A FAILURE OF IMAGINATION!

journal entries, thoughts, poems

I.

I have been saying your name
to no one for three weeks
which is a form of prayer
I think, or at least
it has the same
helplessness,

II.

His laugh, the coat, the half-read book left open on the table. I have started going to the café at the same time every day. I tell myself other things about why.

III.

I met a woman named Diane at the overpass. She pulled over without me having to raise my thumb, my stubby little thumb with a double joint. She gave me half a sandwich before she gave me her name and I took it because I am penniless and have been penniless for the entirety of this trip. The bread was a little dry. I was thinking about the bread when she told me about her husband. She said he had walked into the backyard one morning, and laid down under the singular green ash tree and refused to get up. He was returning himself to the earth, he said. The way the Inca did. I am not sure if the Inca really do this, perhaps he was looking for an excuse. Later, I asked, was he Inca, and she said, no, he was from Ohio, and changed the radio station to a random opera symphony. She told me that she brought him water and he refused it, instead pouring it over the roots of the green ash tree. She said she called her sister who said Diane call someone and she said but look at him, he looks so peaceful and her sister said Diane. And Diane watched from the window for three hours and felt—she paused here, she looked at me—she felt, underneath the terror, an envy. She wanted to lay down beside her husband and look up at the tree. Just for an afternoon. She left me at a gas station near Dead Man’s Flats and said good luck with everything and I watched her go and thought about the tree and the man from Ohio and his certainty, the pure animal certainty of it, lying down into the earth and knowing, simply knowing, that he was done with the animate. I am still thinking about all of it. I am writing it down so I do not forget it. I have never been so close to understanding a stranger's husband.

IV.

Money, the daily genuflection, and the question of whether you are keeping the lights on, which the lights do not answer, the lights just stay on or don't, make your bills on time, and what I want from the lights is not illumination nor luminosity but the answer, am I a series of binaries that have so far failed to compound into catastrophe, the bank wants the minimum payment, the bank wants it by friday, well I am willing to make my body into a mass suicide weapon by friday, there are many tall buildings here, I want to lie down under a tree and return myself to something but I have a 9am and also I don't know what I'd be returning to, I came from a hospital six years ago, but six years feel like six minutes when you are coming from a hospital, so not from the earth exactly, though I suppose ultimately, then the cost of ultimately, the long division of it…………..!

V.

Temporary silver stream as wet as it is cold
folding itself into the fish
or is that how you find
the place the water
goes when it is done
being water, topology,
I have forgotten almost
everything from my 3rd grade class about geology
or was it, geography,
your insistent
mouth, continues talking, talking
talking! Oh,
to be the thing
that does not know
it's bending.

VI.

Old women have no patience and I find this completely reasonable. I love their willingness to leave a bad party, their ability to say that was not worth my time directly to your face. Oh, their coats. Their absolute commitment to the coat! Their right to fall asleep at the table, or mutter a cuss word when the children start weeping!

VII.

We drove out past the hamlet on a Wednesday because someone said there was a party but there wasn’t, but what is a party if not a field and four people and a speaker with 12% battery and a dying weed pen. I sat in the wet grass. The sky was beautiful and nobody said anything about it because we were seventeen and embarrassed by beauty. Somebody passed the pen. I hit it in intervals of three. I think I understood God for forty seconds afterwards and then suddenly, and with too much grace, I understood nothing. Nothing worse ever happened to me after that, nothing better either, merely the long middle of it, Wednesday after Wednesday, the car ride home with the speaker dead and everybody looking out their own window at the same beautiful sky, not saying anything, not saying anything, except, can I have a hit of your vape, please, my mother found mine, she found my stash, and took all of my money, what a bitch isn’t she, Oh, I don’t like raspberry mint, I want strawberry, you got strawberry, you’re an angelface.

VIII.

Hack, hack, hacking, hacking away, phlegm from my grandfather’s mouth. He is clearing his throat of everything that happened in the twentieth century. It is taking a while. There was a lot.

IX.

My short-limbed body twisted mid-fall and I swallowed hair as my face smacked against a large rock. The place between my nose and my lips opened, and out of it came something I can only describe as the pure distillate of being entirely without consequence. And then, laughter.

X.

Bought nothing today that I needed. Needed nothing that I could buy. A perfect symmetry, almost. Almost.

X. PART II

watching a film. a good film is like watching your generous lover build peak upon peak upon peak for your final climax —- the transience satisfaction impended upon oneself after a film. for feelings tend not to linger after finishing a film, they fade and compound into a single memory of the feeling, into a single entry or paragraph written later to help you remember what you first thought of it when watching the film months or perhaps years ago——-

XI.

