Savannah

There is music in your names -  Whitaker, Branscomb, Habersham, Drayton Forsyth... that field  where I suppose divinity  or something dirtier crept in through the seams.

In Forsyth there was fire. In Forsyth I felt lonely often and cried often.  In Forsyth there was a man named Two Feathers  who was killed on a pilgrimage.

In Forsyth I always doubted when your mouth, like ivory, curled upwards.

My Forsyth was crimson redemption alabaster  a cataract.

There I found compromise birthed in the womb of that stranger.  You remember, the one with wooden eyes and a warning.

We broke bottles there, sometimes sticks sometimes nothing. 

Hung out to dry like withered husks,  the cicadas whose legs broke brittle,  still clinging to the last breaths of summer: baking cement exhaust fences wet metal the perpetual dew rotting cigarettes  and the irrepressible taste of heat.  There was everything familiar that you’ve seen before.

Savannah, you have music in your name and you are lonely for your heroes. I have memories in my hand, I am holding them clutching at things condensing.

How do I speak about things that have no explanation?  For which you have no reference,  that no longer exist  except as backwards eroding prints  etched into my mind whose marks are quickly too quickly being worn smooth.

I remember... the cadence of horses desire monotony fear

I remember... oranges  sapphires cataracts the smell of rain sometimes

I remember... Carey Gwendolyn Mary John

I remember... fires from radiators steam and cement tea on the counter windows fogged over

I remember... how often I would come home in a fit of passion or angst fists swollen like rose petals because of your ineffable purgatory 

    There was a man waiting for me down at the river.      Mermaid man, fisherman.      Fisher of men, bait and hook with teeth jailed in flesh and eyes escaping sockets, voice that crowed, "Did you know Jesus loves you?"  Did you know of my windowed plight down mirrored streets where I pursued I and spat, kicked and consumed my self?      Do you know how far my toes would go to remove themselves from my strapped in feet - strapped into the grooves of the sidewalk and footsteps made from those that knew before me?      What measurement can I give that will tell you I really know that Jesus loves me?      If Jesus is called Lucifer and rides my back with whip and chain and hellfire spurring me onwards, towards the eventual hallowed greatness of self.      If Jesus is ritualistic in nature and leashes me, once a day at five o'clock starting today.      If Jesus has the inlaid silver, dripping hair.      If all of that rings holy and sacred and true in this, the eyes of the plowed field, then I will cry out that      YES, JESUS LOVES ME.      And he cradles me over fire,      Caresses me,      Strangles me,     And continuously leads me onwards into the spark in that fisher's eye, who sleeps in his car and every morning wakes up to the battle cry of loneliness.      The fisherman who's defeated as soon as he draws breath but breathes so easily it makes me gasp for air.      The sincerity of true humanity that speaks volumes of nothingness      And stories that I don't care enough about to listen to but am ENTRANCED still because he is human      And I am human      And we are bathing in the residual light of knowing so - almost simultaneously.      Here Jesus sends a colossal, lusting, metallic whale, engorged on commerce and product who sets up camp in the port while whole men are made slaves.      Slaves whose glands substitute sweat to drip oil and money and domestic abuse and absentminded homicide.      Here Jesus sends salvation in the form of distraction,      and the bellowing mating call of cargo ship to cityscape and the horny lights of tugboats, looking for a lost, homeless soul to drag into the river.     Get back, oh God.      Do not tempt me with sex and sea and promise of salvation. I will vomit you out of my mouth.      "He will vomit you out of his mouth, should you be lukewarm," said dilating pupils who oscillate between conviction and madness.      The macrocosm in the microcosm of a dark brown chestnut in the hands of a washed up, dirt stained martyr pleading for acceptance and community in the desolate wasteland of America. 

