i don’t, i don’t

je ne manque pas le garçon
je ne manque pas le garçon
je ne manque pas le garçon
je ne manque pas le garçon
je ne manque pas le garçon

GODDAMN IT.

 

ortense

snow belly rising
she has traveled
always wrapping her crooked
mouth around an empty day
also known as
the last hurrah

 

heart-attacks

lately i’ve been pretty agitated with the fact that everything i write seems to just sit around on my computer, like lazy, untrained dogs …. cats, basically. so i’ve been toying with the idea of publishing a few of my poems and short stories myself, via xeroxing and stapling little books together and distributing them around the downtown area. sort of like those old men handing out the little bibles, but maybe different. it isn’t something i ever thought i’d do, and i’ll probably only ever do it this time, just to see what happens. it’s all the thrill of releasing an animal into the wild with none of the dangers of it dying as a result.

anyhoo, i wrote this a little while ago ( say, a few months ), and don’t think i ever posted it or anything. reading over it, i’m not sure what i think about it. maybe it could have ended better? figure i’d see the response it gets. critiques, suggestions wanted.

—

Even now, my chest gets tight around you. An arm goes numb and tingles, and although I never remember which, I’m sure it is only ever one arm. Sometimes I even feel nauseous. You’ve given me alot of these small heart-attacks. Kind of like when a kid is in the car with one of their parents driving and suddenly, the parent has to slam on the brakes and they stick an arm out in front of the kid. To save them. The parent could have a full-blown myocardial infarction, but they don’t. Why? Because the child is so accepting of that one gesture. The arm goes out, the heart resumes its normal business. Fatal injuries are prevented, facial reconstructions are avoided. Concussions, brokens noses, lost teeth, broken ribs, punctured septums, collapsed lungs. Head trauma. A child lives, a parent’s heart does not stop, just because they could co-exist so perfectly for a split second. This is only my opinion though.

It was never that you needed saving in particular, and you were not my child. You’ve given me so many heart-attacks like that though, simply because I could never stick my arm out in front of you unless it was a hug to say hello or goodbye or just a hug because you were feeling happy, excited or silly and just felt like one. So, I certainly couldn’t kiss you. I could not hug you from behind or rest my chin on top of your head or ever-so-slightly press the tip of my nose to your neck. Even if it wasn’t because I loved you or might have loved you, even if it was just to save my own little life. I could not mirror your body position with my own close as could be or let my fingertips graze your eyelids or stretch out across your back so that we made an intersection on the floor. I could think up all these interesting, non-sexual-but-still-interesting things to do concerning our bodies, but these always were and still are and probably always will be things that will never happen. I could not stick out my arm to hold you or even to stop you. Instead, everytime the brakes slam, I will just wish that I could reach out, and I will wonder how I have survived so many of these little heart-attacks.