Sunday church and my best friend went to confession and while he was in there I thought about him naked in front of the priest, which is not what confession is but the booth is very small and someone has to be naked in a small space and it wasn’t going to be the priest. Naked slouched on the pew like a renaissance painting of a death, very serene. Naked and shot. Naked and fingered for the wound like doubting thomas. Naked with other guys. Naked in a gang bang which the priest would have thoughts about but the priest is in the booth and I am out here with my thoughts and my thoughts are a gang bang. Thought about cows giving birth. Don’t know why. The cows. The specific nakedness of a calf arriving. Someone outside eating a dog. My friend came out of the booth looking unburdened and I looked at him and thought, naked. He said how do I look and I said fine and he said really and I said yes and he said I feel like a new man and I said great and thought, naked, shot, renaissance, calf, dog, gang bang, priest, amen.

XII.

January 23rd, 2023

The funeral home did his tie wrong. I stared at it the whole service. I have seen him without a tie. I have seen him without anything and now here he is in a wrong tie in a box and I cannot stop, the thing is, I cannot stop picturing him underneath it. Naked under the tie. Naked under the suit his mother picked. Naked as the priest says he is with god now which means naked before god, naked in the eternal, naked at the right hand of the father, world without end. The woman next to me is crying beautifully. Naked as he ascends, naked on the toilet, naked in the shower, naked as his father beat him, naked as he overdosed on laced coke, as naked as he was born.

ELEGY POEM.

We are all trying our best
to trap what we don’t
want to remember
in the formaldehyde
byproduct of the
burnt-out guts
of our vapes—
sweet with decay.
Ivory,
Ivory,
Ivory beam of my vape.

XIII.

I spend four hours handing out drinks, nodding at jokes, pretending to care about love and God and the buffet line, and fantasizing about placing the tip of a gun just below my left eye. I get in my car after and the prairie is so calm I almost feel guilty for imagining veering into oncoming traffic. But not that guilty. And then, the buildings rise. Big, empty, taxidermic, commercial buildings with men in boxers on the billboards. It’s eerie watching this and thinking about how many people inside those buildings walk into machines and pray for death. I thought about the machine that spits them out and the ones that walk in praying not to be self anymore. Is there such a way to abandon this body? Sharp machinery. Safety manuals. Missing limb. HR reports. Laceration. Cranberry rivulets. Then I think, how many of those men with abs have cried into an empty plate. Or begged the director to retake the shot because they popped a boner. Or worse, didn’t. I should take my pills. I should stop watching YouTube essays about metaphysics at 2AM, I won’t understand anything anyway. At home, I eat a cheese quesadilla made with dollar store singles and ketchup. It makes me ill so I down a glass of milk. I knew I should’ve bought the fucking organic cheese but my job still hasn’t paid me. My gym membership is 25 dollars every two weeks. For what? To sweat in front of a mirror and pretend that satisfaction comes in the form of smaller arms (it does). Watch the men swallow their fears through the hand dryers and crusty towels. Watch the women cave into themselves until they can fit into small lockers lining the locker room. The sauna is full because obese women need somewhere to hide. I hide with them. I tailgate 18-wheelers on the drive home and dare Jesus to blink first. In bed. Black underwear. XXL t-shirt. I cry tears of inconsequential reason. I cry because my ex is still alive. I cry because God has never intervened on my behalf. I cry because I haven’t said anything funny in weeks and my writing isn’t sharp, it’s just bleak. And I cry because I think I’m starting to become one of those people who are just… earnestly sad. I should kill myself, but I’m scared of Catholic hell, and being remembered as the girl who googled, Signs of HPV. Is it bad to hit a burnt vape. How to make sure your body is found on a weekday. So we go to sleep instead. And in it is absence. Absence of death. Absence of understanding. Absence of my body. Roll a blunt and pretend they asked me what I thought of the movie they put on. Have a conversation in my head. I suck them off in a dream and they say I matter. That my words are consequential to the pivot of the Earth. What they mean is, you matter. But they only say it in my head, so it doesn’t count. They only exist in the bounds of the blunt, so it doesn’t count. So I matter to no one but myself. And even then, barely. My alarm goes off in six hours. I stay very still. I pretend I’m already dead. It’s the closest thing to sleep I’ve had all week. Displaced suicide is still suicide. I think. Durkheim should add it into the categories: Egotistic, Altruistic, Anomic, Fatalistic, Displacistic.

XIV.

Biked to 7-eleven to shoplift a slurpee, leaked pink
matter onto my walmart vans. I think I met god
or a cousin, there was a striking resemblance. I remember
there being a revolution, behind the 7-eleven,
in the alley, nobody came. It was perfect.
What a failure of imagination!

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Big fat kiss to JLG Noga, I abuse my friendship with him and he doesn’t even notice! Just kidding! Most of these are old, some are new, let me know what you think please. As always, thank you, my beautiful subscribers, for reading.