Another Malachi Another man to pluck the eventual dandelion from my soul The dandelion... the weed-turned-flower That’s what you told me And that’s what I see.  I saw, in you, whole The whole All  Encompassing The great beauty of the  Earth-stained flower The long-necked buffalo I fell in love with  Over six long conversations Transformed!  Always with me The ever-changing totem Hanging ‘round my neck To you, Michael, I owe my all My self is divided You fill several bodies All speaking to me in turn The ever changing forests of Savannah Transformed!  Shifting Shape shifting That’s what you told me You, you, you, you, you and you You encompass me And to you,  Whoever you may be now, Whatever poor soul you’re inhabiting this day I give you all my love My dandelion.

For my Father

    “I love you.”     The words scratch the back of my neck. Blood dribbles out of my open mouth. How long have I been talking?      Quiet.     “You’re quiet.”     “I’m sorry,” I murmur. The sound of my voice startles me. I realized, painfully, that I hadn’t been talking after all. I hadn’t said a word. There’s a dry laugh.     “Are we okay?”      “Whatever you want to think.”      He didn’t hear me.     “What?”     “Sure we are.”     There’s an asian woman standing outside the car, in the rain. Her umbrella is being beaten by the wind, mercilessly. It’s screaming. I can hear the sound of screaming metal in my ears. 

I write differently from what I speak, I speak differently from what I think, I think differently from the way I ought to think, and so it all proceeds into deepest darkness.

Franz Kafka

I’m a loose canon. Life’s a ride. I can’t help but love. We redefine the demons. He fights harder every time.

These are my only explanations. 

I, Rat (edit)

My name is Rat, and along the walls of filth I sat enthroned I had found my redemption among the dogs Found a heaven in rusted diamonds of sweet beggar eyes and had learned to speak the language of Eden corrupted.  Eden has become disposable and now I am ashamed.  no longer hear the all hallows saints laughing in the dumpsters My whiskers are blunted by the promises. And so the great educator has come down from Jerusalem with fury and guilt and has leashed me with a gallows rope seductive destroyed my only hope at returning to the dust. Now there is a wall to my house so high I can’t climb it I am rat, mislead. I have traded in my teeth for bibles Lit by firelight going blind because of ink and now all I have are pages My great kingdom of waste where I was some time proud and happy has been lost Shattered are the walls that bore my infancy I am left alone 

Excerpt from my one-act play

MAN #2: Do you want to die, Jackson?

MAN #1: On nights like this, I’ve thought about it. When the moon was suspended in the sky like that, makin’ the whole world glow... I wouldn’t mind slippin’ away.

MAN #2: On nights like this, you wouldn’t mind dying.

MAN #1: Or some mornings, even. After it had stormed all night, and the sky was gray and the earth was gray and the trees were gray, and my body felt gray. The air seems heavier, makes a man feel like he could sink into the ground. But it ain’t a bad feeling. Just... a feeling.

MAN #2: You know I really can’t understand you when you talk like that.

MAN #1: You ain’t never thought about dying?

MAN #2: The only time I ever thought about it was in the war. And then I only thought about how I could save my ass.

MAN #1: You mean you ain’t never looked at your kids when they was sleepin’ and thought to yourself, “Jackson ol’ boy, you done alright. I think they could get along jus’ fine without you”?

MAN #2: Not recently, no.

MAN #1: But you have once?

MAN #2: Maybe I have, Jackson, maybe I haven’t. It’s not important.

MAN #1: It’s the most important thing that ever was.

Excerpt from my one-act play

GIRL: It’s nights like these that make me feel unfamiliar to everything.

BOY: Unfamiliar...

GIRL: Do you remember the time we trekked down the railroad tracks?

BOY: All night.

GIRL: It was a night like this. I remember singing with you.

BOY: It was a beautiful night, that night.

GIRL: But I got exhausted after the fifth or sixth mile and begged you to stop.

BOY: And we did stop. But I didn’t want to. We were on our very own quest.

GIRL: Searching for that blackbird.

BOY: The one you swore stole your voice.

GIRL: He did!

