End of 2015

I must admit that I have been suicidal for the past few months. I don't like it, but I have been in what feels like s never ending struggle since October. Fortunately, I have been able to keep those thoughts at bay, but it is becoming increasingly more difficult. I wish there was something I could do to make it stop. 

Pastoral

We are all descended from pastoral people at some point in our family lineage. Over time, small bands of migratory people grew and settled down. Those settlements sparked further growth, which created systems of economics, theology, and governance that helped ensure a nominal level of security for their inhabitants. Naturally, more and more people wanted that stability, so those settlement turned to townships, then cities, and eventually into the megalopolises we have today, which puts humanity into a precarious position because if we are not careful our cities will become the cancerous tumors that ultimately consume our planet until everything we have have built becomes its own destroyer. 

For Woody

Our dog, Woody, died on Friday, December 11, 2015 at around 7:10 pm. Our hearts are still sad many days afterward. It was terrible to see our happy dog become so incapacitated in his last days, and especially during the last day. The look in his eyes told me that he knew that he was done. Both Denise and I took time to lay with him while he was still cognizant of the world. After his body became to finally give out, I sat down and stroked his body and spoke to him quietly. He eventually took his last breath. His body twitched twice as life left him. 

I couldn't bear to have the vet put him down, so I brought him home so that he could spend his last day with his family. I know that it was traumatic for our entire family, but after spending nearly 14 years together, I felt that he needed to go at home with the family who loved him so much. 

I will never look at that spot in the hallway the same ever again. That is where his ghost will always remain. 

Taking his limp body to the vet hospital to be cremated was one of the most difficult and emotional drives Woody and I have ever taken together. Once inside of the room, I just sat there talking to him and cried. It is no simple task to leave those who we love. It is no simple task to walk away from a body that meant so much, regardless of its lifeless state. 

There seems to an eerie silence around our house these days. There is no more barking in the morning for food. There is no more being enthusiastically greeted at the door upon returning home. His companion, CeCe, still wanders the house looking for him. She waits at the door for him to come home from the vet, but it is only us who walk through the door. 

This year Christmas is a little bit sadder than it has been in a long time. 

Goodbye Woody. 

Wherever you are, may the fields be green and wide open. May your dish always be full. May someone who loves you scratch your belly. May you have someone to love in our absence. May your tail wag forever after. 

Useful just useful

Sometimes I feel that no one really loves me I only feel that I'm useful. I feel that they are nominally nice to me as long as they get what they want. As long as I do with they want for that. In essence, but I am useful. There is a difference and I feel it. That is how I feel today. That makes melike I want to put a bullet in. My my head

Some days

Some days (and nights) it takes every ounce of strength and common sense to stop me from running a razor across my wrists or putting a bullet in my head. I hate that I feel this way, but it is something I cannot control. I cannot simply make those feelings disappear. I have been fighting them off since I was a child of five or six years old. You would think that I have gotten good at beating it back by now, but those thoughts are just as sneaky as I am strong. On certain days, it almost feels like I have met my match. 

Look of disapproval

Sometimes my life feels like a small child backed up against the wall enduring one drawn out look of dispaproval 

Time

When time became tired
When time became weary and worn
when time tried to pause
they said, no you must keep on
there is no stopping
there is no stopping time
but time slowed, just for a moment and remembered
all the time that had been taken
and so little time that had been given

Incessant insomnia

I feel as though this incessant insomnia is slowly killing me. 

Spring

Spring

He took his first breath on a late spring afternoon, somewhere between the rains and the scorching sun surrounded by green stalks of corn reaching toward heaven and tangled raspberry bushes wandering along a rusty chain linked fence.
The air hung thick with humidity from an approaching storm, making each breath damp and heavy like long forgotten photographs thoughtfully placed atop a kitchen table like tarot cards.
One is of a child posing uncomfortably in those 1970s clothes filled with too much orange and plaid.  Another is of two brothers hugging much to the delight of their mother, but to the dismay of their individual fathers. And then, there is that photograph of a smiling little boy with a beer can in one hand and a pack of cigarettes in the other.
Those memories linger for a moment, but disappear almost unnoticed as small pieces fly out of car windows in the Arizona desert, or are dropped on the floor of a bus station bathroom in Sinaloa on trips across continents.
Some drown in the heaving Pacific after being swept away on the winds of a typhoon. Others are simply pushed to the side by the excitement of youth and the ambitions of adulthood.
As if the transition from sweet bloom of spring to the heavy heat of summer would be eternal.

