I think we are gonna be friends

It’s a cold November morning

and, like me, the sun is having a hard time getting out of bed.

Robert Ullrey’s encouraging voice echoes in my ears

to the soundtrack of bland techno.

He’s 43, you know?

He lives in California.

And on his 43^rd birthday, he decided he wanted to start running again.

He tells me this three times a week right before I decide to torture myself.

So, all this time, I secretly had another blog which I updated even less than this one. It’s meant to showcase a bunch of short stories which all take place in the same town. I just finished up one called The Georgian. So go there if you want. I have two stories up and hopefully I’ll put in some more sometime this century.

Walkinville

He sits on the steps adorned in a red coat and hat
A hero dressed as a hero who hates himself
In his hands is a chipped axe and bloody baseball bat
His old uniform sits folded neatly over his bed on a handmade shelf
His shaky fingers run quietly through his blondish hair
He faced his darkest side and killed it with violence
For the rest of the day he sat on that stair
And looked off at the trees rustling in the silence
Am I a superhero or a vicious killer?
An emblem and a costume or a scythe and a hood?
What happens now that the best becomes a blood spiller?
What good is strength? What good is being good?
When deep down you’re just as bad as the worst of them?
What does it mean when I saw myself as evil and then I killed him?

Now before anyone freaks out about any deeper meaning to this poem, I’ll just go ahead and explain that it’s about an imaginary character that I invented in a comic book I have yet to write.

Bellicose means belligerent or pugnacious.
And belligerent means warlike
While pugnacious means prone to fight.

I have several xenophobic acquaintances who
Wallow in their pugnacious attitude towards outsiders
While basking in their blandishment
To bolster their fragile egos
While their homogenous ways threaten to shatter before their eyes.

These grandiloquent friends
Pick and tease at my feeble vocabulary
Fit only for a penurious beggar
Or palatial pauper.

But I consider their overweening
To be a bit overzealous.
They have no right to ostracize me based off of loquaciousness alone.

I consider them reprobates,
Repulsive in manner and soul.
And hopefully they’ll experience retribution
At the hands of the Divine.

“That’s not how it’s supposed to work,” she said. And she’s right. That’s not how it works. You can’t just talk to someone for an hour about nothing and expect them to date you.

You have to woo them. You have to ask them out. Straight up. On a whim. Hang out with them all night, and brush some broken glass away from their feet. You have to meet her in a bookstore and realize she’s the girl you took on that road trip in college.

Falling in love is like a video game and, unfortunately, I’m the one who makes the little guy run into the hole because I have no idea that the b button makes him jump. So I keep running and running and running and falling and falling and falling. And every time, the little guy dies, and another life is scraped off the top, right hand corner of the screen.

I’ve never figured out this game. I don’t even know how to hold the controller. And pretty soon I’ll be staring at the big, fat words, “Game Over,” sitting alone in my room with four cats and two dogs and a dusty comicbook collection wondering how I got so fat and so stupid.

I sit in the cold and clasp myself,
thinking of walking in the cold with you,
our lips chapped and electricity flowing through our hands and warming our souls
as our breath, like smoke, flows out of our mouths in a happy rhythm.

But, in reality, real smoke enters my throat
through a pipe nestled between my lips as I hold myself
against the arctic wind, looking up from my escaping story,
which wisps away like the wet smoke flowing from my chest,
burned by the fire of you in my imagination,
smiling at me with a red nose
while leaves fall around us as orange as the sun setting in the distance.

My mind sits cracked in half by two dreams:
one of which refuses to leave my head
and the other refuses to settle on the white screen in front of me.

Reality chills me and fantasy kills me
and nothing gets done.

Fuck! Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!!!

Okay… sorry for the language. But I’m not sure, but I think she has a boyfriend. I mean, it was on my way out of the place. And I overheard it at the last second, but I’m pretty sure she said that her car was out front because her boyfriend brought it for her. Fuck! Why?

Man, I’m horrible at this. If love is a game (and I believe it is) then it’s like just about every other game out there. And I totally suck at it.

No poem today. I’m just going to go dig my heart out with a freaking rusty spoon and then stab it a few times with a phillips head screwdriver because I hate it so freaking much.

A poem is never born out of nothingness

like a storm over a midwestern field.

A poem rips and shreds its way into existence

devouring all it sees.

A plague of words and phrases fluttering about

and clouding the mind black as pencil dust.

A poem’s favorite dish is one like itself, another poem,

perhaps even greater than it will ever be,

echoing through the brain unaware that its scent has awoken the unrelenting beast.

And when the birthed poem is finally satiated,

gorged and satisfied on its comfortable paper couch,

it too will be plucked up by another curious soul. Eaten and digested

in a bloody display of beautiful, predatory cannibalism.