BOY: I remember the day he did it, too. You didn’t speak for weeks.

GIRL: I didn’t, until your sister’s kitten died. Right on the front steps. I couldn’t keep quiet about that, it was the first time Chelsea and I were alone. I had to tell her it was alright.

BOY: She cried on your shoulder.

GIRL: She cried on my shoulder.

BOY: (after a pause) But we never found that blackbird.

GIRL: That bastard still has my voice, too.

BOY: I think he turned you into a poet, though.

GIRL: You think that’s what did it?

BOY: Yeah. I think that’s what did it.

    I am sitting at my mother’s bedside. She is dying. I know she is dying because the woman next to me keeps saying aloud, “She is dying, she is dying”. I don’t know who the woman is but she’s sitting in the chair beside me so I should turn my head to look at her but I don’t. I don’t want to see what she looks like, the woman beside me, but even still I can’t turn my head because it has become stiff. I don’t ever remember my neck being stiff, maybe it’s been stiff for years but I would never know because I don’t exactly have in my memory any true testaments of my neck’s capacity to turn. It seems my neck wouldn’t turn to her even if I would want to, a matter of temperament. I can only keep staring straight ahead at my mother and her bed. There is nothing else to look at, because the wall behind my mother’s bed is bare and there are no pictures to look at. But I don’t know if that’s entirely true because I can’t see out of my left eye; I might be blind. I suppose I haven’t been able to see out of my left eye for quite some time, although I don’t remember when exactly my left eye escaped me. But I can see my mother, quite clearly, sleeping on a pillow on her bed where I’ve been told she is dying. Hands like the ones you see in magazines. So I’m not going blind although I might already be blind, in my left eye, to be precise. A matter of temperament I suppose. No, not going blind but already blind and at my mother’s bed. I’d like the woman next to me to be quiet so that I can say something to my mother but my neck won’t turn and I don’t know what I would say. Oh I suppose I could grumble something menacingly and hope she understands my frustration, but I realized a moment or so ago, that is when I tried to say something to the woman next to me, that I can’t speak. I try to open my mouth to say something to the woman, or to my mother, whichever one will listen really, and tell them both that they’re being very loud and disconcerting but I can’t quite get the words out of my mouth. So I’ve found I can’t speak. I can’t speak but I am sitting at my mother’s bed so I suppose I should be doing something. Thinking is rather like saying things although without quite the effort or the possibility of error so I might be well off anyway if I only sit here and think. It’s not so bad, after all, not speaking or seeing really, despite being able to see still out of my right eye, and I find that it might be worthwhile in the long run. Thinking, that is. Worth something after a while. That is, if there is anyone to tell you whether or not your thinking is the kind of thinking that could be worthwhile after all.     “Rat,” my mother says to me, from her bed. She calls me by my name and I have never known another one, only “Rat” and I suppose everyone who looks at me knows it must be my name for everyone has called me “Rat” for as long as it is possible for me to remember.      “Rat,” she says, or rather I think she’s saying for I can see her lips moving but can’t hear what’s actually coming out. Her lips keep moving and I nod my head, to make it known that I understand whatever last words she’s uttering on the bed where she’s dying, despite my not being able to hear what it is exactly that she’s saying. I suppose I must be losing my sense of hearing but just a moment ago my ears rose above all of my own internal screeching to hear the woman beside me saying aloud “She’s dying, she’s dying” so if I have in fact lost my hearing it must have only happened a moment or two ago, before my mother started speaking that is. A matter of temperament, my hearing, I suppose. Can’t be helped. 

I, Rat

My name is Rat, and along the walls of filth I sat enthroned I had found my redemption among the dogs Found a heaven in rusted diamonds of sweet beggar eyes and had learned to speak the language of Eden corrupted. 

From far east my brother sends me letters and although I haven’t heard from him in years it’s still the same Always the same He breathes the same, and still the same he lights a fire beneath my eyes the same as he always has, hoping to reveal the world where I was born Where I am king.