Sweeper

Sweeper

Daniel wakes at 5:30 in the morning, urinates, and brushes his teeth.
He puts on a ragged t-shirt, a fading pair of jeans, socks, a pair of boots he bought with borrowed money.
His lunch box has what he can afford: a baloney sandwich, an apple, and some water.
Sitting on the train he is invisible or maybe he just blends in so well that he is so ordinary that.
At work he places his lunch in the gangbox and grabs his broom. Throughout the day we sweeps, going from room to room. Floor to floor.
Following directions, all the while focusing on his job, which is to sweep up the dust left behind by the other crews.
The tradesmen. The carpenters. The plumbers. The electricians. They have a future. They are essential, unlike Daniel who is expendable.
A common laborer with a broom sent to and fro to quietly sweep up the mess left behind. To sweep up the dust and dirt like so many lost souls fallen from materials that create impressive buildings where people will impress their friends with views of the bay or mountains.
Where they will watch fireworks from their balconies. Where they will host parties with wine and cheese. Where the rich will vacation in style without the hassle of pieces of wire or slivers of metal framing to stick in the soles of their feet?
 Without fine powdered gypsum to get mixed into their cocaine because it has all been cleaned.
It has all been swept up off the once cluttered floors by the quiet apparition in dust-covered boots, his ashen soul lingering among the whispers.

Time

Time

The arrow of time twist and turns through our lives, weaving a tapestry of days gone by, far off memories, dreams to be realized.

The wonderful entanglements of children's voices bouncing off floors, their hands waving in sibling rivalries, their bodies splashing into the pool of life, offering bystanders the overspray of innocence on a hot afternoon. 

The purr of a cat, her head nuzzled between the sun beaten skin of a weakening neck and a steadfast jaw clenched in dutiful silence while dreams of snatching birds in mid-flight waltz across breaths and heartbeats twitching claws that dig into papery flesh. 

The neglected dog paces back and forth until he loses all hope and refrains from so much as an attempted illusion of freedom away from the sweltering, flee infested patch of dirt that has become his home, his prison, his uneventful desert. 

The dreamer. The artist. The philosopher. All stand with their souls slightly hunched over, leading with a shoulder more in non-committal defense than any clearly defined plan of attack against a world that loses ideas as easily as people in the ebb and flow of desire and survival. 

The needle works its way under the skin and into the bone, down to the spongy marrow soaking up sunrises and mythologies, songs of ancestral feet migrating with the seasons, the forgotten last breath of Lazarus, the transcience of an echo. 

This, we willfully hold in our hearts, but the arrow of time is dismissed as nothing more than the shadow of passing stranger. 

Morning

Morning

Morning comes tip/toeing across oceans

Across forests and golden plains

Deserts and Purple mountains

Across rooftops 

Into apartment complexes

Into tenements

Into trailer parks

In through windows

In between hallways

Between blankets on beds

On the floor

On the cold concrete

Bringing the light of safety

Survival of the night

Hope

Hopefully. 

It's Enough

It's enough
when the sun fulfills its promise
as it rises over well-worn eastern mountains
flooding golden hopes and promises across
drought-stricken earth

when a lazy two-tone cat rolls its back
on still cool concrete stretches its left paw
toward a cloud and drops it head before
heading off to the hunt

when a salt soaked ocean breeze
rambles across the quiet sand of changing tides
through bungalow-lined streets,
up business-attire boulevards, and into the
soul of scrub-brush chaparral

when the incessant chirping of caged birds
competes with the mechanical hum of appliances,
the swooshing traffic across sun-bleached asphalt,
and the faint rumble of jet engines
as people begin and end their journeys

it's enough
when faces smile and speak in courteous tones
directing you through the courtyard
surrounded by shades of institutional blue walls
aluminum seats lined up in neat rows
and even a futile splash of color for decoration
or camouflage
or denial

it's enough
when well-intentioned words spill from the mouths
just below the sympathetic eyes looking at you
pulling standardized data from their brains
while sliding across standard government-issue table
pen and paper covered with the words
for you to agree with a signature that
your son, once again, is not good enough

that he has a limit
that his smile does not produce the necessary percentages
that his hug does not have a place on their graph
that his words are not within the expected lexile
that they may never be enough
that he is not enough

That is enough
to drive a man crazy

Rings

The strength of a marriage is not based upon the cost of the ring, rather it is built upon the mettle through which the bond is forged.

Expendable

It is quite easy to feel expendable when it appears that your only purpose in life it to complete tasks assigned by others. 

Second

Second

He always felt second-rate, second-best, second, even when that meant third or fourth.
Sometimes it made him feel like he was nothing more than a whisper in the night that was shrugged off as background noise.
Words leaking into the night from a neighbor's television with its volume too loud. An argument in an apartment down the block.
A song bumping while the car turns into the boulevard and drives away.
He became the chirping of birds.
The barking of dogs.
The buzz of cicadas in the city.
He became the swishing freeway that rises up off the concrete and sails into the ears of those unlucky to be writhing earshot.
Eventually he stopped becoming anything.
Not the hum.
Not the clank.
Not the whistling or rumbling.
He became silent.
He stopped getting in line.
He was no longer second because he was no longer there.
 He simply was not.

