Category: Diary

Clickety click! or that is the way it is supposed to happen. You on the phone tonight way past the point that you should be, but still there. This is two in one day, or three. What will we do with this? This city excites you, and maybe I do too. But at the end of the day we all want to retreat to the beach and fill our jaws with ocean meat, and to make pledges to each other that only a beach will make real. How’s that humidity? How’s that sleepy town? I hope your night makes you new again. I hope it creates great dreams that will teach me and you how we should feel again… after all of this.

I know i still love you in these strange ways and it hurts that it is not the way that it used to hurt, but I realize now that it can be something else, that perhaps you have to crawl back into your own cocoon. I could not even find you in a lineup now as the crazy muses make the effort impossible. I can lay down no more, which may be a great effort to you. Happy new year. Happy life. You, and I, will be happy. How’s that, boo? I think I have felt some strange love lately, but it cannot be talked about, because of therapy and talk and gossip… I hope you find it. I think I have, or will, or can hope. I can always hope. Right?

This bed is cold tonight.
I get in rooting around
for a little scent of you
that may have been left behind.
Is it the pillow?
No.
Maybe try the divit in
the sheets where you layed.
It is there.
It is there but
will slowly diminish.
In fact, in a couple of days
I will not be able to
exactly recall how you smell.
It will then become a memory
unattached to any real sense,
that can only be awakened
by you again, my nose
against your nape again.
That too will come to pass
as you return to the winter
heat and humidity of that place
you have created – a sunshine city
for yourself.
I will stay here in the cold,
and rain, in this now quiet house,
trying to find a way
to warm this bed without you –
trying to find a way
to make that faint scent
hang around a little longer.

Today, a federal holiday, and I out finding things I did not know existed. Could I fly on a cloud, ride on a magic carpet? Could I dance to the music of someone strange? Oh, you bet! I will drift to this slumberland, the one that makes the dreams all so real with crazy palpitations in my heart. If we were to make it happen, then this is the way. Oh, this is the way!

Tonight was the first night that I have ever gotten to play Santa. After the traditional soup and sandwich dinner at my brother’s house, we put the kids to bed and I stayed awhile delaying a late-night, potentially futile, hunt for petroleum, as my car’s gas light had just come on as I arrived in Durham County. He asked would I help and I said I would, so we went down the street to the Grandparent’s house and into the garage to retrieve several boxes of Biddy Baby paraphernalia and the new gas-powered 4-wheeler for S. We brought them back to the house and took the baby doll furniture into the house for assembly to begin, and a spirit of Christmas that I haven’t felt all season flooded through me. I realized that it really is for the kids, and that not having any kids actively present in my day-to-day life has kept the spirit partly at bay. Tonight it seemed so different, being back here in this town. Although it is strange to me now, there is still a homeyness to the place that is unmistakable. I can feel my pulse slow a bit when I cross into N.C., and even more when the Durham County line is crossed. While playing Santa tonight, I thought, “I can do this… I like doing this,” and thus I put to rest some of the nagging doubts that I have had lately about my suitability and desire for fatherhood, marriage, settling etc. I can put those thoughts, fears, and worries away now – and it feels good to do so.
I hope you all have, had, and are having a Merry Christmas. I hope to see or talk to each of you very soon.

Larry Levis is killing me tonight. He is reminding me that it is Christmas and that things are supposed to be good and that you will still be lonely at the end of the day no matter what you find beside you, that it is you that makes you lonely and that your habits will eventually catch up with you, and your tendencies too and that all those pictures in a box are gone, thoroughly gone, now. That time is passing you by and that tomorrow will create memories that you will want to recreate years from now, but tomorrow will seem like an excruciating day on the surface. He also teaches me that there is a love out there that will make it all make sense, and maybe she has already been, but maybe she hasn’t. Maybe I have met her before, or just recently, or not yet at all. My job is to live, just simply live, and be good until the mystery reveals itself, possibly in a dream, possibly in a bar, possibly this time next year as the wind grows colder and my eyes begin to dry – when I can finally laugh at myself again.

The divorcee across the street has met a man on the internet and will soon take her son in the middle of the night to a foreign city where she will enroll him in a foreign school with foreign friends and her ex will know nothing of their whereabouts… his son, his ex wife – once the love of his life, and maybe still.

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I started reading the Sunday New York Times again today. The day that I drove J and S down to Perry, GA so they could make their way further south to Tampa, and the day that I noticed for the first time that the cold snap and some negligence has all but taken the hanging plants in the Florida room.

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I have lost my dream. You see I used to have it, but I have lost it now. I have discussed this with my therapist, he asks, “have you had any dreams lately?”, and I say, “no I have lost them, I thought I had a dream a few days back, but it turned out to not be one. It turned out to just be Tuesday.” He gets concerned at such talk and makes odd faces at me. Sometimes I try to fool myself into thinking I have a dream, but I realize such games are just games. I have lost my dream. Maybe I will get it back. Maybe tonight after dinner and reading in bed, I will drift off to sleep and I will awaken realizing I have gotten my dream back. I am a dreamer by nature, just one without a dream right now. If I could just remember where I put it. Please let me know if you see it around. Otherwise I will have to shop for another one. My therapist and I cannot rest until.

I scream Antigone to the dark sad night,
or is it agony, or is it uplift,
I can give you all of that.
I can make a sweet dream
out of the outside of your hand,
you were making sweet stuff
out of the bad stuff all along.
Your face in a dream
the last few nights.
I don’t care where your loins have been.
A beautiful jaw,
a beautiful face,
your strange absence in this place.
A vacancy in my heart,
my head,
that has no substitute.
It’s brunch,
simply brunch,
and I’m buying?