So, exposed my hovel has become Eden has become disposable and now I am ashamed.  Now I seek to condemn the sewers of my childhood and crawl forth into light The rubble among where I once gratefully made my bed I now see with eyes scaled by shame and no longer hear the all hallows saints laughing in the dumpsters My whiskers are blunted by the promises.

Away from the earth now do my arms reach Grasping at branches of tree academia hoping one at least is poisoned by enlightenment And so the great educator has come down from Jerusalem with fury and guilt and has leashed me with a gallows rope seductive Self important under his influence my skin has made him blind Invalid inquisitor,  destroyed my only hope at returning to the dust. Now there is a wall to my house so high I can’t climb it.

I am rat, mislead. I have traded in my teeth for bibles And sit up in night terrors under blankets of blankets of blankets  And quivering by the hands of men instead of hang drums Writing words in the sand instead of being in the sand Lit by firelight going blind because of ink and now all I have are pages My great kingdom of waste where I was some time proud and happy has been lost Shattered are the walls that bore my infancy I am left alone  Left alone in a world of kings whose voices crowd my mind Left alone in my kitchen with a hole in my jacket Left alone and nauseated. 

Vomiting Ginsberg Dostoevsky Camus Beckett Quinn Lewis Kesey Watts Wilson Bukowski Ginsberg Ginsberg Ginsberg Ellis Thomas Keats Neruda Ionesco Kafka Kerouac Tolkien Thompson Ginsberg Ginsberg textbooks full of Ginsberg and Valentine and Murphy and I have lost it  I have lost my mind. 

They say I speak  I do not speak They say I think I haven’t thought for days I don’t think I can’t find my way back to the waste.

I’m not sure which I dread more: the early morning teeth chattering, or the late night scavenging between cigarettes, rolling around on the counters and greedily eyeing the rat’s food.  Gabe told me that living on bagels and rice for weeks at a time isn’t normal, and we laughed, but I was sad.  I was sad because it isn’t normal.  I was sad because my ribs rattled when I laughed.  I was sad because I’ve forgotten the bellyache of missing someone.  The last time I felt that was yesterday night. How long ago was that? Yesterday?  Hours, hours, hours.  Must have been more than a few hours.  I remember standing by the bed at four in the morning.  I think that’s when I felt sad.  My head is still in the January womb, and it makes me feel sleepy and scared.  I want to go back.  There’s a halo around all of the lights tonight.   I have no memories of Kerrick that are associated with halos and lights.  And, I’ve found, this is how the loneliness seeps in - through the cracks between what you can remember. 

 All of my urges are killer and carnal and skin shivering under blankets of blankets of blankets and I try to think how many times the rope would swing in an hour.  Twenty six times.  Toes knocking against the counters twenty six times an hour. I can’t stop laughing. There’s a wall to my house so high I can’t climb it.  I’m fucked,  I’m fucked  Drowning and dying and rolling around in the waste  help me  Twenty six times and my neck is turning blue No,  That’s wrong No, Living

