Balm 457
★ Words
"traits that are disabling in one environment are likely advantageous in another."
☾ Read more ☽2024 Books
★ Words
2024 list of books that were memorable and rose above the noise into my life like a disembodied Narrator remarking on my life choices. God Is Red : A Native View of ReligionVine Deloria Jr Took a Native American Studies...
☾ Read more ☽Hungry and New
★ Poetry, Words
Your heart is a candy barI got for freeI didn’t dress up for HalloweenI just sat on the bathtub with youin the red water waiting for a moment we were already inI think I ate the whole thing there Is...
☾ Read more ☽Prices or Colors
★ Poetry, Words
When I learned Derrick Bell wrote science fiction, I cried in my car,George Wallace screaming on Color TV 500 armed veterans and 9 black teenagersprobably still alive to vote in 2024 In the shadows of temporarily embarrassed immigrants, were my ancestors bittering,red...
☾ Read more ☽Dating Profile – V. 33
★ Words
We're all dying and its thoughtless to lead with, “Hey” and “What do you do for work?”I need to know: How do you feel when you remember Robin Williams? What do you believe happens to you after you die? When...
☾ Read more ☽Fuck this
★ Playlists, Poetry, Words
I wonder about
the knees behind the backs
of the holes in the bodies
in the ash of the wreckage
after an ad for therapy
I am reminded that
I have never left my cats in a war
to escape with what’s left of my life again
I wonder about
the inside of the skull
of a woman in yoga pants
next to a gun on a bridge near my house
The cops asked me to describe each moment
as construction workers spray painted RIP 5/4/2023
while 100 cliff swallows under the bridge
became a spinning cloud of
little did they know
I wonder about
the blood on a cowboy boot
being hosed off an hour after
having said I love you to the owner of it
His body appeared
half crushed and preserved
in a suit and a tie and a coffin
returning to the spot where he died
I met an angel named Titus
who taught me, to learn is to hope
I wonder about
the silhouette of my mother’s body
in the carpet of my childhood home
Among the piles of online deliveries
there was 1 puppy, 2 cats, and a carpet cleaner
1 lived, 2 died, and I rocked in the shower
after 3 gallons of solvent would not remove
the shame of the quiet that settled in between us
after she chose death
I’ve wondered about
taking the exit
before Iâd taste the earth again
between my teeth like dentist tools
reminding me that the human right to grief
Is not allowable if the body count
does not climb high enough
to lower the price
or make the news
or kill the witnesses
or reach the deaf ears of God
before the winners become the losers
Some will delay the unknowable with certainty
instead of misunderstanding the language that
Some have not been raped for their wings repeatedly
by the hawk that combusts from thin air for the pitiless chaos of renewal alone
Some will not admit the cancer is systemic
because it was not heard in words they hear
So I propose we pretend to vote
for the human being who speaks the following words:
We either get up for work in the morning or we don’t
Fuck this
Beliefs
★ Poetry, Words
Whether a hypothesis or a prayerboth are still a wishfor something to be truethat is not yet provable Baby spider or baby humansquished or bombedthe life hangs on the threadof your unspoken beliefs Ten slides pitched tostakeholders nodding while texting...
☾ Read more ☽Sorry, It Took me a Year to Write This
★ Playlists, Words
Dear peripheral darkness in the corner of my room, are you my mother?
Have you come to wet my eyes again with tears of ethanol or return the memories you took with you?
I’d like the ones with the sunshine through your golden hair, the healing of your food, the safest hours of our private conversations and those nighttime psalms you sang, please.
Will I cry like I cried when you called me from purgatory in my dreams? Can you explain what you meant when you said, “Our boss won’t let us talk too long”, and faded into the back of a dusty stagecoach? Its just that the panic I felt when gripping your hand woke me up and I never heard your voice again.
It reminded me of the time, your purple arms made me advise, “Love does not tolerate abuse”, but at the last minute, I asked the veterans to write “LOVE NEVER FAILS” on your headstone.
You had cried wolf so many times that without warning, me and some familiar strangers, at the time, plummeted, guts first, through the years of our future together in an hour and three minutes, clenching every inch of your body in a quiet hospital room.
They wheeled in what was left of Dad, and he grieved his oaths, for better or worse, into your thigh, since they cut his wedding ring in half to save him enough to bear the guilt of your death. You’d be proud that I cleaned the mucus from his face and forgave him before he died like you taught me to. You probably know this since he’s probably with you right now, but I’m not sure if your boss let’s you guys hang out there, so I’ll keep being specific.
