The Monkey’s old school pal. Singing a song of love forgone… Oh the memory of it is all as pertinent today as yesterday so many years ago. Implode my brother.
Do not let love die gently – Dig!
In Impassioned Song Implode
It is a warm dark place of black water where I am. Somersaults through clouds of liquid shadow, bubblesburst past my ears. I drift here cause I’ve been burned.I…
feel…hurt…and…scared…and…and…nothing(ness). I am alone.
1. The way Things appear
Dear Carolyne,
At times I see my life as a walk round the ring of a bell. I seem to be always completely confused about everything. This is why I need to know-it-all and am terminal cold shiver tense. Being with someone who cares allows me to calm down enough to go places, feelings, I can’t be alone I need to Love. Of course you already know all this and everything I needn’t explain more cept right now I am so desperate I don’t even know what confusion is.
Your saying: “I love you” dissolved the world. Telling me you were in love with someone else brought the whole crashing back. Since I understand you to have never cared at all for me because:
1. You would have told me immediately that you had a lover.
2. You would never have led me on as long as you did. Then (meaning) I can’t care for you (meaning) I CANT LOVE ANYONE. I should have stayed alone. I want everything is your way doesn’t work. I hope your boyfriend makes you very happy cause youdeserve the best even if you’re already dead. You don’t have time you have your life you don’t want me I’d rather stay alone.
Truly Foster
1 2 3 4 5 The empirical world around me collapses 6 7 8 9 A I am, I am a catatonic B C D E I lose the ability of language and convincingly become a complete idiot.
Dear Carolyne,
If by chance we meet at Als, I will buy you all the beer you want and won’t think anything about it. Call me whenever if you like even when your boyfriend dumps you or on you just want to talk. I’m really not a complete asshole just as you are not a total whore.
There’s a part of me that cares even though I know you’d do what you did once again if given half a chance. Does accepting the irrationality of things make one more rational? Or alive? Can anything make any sense. Reasoning about the unreasonable outside of reason. GOO. I am very happy for you. GOO. I wish you continued success.
Love Foster
2. The world above ground
Through this window I see strewn corpses rotting delicate through soil steamed black soggy ash. Through a cool gray veil of mist where the musty smell of disuse and a sudden chill rubs the slush of rancid vomit I see a cross rise slow deliberate arcing swinging upright, resting solid off the perpendicular. I see the dead approaching black and white. The corpses grin at each other showing all their teeth. They say: The hour is ours you little creep and nothing you can do or say makes any difference.They lift me ever so gently as I scream and scream. So gently as I scream. This is the Christ of the prophets and disciples, the chosen one, the bearer of THE truth, mocker of dreams. The cool entertainer. Now and at the hour of our death. Say something tell me something. Listen: I want to tell you something. I want to tell you I am going to tell you this and only this. You are have always been: completely vulnerable. Friends and being in love mean everything to me. But this is of no importance to you. You also said: “I know more than you do about these things. I have more experience. Not now you don’t.You’re a cunt. You burned me. “I have more experience,” meant I can Fuck with you cause you don’t matter. Since I’m invisible, I don’t matter. I float between earth and sky suspended between ceilingand mattress. Your red that stains this white. My red that drips silent in speaking shadows of dreams. I don’t know if Im alone now.
3. Language
There is a black girl, fifteen to twenty-four depending on the success of her make-up, for men might not want you if your skin isn’t smooth and tight between your thighs. She is standing in front of a crumbling Victorian house squeezed by black graffiti on white beach sand stucco apartment buildings, two broken windows boarded upon the right one, the left building’s door marred peeling red paint on previous layers of blue and white. The door lies behind a screen-less screen-door frame good for nothing. A black leather glove squeezes a cigarette. She has stopped here to rest or maybe to look at the elementary school girls in catholic school butterscotch uniforms, white blouses, walking together giggling cause they know they know everything dumbo. Her pimp stands outside the middle eastern meat marketwhere they sell lamb. He’s wearing a tailored pressed green and white shirt with the top four buttons open. Flared white slacks. He’s talking to a homeboy, standard white tee-shirt, black baggies, black shoes shined impeccably pointing north and west, fishnet hair cap on black, slicked back military cut. Nineteen-eighties Mazdas and Datsuns drive by this scene, clean, windows rolled tight, music leaking out muffled like your next door neighbor’s favorite record cause it is that. The cars are going to and from USC. They stand out next to the beat up Chevies and Fords that dominate this scene after dark. Fast food franchises echo the colors of the newer cars at once irritating and fascinating the eye. They sporadically pock this boulevard. There’s at least one new one built every year. At night, nights, I walk the streets of my neighborhood thinking not thinking looking for that moment when I will see things clearly. Right now, in this Now, looking for this instant is all that can matter.What can I know about what is real? When I reread this language, my perception of my neighborhood changes. When I walk out through my door it will change.
Did I ever love you after all I only knew you for a few short weeks. I wonder if I was someone else or why it wasn’t someone else. I can only truly know what I feel. At night, with your head snuggled inside my left shoulder, the faint smell of your hair across my cheek, my side warm against the push of your hips, your breath faint on my skin, hands light on my arm. It’s time to stop making you up.
