Catastrophe Jones

When I bound, leap, lift, fly–

–for a moment, escaping the hold Mother Earth has on my leather boots–

–I imagine myself an angel, even as I come down, blade at the ready, to end your life, and take what little you had in your pockets.

Occasionally I think about you, the way you had this mouth that seemed to open up far too wide, and I am strangely, perversely enthralled by how much you held on to me, how long I felt you worm your way through my guts.

If that was love, I don’t know what I’m doing right now with my life.

I prefer to think of you in terms of intestinal parasites.

I had a bad case of you, and now I’m finally cured. It’s so different, not giving a shit about you, that I sometimes remember that I did. I suppose you will always be a scar, faded and fading, still — but there, marking me.

I had to bear witness to what you did to me, to become the person I am. I am not certain I can say I would not change what happened, but I am certain I can finally say I forgive you.

Now if only you’d just stay dead.

Sometimes it doesn’t happen.

Damned if you do —

I would say more but then again I wouldn’t have to speak if I could just rip open my head and let it all spill out in colorful pictures. It wouldn’t be just red paint; it wouldn’t be just gray gel.  It wouldn’t be just white chips and the trailing ends of eyeballs.

There has to be something more in there, something more inside. Bigger. Better. Darker. Stranger.

When I was a little boy, my father told me I would grow up to change the world as he knew it. He died believing that.

I am dying, now, never having believed it, and I wonder which of us has been the liar for these past forty-six years. I’m tripping on all the broken teeth of discarded dreams and simultaneously wishing I could be thinking that I mean something. That I have ever meant something.

I am little more than the wet and dry ingredients that make my brittle bones and cancerous heart.

When I am broken down again and reclaimed, I will return with a ferocity I should have always had. You will hear it in my first breath, and know it in my last.

For now, I will smolder down and extinguish myself in all of the ways and things I could have, but didn’t.

Sometimes it doesn’t happen.

Damned if you do —

I would say more but then again I wouldn’t have to speak if I could just rip open my head and let it all spill out in colorful pictures. It wouldn’t be just red paint; it wouldn’t be just gray gel.  It wouldn’t be just white chips and the trailing ends of eyeballs.

There has to be something more in there, something more inside. Bigger. Better. Darker. Stranger.

When I was a little boy, my father told me I would grow up to change the world as he knew it. He died believing that.

I am dying, now, never having believed it, and I wonder which of us has been the liar for these past forty-six years. I’m tripping on all the broken teeth of discarded dreams and simultaneously wishing I could be thinking that I mean something. That I have ever meant something.

I am little more than the wet and dry ingredients that make my brittle bones and cancerous heart.

When I am broken down again and reclaimed, I will return with a ferocity I should have always had. You will hear it in my first breath, and know it in my last.

For now, I will smolder down and extinguish myself in all of the ways and things I could have, but didn’t.