hair (spare me, please!). Yes, spare us. Spare us the shared ruination.
The first is a found poem* taken down while watching an old Vera episode. The second was written after watching several episodes of Vietnam in HD. It probably is unfinished so I can’t really call it an essay.
****
Vera
that ruck at the nightclub
There were complaints. Seems it was a pattern. One that could get him the jotters.
A poxy little complaint
Heard he was taking backhanders
It’s okay, Kyle
Dead in the pond.
You need anything, you call me.
Going a fair old lick there, pet.
What’s going on with Gary?
And your coat was on a shaky peg as it was.
Some scrote
Now sit down
Kyle being Kyle he makes a pig’s ear out of it.
****
Vietnam in HD
Vietnam in HD shows so much up close and devastating. Helicopters roaring in for the injured, close-ups of bandaged heads, missing limbs, following soldiers through jungle terrain with invisible enemy combatants near.
No episode about strategy ever makes sense. They are going west on such and such a road, helicopters flanking to the south. What? To what end? And when a vet reflects later and says he could see the campaign wasn’t working, what I want to know is how he’d have known it WAS working? It all seems a terrible waste.
But here’s a surprise. The sense of love I feel for these young men. I’m not a person who walks through life feeling love at random moments or even, necessarily, at heightened personal moments. I know people who are like that and often wish to be more like them.
So it’s an extra surprise this love. Those boys, I think, over and over. Oh, those boys.
I love their bravery and their cynicism. I love their bare chests and the line of their jaws beneath their helmets. I love how their pants hang off narrow hips.
I remember in a way I forget to remember what it feels like to lust after a young man. I’m more team Janelle Monae than George Clooney these days and needless to say my husband hasn’t been a young man for decades.
Maybe it’s the music. Rock n’ roll — all familiar, all capable of tripping a rolling and powerful nostalgia. I was 17 at the fall of Saigon, too young for the earlier peace protests, too young for Woodstock, but a perfect age to love Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin.
At the beginning of the Tet Offensive, I was ten. It feels important to do the math. There’s so much I wasn’t paying attention to, but the fact and images of the war were nevertheless inescapable. I can’t remember what I thought of the soldiers back then. I doubt I considered them as peers. Certainly wasn’t drawn to them. I DO remember making a beaded necklace that spelled PEACE in Morse Code in the quiet solitude of my bedroom.
Last night I watched scenes from the largest protest by veterans in our history. One after another, they threw their medals into the reflecting pond in D.C. I got choked up, so much damage visible, even in the men who were not in wheelchairs.
Once upon a time I was courted by two Vietnam veterans. One with a puppy dog persistence that struck me as benign, maybe even cute. He’d grown a beard since his service and gotten fat. I wasn’t cruel or dismissive, but he wasn’t necessarily real to me.
The other I allowed to get a little closer because of his bad boy vibe. Blond, hairless chest, on the short side, gorgeous skin. Definitely my type (except for the hair color). It was frightening to discover how very disturbed he was. He may have been a sociopath or he may have been a regular person damaged enough to harbor homicidal tendencies.
But those boys in HD! Smoking, always smoking. At work, oiling the big guns. At work, cleaning their rifles. Slim waists. Beautiful shoulders. I remember what it was to want to get near enough to smell the object of my desire and to feel his warm breath on my neck.
Age mutes things and so does raising sons. How unseemly (or worse) it would’ve been to notice how beautiful my teenaged boys were — or the same about their friends, a possee of boys turning into men, unaware yet of all that life would deal out to them, unsure of their sexuality, and nearly to a boy unaware of their beauty. And beautiful.
* To create a found poem I write down phrases as spoken and in the order they were spoken.
Indulge me. Otherwise where will all these passages live? I randomly opened a writing group notebook and found this prompt response. I may do more of this.
Not that you need to know to appreciate my response, but these words were written about six months after my brother’s hemorrhagic stroke. The novel mentioned is Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam.
Who’s to say why the coagulation goes awry and what shoves the blob skyward to lung or brain? I don’t mean chemistry, but rather destiny.
Flannery O’Connor said anyone with a childhood has enough to write about for a lifetime. Two things: what if you don’t remember is one, the other is had she lived past 39 would the assertion have held?
Next up: a novel written about end times. A white couple in their forties rents a house from a Black couple in their sixties. The initial conflict centers on sympathetic flexibility — to exercise it or not — toward the Black couple. One of the younger characters in defense of helping them out keeps repeating, because they’re so old.
I’m so old. What an unexpected place to land critiquing a novel.
The radiology tech ticks through her questions: surgeries, Jewish genes, forebears with breast cancer. No. No. No. The final No gets an asterisk — none of my forebears having lived long enough. Same regarding hip fractures.
Without looking back (to childhood), what is there to say? My socks are damp. I hear a truck passing on Route 9. For some reason, my ears are ringing. What’s for lunch?
If I wrote an end times novel, the first floor would fill with water and the deer would swim all the way to Worcester to claim higher ground. Wouldn’t we be clever, crafting a boat out of an armoire, diving into the pantry to claim all those cans of beans and a can opener. He did scuba. I can sew. Does anything ensure survival?
The water froze on Saturday. A beautiful skim of ice not welcome or expected in the white ceramic pot outside where it awaits spring annuals.
Beautiful, cheerful, colorful spring annuals. Let the adjectives march off a cliff after I fill my pot. I want the thing instead of its description.
One child gets the bum thyroid, another my soft teeth. Their father imparted a singular disinclination to converse.
Check the bloods! Get the teeth polished! This week I learned that most hip fractures are from falling sideways.
It still knocks me back to hear my doctor ask, “Have you sustained any fractures that you know of?”
Husband and I would paddle out the second story window and collect the neighborhood cats, relieved that at least we wouldn’t have to listen to children screaming at the nearby playground anymore. The school and its surround submerged.
So much of privilege comes down to being able to effectively manage one’s annoyances.
Raucous, repetitious, grating. Adjectives that speak to the inability to control things.
Last week, I said to the Dive Master, “We’ve got a screamer this year. First period.” I blame the teachers.
He hasn’t donned a scuba mask in years and most of my sewing is of decorative items. Make a top why don’t you? Cover the goddamned ripped chair?
Marshaling skills in non-income producing venues is another sign of privilege.
Soon I shall reduce myself, not to a fine, ineluctable syrup, dense with flavor and mystery, but to apology. I am sorry. I am so, so sorry.
Everything is happening at once. The reefs dying off, the burning of the West, forests under stress. And here we are twiddling our thumbs as if we had all the time in the world.
I am sorry. I am so, so sorry.
Destructive, greedy, corrupt or willfully blind. Those adjectives feel necessarily to name what gets in the way.
Not to be too reductive. But it’s white men, specifically Republicans.
Chomsky called the GOP ‘the most destructive organization on the planet.’
Noun — GOP. Adjective — destructive. We get tired, all of us, tracking the damage. The clot gathering density, the vein about to collapse and send blood northward, glacial ice one-fourth the size of Rhode Island letting loose.
I got cold. Put on a sweater. My feet feel dry now. Sometimes that’s all we have — the noticing of damp, the preference for non-damp, and the gratitude for dry socks.