One Saturday night a close friend dropped by my apartment. He was meeting two girls at a bar in Hollywood and he wanted me to go along. One girl he had previously slept with; the other he had set up with me, though I didn’t know it at the time. Normally I’m too paranoid-hypersensitive for blinddates preferring rat ass drunkeness instead, but this time I said yes in part because he had money and I didn’t and was willing to spend it and partly because he asked me after we had finished a twelve-pack. I liked her scent, jasmine, stale cigarettes wafting through rank beer and body warmed vinyl. By closing time we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. She squeezed my crotch and I followed her into the John. I remember it was dirty with peeling pink paint and a leaky toilet that left rancid puddles around the stall. The mirror had a corner cracked off it. We managed to stay calm enough to button up our clothes when the owner knocked to clear the bar. The liquor stores had closed so we agreed to go to her friend’s apartment and drink whatever we could get our hands on. Around 3 a.m., my friend and her friend were going at it on the bed. We were across the room, groping around on her couch. I thought it a good idea to ask her about birth control.Our bodies worked well together for a first time.The next day, we agreed to go out that night. That night she said she couldn’t stay. Two days later, she spent the night with me. When I called her on the phone the next day, she was showing a guy out the door. I could hear her kiss. She said it was nothing-a friend.
This pattern continued for two weeks. On a Sunday night, I remember it was a Sunday because we had a hard time finding an open bar, we decided to talk. When I explained to her how I felt I felt, she was saying how little we knew each other and that I couldn’t feel this way after a few short weeks. I asked why not and she said “I have a boyfriend.” I said, that doesn’t have to effect us,” all the while thinking that though I usually think the worst of things in any given situation, I wouldn’t lose control and freak, watching how it all fell into place, saying to myself: this is the last time I let this happen. When I asked her why she had told me she loved me, she smiled and took a sip off her wine. Now I don’t love you. Romantic love, though it’s the only kind of lover’s love, is sick because it’s about saving yourself often from yourself so it’s selfish. It’s about wants and what better want than to lose yourself in another to find yourself cause your not even a person yourself. When youre lost, there’s no more problems. The problems come when youre left with your abandoned self. Sometimes I have to fantasize you leaving me. There is a man and a woman standing at arms length. They are not speaking to each other. They are looking into each other’s eyes. The man bows his head looking at the ground. The woman turns with a smile looking out to the distance saying, Its all right, I’ll do as you wish. “This can only be a mockery as she loves someone else. After a short silence and with this same smile, she waves as if to be making her exit. I reach out with my arms like watching myself in a slow motion movie performing an act already completed, performing an act already complete, like asking for one more chance, like a last reprieve saying in a low dark whisper voice please please no-don’t leave me.Of course you leave me. It is at this moment that my heart breaks open. Shades of black, black to black Holy thorns of redsplat the soiled linen. Shepherd face cries waxy tear, the rows of dead souls flicker waft pungent wrap around my nose. I am eight years old. My knees hurt. I have no more nickels for my sick grandmothers soul so I must feel pain. Her ten Hail Marys and ten Our Fathers or no supper and I say them now. Bible face with his hand dipped in bloody dying sunlight. This is their house and they can see my black spotted soul. Sister Ray used a paper hole punch to show me. The attic of bleeding and burning sugar, the lamb of God, the church of lawful pain. My father says Im an insolent little bastard. The little bastard is disrespectably awakening.
I decided to call her one more time. She agreed to meet me at a club.She said she couldn’t see why I felt so sick, that I was being a jerk and that if I liked her, then I should accept THINGS for what they were. I said I did but that wasn’t any reason not to sleep with me more than once every two weeks. Then she began to kiss me. “I’m not your property,” she said.” I dont want to own you or anyone so lets stop talking in cliches.” I want someone to love me even if love is sick. “If you like me, then we can work it out. NO-one tells me what to do.” “This talk shits. I’ve never told you what to do. You do as you please. But I can’t accept this kind of arrangement. I’m just gonna get crazier and I don’t want to get any crazier. I have to start fitting in somewhere. Then why don’t you start by being reasonable. You’ll see me when you’ll see me. I like you. I want to be with you. That should be enough.” “It’s not enough.” I had manipulated this whole situation to screw-up the one thing that mattered most in the world.She shrugged and the show ended. LAPD outside thedoor. I step through shadow into the blaring white of a helicopter searchlight. A girl with green day-glow hair, shimmering beautiful in the artificial sun, turns towards the hissing sound already over, black baton dull sick crunch of disintegrating bone, red oozes through green as she hits the pavement.. Two skinheads pick her up and away. I notice how dazzling the helmets are behind them. I’m swept by the crowd and then I see her. She looks scared not terrified.: stay with me tonight: no. I can’t: why: I can’t I look at her, watching how her face changes. Her face is very firm, her features sharp. The swirling light overhead makes her features undulate. She says, you know we’re going to see each other again. “I can’t see her now.
Here I am once again entrenched in my most favorite of places. Nana is upstairs sleeping cause her insides are Bad and I hear the ceiling creak from Father Fatso priest. Hes whispering magic. The groans and creaks above me zoom off these damp walls of mortar holding back the world. Nana is holy and won’t be sick long. Pop pops life-light is outlike the time the gas made him fall asleep in the tunnel, now wrapped in soft black fur. Yellowed looks-like-oak melodian with its pedals of brass worn brown a cracked flowervase on top with plastic red roses black dust layered even hasn’t been touched in years, bleakened by more black dust than the coal that lies stirring next to the sucking furnace, cracked jars good for nothing soot streaked black tears.This is all of time.One day the bric-a-brac was gone, whirled away likemagic. She never cried out though the pain made her incoherent.I couldn’t understand why she amongst any had been chosen to endure such pain for weeks. I sat there like an outsider, too numb to do anything but watch the dust dance through sun slats crashing past the bulkhead door. At the bottom of the sea, under the blackness, under the sand, I turned to look for the sun, but all was black so I clenched my hands into the sockets of my eyes and rubbed and rubbed, harder and harder, until I made light appear. I smiled.The world was as I imagined.
Kevin Burke