    It’s cold. The temperature has been dropping for several days now. The streets are empty toady because it’s so cold. I’ve worn a hole in the sleeve of my jacket, and the wind is bristling against my exposed skin. But I don’t move to pull the jacket closer around my body; I remain still. I don’t feel like moving, although I could go inside.      “Nicholson,” I say out loud. No one is outside with me. I say it to hear myself speak.     “Nicholson,’ I say again. Sometimes I like to repeat words over and over again, until they lose their meaning.      “Nicholson.” I’ve said it ten times now. The word is starting to sound unfamiliar and alien. I’m beginning to forget what it means, and why I’ve been saying it.      “Nicholson.”     The word weighs down on my body and I sink deeper into my chair, brooding. I let silence build again. Someone tall, with long, swinging arms, walks by my table on the sidewalk. They have a hat pulled down over their eyebrows; I can’t see their eyes.      “Nicholson,” I mutter after the tall person passes. The word is meaningless now, heavy and empty. I don’t think it means anything. I find myself yawning and realize I’ve become bored.      “Nicholson.” It sounds wooden. It could be a tree. A special kind of tree, that only grows after a forest fire. Up north. With the tall pine trees. It’s a dying breed of tree.      “Nicholson.” A unit of measurement, used to describe the space between seconds. No one’s ever had any reason to use it before, though. It doesn’t really help anyone at all.      “Nicholson.” The name of a street I used to live on, but couldn’t remember anymore because mother had overdosed on the top of the washing machine and wasn’t found for hours, so we had all blocked out the memory of that house.       “Jack Nicholson,” said a man standing by the bicycle rack. He had come outside to smoke a cigarette, but I hadn’t noticed him. He said the name effortlessly, it had meaning to him. He hadn’t lost it in a fog of thoughts like I had. He took a puff of his cigarette and looked at me.      “Jack Nicholson,” I repeated. A face came to my mind, I remembered who he was. I remembered how he looked in the seventies, how he cocked his head to the side and his lips curled when he spoke.      “Oh,” I mumbled to the man with a cigarette, “Thanks.”      The man with a cigarette nodded, extinguished his cigarette and went back inside. The sidewalk was empty again. I noticed that the temperature had dropped more, and I had been shivering. I stood up, pulled the jacket closer around my body, and went inside. 

Mel,

    I just read through your letter. It was charming, among other things, and extremely poignant. I found it extraordinary. But it, as all good pieces of writing should, has lead me down a strange rabbit hole of thoughts.


    First, it made me remember a younger Isabel. An Isabel who was compromising and doe-eyed and unapologetically wore her heart on her sleeve. I remember my first few years on the internet and my vehement desire to explicate myself to every stranger who stumbled across my meager, virtual existence. And, it goes without saying, this selfsame Isabel exhibited the same behavior offline. You know, in awkward brick-walled institutions where there were always too many elbows and knees and no one knew how to properly pronounce words like “eulogy”, “epiphany” or “hyperbole”. That’s when my great big eyes, much too big for my face at the time, glistened behind stylishly childish Mary Kate & Ashley prescription glasses and I stomped my feet and demanded to be heard. Of course, I was a knobby, scrappy little kid and wouldn’t have really known what to do with the attention once I received it. I did have one teacher during this time who lighted on me the kindest, warmest eyes that always gave me the sensation of validation, as if he were simply waiting for me. I would rush to the doorway of his classroom and stand breathlessly on the threshold, wide-eyed and excited and desperately trying to find something to say that sounded intelligent or charming or outstanding in any way. It’s only a matter of course that I left, sometimes only moments later, greatly disappointed in myself. 


    So the years rolled on and high school wasn’t much different. Still I found a teacher, with the same violin-colored eyes, with whom I became inexorably fixated on and tried to, in many clumsy and shamelessly embarrassing ways, attach myself to his hip. (It should be stated at this particular juncture, that I was never seeking something sexual or romantic from him, I just mistakenly identified him as a potential “father”. Take that as you will.) Through four years I sincerely thought were my last, mostly because I couldn’t comprehend the idea of being outside the social womb and becoming an autonomous, self-sufficient individual, all I did was drift. Oh, I had friends. I had one friend the whole time, from start to finish - not a moment before and not a moment after. Her name was Gloria, and I loved her dearly. She was my moonlit companion, riding recklessly in the back of pick up trucks, screaming and howling because we thought that we were the American Youth. We rolled around on beds with nicely painted smiles and eyelashes laden down with large black pearls dripping from our eyes, sauntering through poorly lit, pathetic shopping malls where we spent money our fathers hadn’t earned yet. I dated, too. And I wasn’t shallow about it either, I conducted all proceedings honestly, openly and with a great deal of self-respect. I dated one man for two years, tricked myself into thinking I was quite grown up and knew what I wanted, thought that early mornings meant something permanent. We had a respectable and innocent relationship with all of our quiet scandals kept neatly to ourselves. He romanticized everything, he liked punk rock, he was a gentleman, he had a loud voice. I thought I loved him. I was young, I was wild, I was beautiful, I was given a heart that I didn’t know what to do with. I shattered it, that was inevitable. The cracks came slowly, over time, but the first fissure I felt down the length of my spine, standing on a green turf in the humid mist of an evening in late May. When his eyes met mine, I understood nothing.