The Burbs

The shiny sedans and overcompensating SUVs swarm out of driveways and down hills. They dart in and out of streets wistfully named after flowers or longingly named for far-off places that hold their own glory.  Facsimiles that will never become here and now. Middle of the road zip toward the stop signs and through the stoplights, then enter the freeways where they sit lurching forward, inch by inch. They look out the window at their tacit neighborhoods propped upon hillsides, like small kingdoms that recoil at the thought of conflict. The drivers apply make-up, listen to the news, bob their heads to a song while remembering some past lover back when the world was for the taking, and like so many generations before, they believed themselves somehow special. Somehow the rebels chosen to define an era. Somehow groundbreaking. Now they strive to please the boss. To please a spouse. To raise children worthy of an occasional brag. They wonder how Amalia will do in level three gymnastics. She hops and flips around the house with abandon so much that one day she might break something. Hopefully, not the television. Sophia has always attacked the ball with the courage of a lion, but something is different this season. She needs to keep her mind on the ball and goals instead of boys. Diego. Oh, Diego. Poor young man is too serious. Wears his hair and clothes like a thirty-five year old manager of a store. He needs to untuck that polo shirt. he needs to throw away those mannequin dreams and be a child. Poor child. Can't he see the world in front of him doesn't need another follower. It doesn't need another car on the freeway, merging from the off-ramp into the line cars hoping that a boss notices the sincere effort; that a spouse notices the hard work; that the children notice the log hours; that the bill collectors see his side of the story that the car in his blind-spot sees him switching lanes, just like the guy in the old pick up sees him roll through the stop sign in a hurry to glide down the hill and into gridlock of his choosing.

Birds

Birds

Relatively few people notice
the migration of birds in temperate climates
however, on a still morning the chirping
will sometime rise above the metered
ticking of a hanging wall clock
the white noise of traffic
swirling up asphalt thoroughfares
rolling up hillsides
through parched canyons
travelling from comfort of a warm bed
to the duty of concrete buildings
where bodies
and minds
and souls
minimize contact while speaking to machines
bustle along fabricated pathways
fulfill agreed upon responsibilities
staying in motion
counterclockwise
and then, maybe in the silence between two breaths
a breeze, as innocent as a child's hand
caresses a wind chime
its muffled song an unexpected conversation
that one hears between children
who smile
and run
and jump
and flutter from swings
to slides
to branches
where they briefly sit
and belt out a song
against the grey of a spring morning

Conversation

Sometimes I find myself lost in conversation as though anyone actually cares what I have to say. It is quite ridiculous, I know. Yet, the words just move from brain to lips and fly into the air for no reason other than to dissipate like diluted poison in a room full of clutter. 

Travel

Let us never forget that we are all born from the deep-rooted desire for travel. Never let us condemn those who follow their instinct for discovery and exploration. Never let us destroy the spirit of those who embrace the act of putting one foot in front of the other.

Art

It could be argued that the arts are an essential component to our humanity; therefore, removing the arts from our schools is an act of dehumanizing our children and ultimately anesthetize mg our society. If we view it this way, then we must ask ourselves who is systematically doing this, and to what end. The next step is to recognize and remove those people from positions of power, and replace them with individuals who care more about cultivating humanity than destroying the world for monetary profit. 

Suicide note 5

I think I can say with confidence that I am not a good father or husband. I am a disappointment. My wife stays by my side because she took a vow, and my kids stay by my side because they do not know any better. They would all be better without me. Then I would stop holding them back. 

The riotous mass

The Riotous Mass

The riotous mass of bone

And hair 

And flesh concealed behind masks

Collectively heave-ho the indescribable

The unmentionable

Agony of memory near 

And far

Into the air

But that twisted face of barbarism

Does nothing more than allow itself 

To be flung into the air

And hang ever so patiently

Quietly

Like fresh bedsheets on the line

During a spring afternoon

Until it is taken down and passed to 

Another generation 

To be draped under the weight

Yet again. 

Suicide Note 4

I am sorry that I couldn't be the father you wanted for your children. I am sorry that I was so ridiculous whenever I took them to softball practice, to baseball practice, to soccer practice, to their games, to the doctor, and to therapy. I apologize from the bottom of my heart for ever taking our precious little angels to school, and heaven forbid, I actually picked them up and did homework with them. I am sure I must have completely destroyed every ounce happiness each time I went outside to play basketball or catch. It must have been terrible of me to sit through a church basketball league when I clearly almost vomited each time I walked into that unholiest of buildings, and alas, I was constantly struck by lightening for being such a non-believer. And in front of the kids nonetheless.
So again, I offer my sincerest apologies, but that will no longer be of any consequence to you or the children, as I will be gone. I did finish the laundry, but won't be able to make dinner tonight. There are left-overs in the refrigerator.
Love,
M    

Suicide Note 3

I am sorry that I couldn't be enough for you. I said that we would be together until the end, and I kept that promise, but that was an unfair promise for you to have to keep. Now you can be free of burden I presented in your life. You truly deserve someone much better than me. I hope the kids aren't too much for you to handle. Just tell them that daddy went for a walk. I am at the bottom of the canyon on the other side of the ridge so neither you nor the kids have to see what I have become. 

Love,

M