.

* “How can I explain / When you don’t want me to?” “Kid”, The Pretenders

Sometimes I’ll just be standing there around a bunch of kids, punching push pins into a bulletin board, drawing a walrus on a marker board, listening to them call each other “small-head” and “big-head,” watching them hit each other, and I’ll just SEE satisfaction in one of them, I’ll SEE how I’m providing to them something they need, just simple attention, and for someone to truly know them.
Out in Colorado the sun used to shine all the time. It was in the middle of the desert, but people would pop up like daisies, and one time this eighth grade girl made this sound like I was fu**ing her as I walked past her. Instead of religion, they had sunshine, the kind we get back here in our eyes sometimes when there’s someone there who doesn’t have the heart to explain things.

It’s tough

When you have a wedged, fluid shape,
And you’re listening to the song
Crawling sidelong
.
Along the sky,
But built for buffaloes
The blood cave
Contracts and expands one time,
Leaving miasma
Breathing life which is
Turning teeth,
Metal in the sky for pruning.

Anger

May not be so much
The nadir of failure
As it is
.
The cinematic disparity
Of crushed expectations.

Somebody scourged the man on the golf field,

And somebody owned the heads of the golf game,
.
And these
Are
All
Mythical
Things we
Make
Up,
.
Arbitrary,
So
That to
Hold
Things together,
Like a society,
Is never
A breath
In the
Wind, like
A cardinal
Might
Bequeath
When it’s wanting to die.

Finally I see how this land is dark,

Because instead of having logic fully reign,
It’s never logic that fully reigns,
We are
.
Pulled into
This abyss, compelled to fornicate,
Compelled to
Reproduce, we are
Haunted by greed,
Dashed
By hatred for the next man over.

It was February 16th, and as I walked to my car on my way into work, there was the head of a doll, just the head, hewn in a smile, rolling down the walk, parallel to the driveway, pointed toward me, as it rolled.

It was my last semester of my internship before I got my nurse practitioner’s license. On an unseasonably warm day, the type of day when the sun seems to peak through the clouds a little more than normal but everything still seems rusty, like spring has to shake the kinks off of it and stuff, the birds have to add WD-40 to their vocal chords, I made my way in. The parking garage of the hospital was the same, but there was a briskness about things, with the weather being warmer, I could feel it.
I could still remember the day I’d decided to get into the field of medicine with my life. I was watching a video of the remnants of the big earthquake in Haiti, and there were bodies piled upon bodies, regular casseroles of blood lining that once beautiful country.
My father passed away when I was 14. Cancer, a regular smoker. He’d held my hand, and said, son, Just do what you want to with your life, just make your mom happy. We went out to eat after the funeral. Nobody said much. I had no brother or any guy cousins, and my girl cousins all wore a bunch of makeup, and courteously deferred conversation.
I became better friends with my buddy Mitch after my dad died, and we even messed around a few times, just joking around. Nobody ever knew, I never told my mom or anyone. Mitch and I never played the same sport, so it was pretty easy to hide the weirdness. I think my older sister sensed it though, a little bit, and she looked at me despondently after this, but it was only jealousy. Just more weirdness, and we’d all see what was on TV, me, Mitch, my sister Erin, and the mailman named Axe whom she’d made friends with.
I still lived at home when I was finishing my internship. It made the most sense. Whatever, I just stayed out of trouble.
I’d never thought about this, but it was funny, on a day like this 45 degree day in the middle of February, when everything started to be turning up, when the old ladies down the hall started talking a little louder about getting their nails done, seeing a guy whose jaw was imploded, whose face was jaundiced, whose eyes were distant and still, and whose neck seemed solidified in a 12 degree right tilt.
On my first day I was to work with the new guy, I went to bring him his towels, just so he could look at them. It was a courtesy I’d make, which I knew full-fledged nurse practitioners probably wouldn’t have time for, but who was thinking about the future?
“Whadya think of these, old man?” I said.
He gave me a weary thumbs up.
Then there was nothing to say, so I walked away, and sensed that old stillness in the room as usual, but maybe remembered a few extra things this time, the deep velvet blue of the company tapestry somehow seeming to come alive.
That night I went to play tennis with a platonic friend, Nancy.
“How’s work goin’?” she asked.
“Oh,” I said. “Lotta old people.”
“At least you get to SEE people. My head is stuck in books all day.”
“Wanna grab a mocha later?”
“I can’t, actually I have a date!”
“Oh,” I said. “Can I come?”
“Haha,” she laughed, “ok, but you have to buy the Jujyfruits for us.”
“Agh, those are an arm and a leg!”
“You’re used to arms and legs.”
And as always, it got dark before we thought it would. I got home physically rejuvenated, but thinking, I hope that boy brings me my towels again tomorrow.

It’s an airport in Iowa,

Oh, I meant we’re going to be flying over Iowa,
You see the slick businessmen in slacks,
Traveling is the myth —
.
They’ve no time to stop
Here nor there,
They’ll avoid the glares of the janitors,
They’ll avoid the glares of the baggage clerks,
Because to them everything is right,
Except the baggage clerks.

When you search for a career path

You’re stealing,
Taking nebulae
From different songs,
.
So keep this in mind
Because you’ll have to pay them back
In the systematic prick
Of evermore.

When there’s so much you ignored,

It was the low cards,
The 2’s and 3’s
That came to your graduation party,
.
While you were
Alone,
Waiting on your
Jacks and aces,
You walked under the bright lights by other people’s cars.

The idea that energy translates and travels

Is primarily what’s offensive to people
.
I saw this girl decked out in lipstick,
She didn’t usually wear it
But her time had come
To have a dollar sign attached to her