    Months later, his eyes met mine again on the sad, sighing but respectively manicured lawn of a cemetery and I understood everything. He was the man I was to love. He was not the man who picked me up from school every day in a rollicking silver car and desperately kissed my hand, silently pledging his undying loyalty, looking up at me with wildly naive eyes. He, instead, was the man who was to roll over in his sleep three years later and sigh into my neck. He, instead, was the man who broke my heart. He, instead, was the man who stands out in my memory as the clearest face, the dearest voice, the most familiar touch, the kindest eyes. He, instead, was the man who saw me more exposed than anyone else and loved me all the more fiercely because of it. He, instead, was the man I love. At the time, he was just a boy and I was unbearably jealous and inexcusably manipulative. This is the youth I hate, and the childhood I wish I could escape from.


    Of course, nothing happened quite that way. 


    Now I’m sitting at my desk, staring apathetically out of closed blinds, attempting to shrug off the weight of my impending twentieth birthday, wondering when it was the twelve year old grew up. Who I am now, who I’m working towards becoming, I am proud of. Or rather, I respect who I am turning into, and the hard work I’ve accomplished to get where I am going. I feel accomplished, productive, mostly happy, and optimistic about the future. I am proud to feel those things.


    But, I hesitate. When did it become hard to look my professors in the face? When did I start second-guessing myself, tripping metaphorically over my feet? When did I start stuttering in all the wrong places? When did I know the difference between ontology, tautology and phenomenology? I realized a moment ago that I keep my head down when I walk, or when I huddle against the concrete, cigarette clattering between my fingers. When did I start smoking? I keep my eyes down, out of other people’s faces because I don’t want them to look into my eyes and see something there I’m trying desperately to swallow.


    Well, no. That’s not true. I do look people in the face. Hard. I am unwavering, scrupulous and unapologetic when I look at people. And I look at people all of the time, it’s my job, it’s what I do. So why am I not afraid anymore? When did life smoke the fear out of my bones, like two foxes leaping, tails ablaze, from their den? When did I stop telling people my story? When did I let the static on the other end of the phone speak for me? When did I swallow my tongue?


    Because I don’t remember doing any of those things as a child. 


    The point, I suppose I should say, Mel, is that I want to thank you. You are an incredibly brave woman for being able to talk about yourself so openly and with such clarity. I admire it wholeheartedly and am grateful for the opportunity for be apart of the story, in whatever small way. 

Sincerely, Isabel

Savannah

I was out so late tonight, I had to do battle with the street sweepers Head-to-head with the iron bison in the prairie lands of 5 AM Weary eyed and hurting, I composed suicide notes to be left strategically for my friends So I could sleep the day away without interruption.  Birds were barking at my swollen shadow,  Pedaling through historic downtown On historic streets Paved with historic concrete By historic machines Of a historic American economy, Still supported by a slave trade  (That never went away, but only changed shapes) While America’s sovereign saints slept anonymous and pale beneath my wheels. And they say the South is quaint.  I never thought of yellow fever as being quaint Or pirates, either Or human trafficking and manslaughter and children getting stuck in chimneys and being burned alive while Daddy enjoys his nightcap How quaint we are. And the rat was mad at me when I got home,  And though she chattered her teeth at me I could do nothing but shrug my shoulders  And stand in front of the sink for an hour,  Sighing and drinking and thinking about how tired I was but still too lazy to walk into the other room and lie down.