When the 15 Spaniards went out into the yard they peered in the stream and saw their reflection
twins
multiple sets
many young men striped in black on black on their skin
afraid of eachother
afraid of the neutrality of the stream
the life that grows in the stream
they ran back to the house to work on their drawings of ducks in a pond and life happening off the farm
Friday, October 31, 2014
The River Of My Heart
When I was a kid I found the river of my heart near the burnt car in the Kansas River
The sun was dripping like all the things around me, all the little ticks falling from the trees like marbles falling from the sky and landing in the dirt in the afternoon of my life
I thought I'd be alright, out of the damp basement and into the light hallway where the wind feels like walking but the natural decay of monkey brain in the field of my schoolyard
Boy cloaked in big shirt walking toward me with orange hair, dangling, arms flailing like monkey-man inside of the vision behind the eyes that left me blind under the river of my heart
The river of my heart the river of my heart that would flow like lava down the mountain, the blue cars rush down the mountain like little rain into the day on the shore
Here in time
Finality of morning where light hits the blades at the tip and i walk around until the knees buckle at the top of the mountain where my life was and the water in the lagoon would greet me with warmth where there was everything all around the river and morning would feel like night-rock in my mind in the kitchen of my soul in the love of spring
I come down here to settle the feet
The shore line is so long
The prince and the queen fly along together in syncopation like bees do where the trees dangle like kid in the schoolyard and I go behind the shed and tell myself to keep trying
to keep being here
and if i'm not here than i'm in the river of my heart
The river of my heart
The river of my heart
where all things flow like time in the river
The sun was dripping like all the things around me, all the little ticks falling from the trees like marbles falling from the sky and landing in the dirt in the afternoon of my life
I thought I'd be alright, out of the damp basement and into the light hallway where the wind feels like walking but the natural decay of monkey brain in the field of my schoolyard
Boy cloaked in big shirt walking toward me with orange hair, dangling, arms flailing like monkey-man inside of the vision behind the eyes that left me blind under the river of my heart
The river of my heart the river of my heart that would flow like lava down the mountain, the blue cars rush down the mountain like little rain into the day on the shore
Here in time
Finality of morning where light hits the blades at the tip and i walk around until the knees buckle at the top of the mountain where my life was and the water in the lagoon would greet me with warmth where there was everything all around the river and morning would feel like night-rock in my mind in the kitchen of my soul in the love of spring
I come down here to settle the feet
The shore line is so long
The prince and the queen fly along together in syncopation like bees do where the trees dangle like kid in the schoolyard and I go behind the shed and tell myself to keep trying
to keep being here
and if i'm not here than i'm in the river of my heart
The river of my heart
The river of my heart
where all things flow like time in the river
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Tonight: Now
I engineered everything around me
Because I was thinking differently
About the categories of fragments
And unidentified bacterial infections
There were three people I remember as drowning
And one of them was me
In the fractured light of the afternoon
By the beach
Down home in the grass hut
Missing happy and jh
They looked like little balloons on the lanei
With his back arched
And apologizing for wanting to throw up
In a sock
Or in a pair of her shoes
Today is another day of promise
Like all of the others
That I have been living forever
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Clear Everyworld
My skull is melting into my brain. The sun shines on everything here like a machine. My face is melting. I want to be mean
Have you guys ever thought about what being a man
means? I don’t really know, I’m
totally uncertain. All I know is
that to be a man you must readily prepare the people you care about for totally
altering grand absurdity. And then
certainly, if you consider yourself a man, don’t be the man that admonishes the
other man for not understanding that you aren’t a man anymore.
There were palm trees
There were ferns
I had my zen reader
On top of a mountain
The lava bursts onto the cliff where Tim Freeman and Skye
stood the other night. They missed
the explosion, they build tree houses on state-sanctioned land for maximum
comfort and Hawaiian good time.
I fucked up
I’m kidding
That’s the last thing I did.
All I want guys, my friends, the ones I love with all my
heart, is to just be good. It’ll
come, but I’m so worried for when my heart breaks and I’ll have to piece it
back together. All of the parts of
my home will be useless. I hope I don’t
need a repair man.
Sunday, October 5, 2014
Fathering
The look in a person's eyes when they want to have a kid with you is probably not a look I'm familiar with but who knows? How much really goes into the decision to have a kid? There are probably people out there who have wanted to have a kid with me. And when they communicated that, through the look that I can only imagine, I probably said something like:
"I can smell your shampoo."
And then they probably stepped back and spitefully didn't want to have a kid with me anymore. But I'm not sure if this is true, it's just an exchange that's easy and fun for me to create. I'd like to think some people want to have a kid with me. And I'd like to think if they honestly communicated this information to me, I'd have the obscene pleasure of gracefully declining. But that's not how it would go at all.
No, I'd probably stand there in the sun, sweating through my white t-shirt, smelling the shampoo, considering the hair and cheeks and teeth of my future wife, and I'd say something like:
"Alright, cool."