If he is there, let him know, I really loved the dream where me and him played together as little boys in a field with river water. There were fewer people to help him die than you had and I felt sad that it was mostly just me and him at the end. After a year of thinking about the differences between your funerals, I think some people blamed Dad for the situation. If your boss lets you watch me, you probably know that I’ve tried to make it clear that you two were responsible 50/50 for this 30-year tragedy from the moment you met on that ditchbank. That you died just like you fell in love, two codependent teenagers with PTSD.
As I left the hospital room with your body in it, I saw your framed picture hanging in the hallway. I realized that the title of “Distinguished Nurse” likely came with an auto-immune disorder and the regret of leaving your son with the addict you married. It sucks that you carried so much responsibility with your shame. Its a pattern I’ve tried to avoid.
Anyway, you left so many things here: Your uncut wedding ring, for example, and a house with 30 years of trash and memories in it. You taught me to be clean and orderly so I had to throw 20 years of it away. Even the family that rarely talks to me showed up to help me. I wish you were there when I climbed to the top of the 18ft dumpster by myself and cried so much that I laughed at the sight of our lives in 32 cubic yards. P.S.: At least 10 years of it got stolen by the people living in my childhood neighborhood. The police told me they couldn’t help me get it back.
I watched parts of the videos in your iPad of Dad yelling at you while hitting the wall, the one documenting the parts of your body that stopped working and the one where you recorded your cat dying from heart failure in all that trash.
I read your AA journals, your letters to your three sisters and Dad, my great grandfather’s baptism certificate and scanned 100’s of Polaroids of our lives into the computer for your funeral. I played “Time in a Bottle” and Sarah McLachlan just like you asked me too. I also did your taxes, so no worries there, I think.
That wonderful doctor you love came to the funeral and apologized to me for what happened, even though none of it was anyone’s fault but yours. Is that why you were so silent with us before you left?
On the note of silence and your siblings, they’ve all become closer to me. Particularly, the ones you taught me to not trust or talk to because they were “sinners” or “toxic”. They are the ones who have listened to my cracked voice cry for hundreds of hours about what happened to us and supported me with the selflessness of saints. Can you explain why you never apologized to them? I’m trying to learn to forgive but I’m uncertain you taught me that? Now that you’re dead, what have you learned about the cost of speaking for God and not letting things go? Just send your notes in another dream, I’ll be waiting.
The boy I’m raising talks about you all the time. He’s struggling in school, but thriving in every other way and wonders why so many people have left him behind. Tell Dad that he still loves talking about cars instead of his feelings or ideas. I’m realizing while raising him, you skipped some valuable lessons raising me. Send that along too if you’ve picked anything up since then. Just send it in separate dream from the one you’ll send about you pretending to be God. Otherwise, all of that might ruin my sleep.
I can’t think of anything else to say except that I now hate you as much as I love you and this revealed every flaw in my spirit at once. I’ve become more neurotic, depressed and lonely but more insightful, resilient and artistic too. I learned that like this letter, our family legacies and my sexual relationships, I am so juxtaposed and paradoxical that I rely on substances, achievements and other people to see reality clearly. No one understands this well but us, I think. However, unlike you, I have puzzled out that you should never leave unprocessed shame for too long, otherwise, it might return to orchestrate your demise, isolate you, flip your paralyzed body face down into a pile of every shit-covered, garbage mistake you’ve ever made before erasing you, piece by piece, from mind to soul. I’d like to think that makes you proud of me, for better or worse.
Most of all, know that I will always be your precious baby but I am also the sole witness to the way the permanent shame trickles down the family trees like the tears of ethanol on a glass of cold beer that the blood of Christ seemed unable to free us from like you said it would.
Love,
Jake
Some melodrama does not change
★ Playlists, Poetry, Words
You cannot sleep without wet matches
You cannot speak without candle wax
You cannot mirror without a bright flame
You cannot love me without firewalking
You allowed me to burn the past too desperately
even though I am down to coals
You removed the pans quietly and scraped me up so slowly
even though I am down to coals
You wrestled with the breath that put me out possibly
even though I am down to coals
You stoked another coven fire carefully
even though I am down to coals
You cleaned my broken skull lovingly
even though I am down to coals
You wet the ash under your eyes tearfully
even though I am down to coals
You are renewed and green beautifully
even though I am down to coals
You attempted flicker and shifting ineptly
even though you are a forest growing salaciously
and I am down to coals
A Madman with a Box Describes His Companion by Means of Shades of Time
★ Poetry, Words
At times, my lover is an artist who doesn’t grasp she is an artist She is abstruse and indistinct but to me, at times, she is concrete At eras, she is the lone sunflower, reaching past the others, arching in...
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