Luckily people don't say things and instead just look at you in expressive ways that can be conveniently misconstrued.
I wrote that awhile ago and left it saved as draft for a couple months. I guess I was thinking about girls. Hope everyone had a great summer.
-John Henry
"I can smell your shampoo."
And then they probably stepped back and spitefully didn't want to have a kid with me anymore. But I'm not sure if this is true, it's just an exchange that's easy and fun for me to create. I'd like to think some people want to have a kid with me. And I'd like to think if they honestly communicated this information to me, I'd have the obscene pleasure of gracefully declining. But that's not how it would go at all.
No, I'd probably stand there in the sun, sweating through my white t-shirt, smelling the shampoo, considering the hair and cheeks and teeth of my future wife, and I'd say something like:
"Alright, cool."
Luckily people don't say things and instead just look at you in expressive ways that can be conveniently misconstrued.
I wrote that awhile ago and left it saved as draft for a couple months. I guess I was thinking about girls. Hope everyone had a great summer.
-John Henry
Wednesday, October 1, 2014
Malcolm
1.
David is sitting on the couch while she puts on music. David is standing on the porch while she smokes cigarettes. David is standing in the kitchen trying to get the last of the vodka out from under the ice, tilting his head back, lifting the bottom of his glass up into the florescent light. David is finding the last piece of generically-manufactured Xanax tucked under the ashtray. David is sitting on the couch while she puts on music.
David is remembering the goat he had as a child. He is remembering how the goat liked to eat barbecued ribs. He is remembering his father cooking the ribs in the park and how the smoke from the grill smelled like mangoes. And how the goat would nudge his elbow with its nose as he sat at the picnic table.
He is remembering his little cousins with sauce all over their faces. He can only remember his little cousins with sauce all over their faces. They're bigger cousins now and look different. David doesn't really know them anymore with their deep voices and stubble and loose basketball shorts. He is remembering how Malcolm would show up and how excited that used to make him.
David doesn't feel anxious or worried even though he's pretty scared of her. He's sitting on the couch watching her pour more Coca-Cola into her huge cup. He's remembering things but feeling far away from them, like they're memories of T.V. or something. He feels a little sad about this because he should be able to go back closer to them. Especially the day the goat died.
The goat died because the neighbor hit it with his car. David thought it was weird because the goat was pretty big and hard to miss. David didn't see the goat after it was dead. He was at school when it died and by the time he got home Animal Control or whoever had come and taken the goat's body away. He remembers that his dad told him to go skateboarding after it happened. So he took his skateboard down to the basketball courts and sat on it, looking at the chain-link nets swaying beneath the hoops until the sun went down.
David realizes that after the goat died his cousins stopped coming around as much. And that it got colder and that his dad started working more and didn't grill ribs very often. Maybe on like Fourth of July or over Labor Day weekend but that's about it. And David started hanging out with Malcolm behind the Acme a lot.
David is lying on her bed now and she's above him, with her dress still on and she's very far away. Talking to him. Talking to him about. What? The music is off and when he closes his eyes he remembers in a very different way than before, like being there, because he can hear and smell. And when he opens his eyes he sees that she has three library books on a shelf full of ceramics. So he closes them again and tries to turn on his side. Because her sheets smell like mangoes. Like mangoes. Like mangoes.
2.
On the evening of the last day of Malcolm's life, David walked slowly down narrow, chilly streets toward Malcolm's house. He thought about Mona and how it had been raining earlier. He thought about the joint they had smoked in her bedroom and how afterwards they had fucked with the window open, letting the rain mist on to their naked bodies. He thought about he had walked downstairs and out onto the porch, how he had walked past Mona's mother who was speaking Spanish on the cordless phone, one angry eye fixed firmly on David as he descended the steps to the street. He was not thinking much about Malcolm.
David is sitting on the couch while she puts on music. David is standing on the porch while she smokes cigarettes. David is standing in the kitchen trying to get the last of the vodka out from under the ice, tilting his head back, lifting the bottom of his glass up into the florescent light. David is finding the last piece of generically-manufactured Xanax tucked under the ashtray. David is sitting on the couch while she puts on music.
David is remembering the goat he had as a child. He is remembering how the goat liked to eat barbecued ribs. He is remembering his father cooking the ribs in the park and how the smoke from the grill smelled like mangoes. And how the goat would nudge his elbow with its nose as he sat at the picnic table.
He is remembering his little cousins with sauce all over their faces. He can only remember his little cousins with sauce all over their faces. They're bigger cousins now and look different. David doesn't really know them anymore with their deep voices and stubble and loose basketball shorts. He is remembering how Malcolm would show up and how excited that used to make him.
David doesn't feel anxious or worried even though he's pretty scared of her. He's sitting on the couch watching her pour more Coca-Cola into her huge cup. He's remembering things but feeling far away from them, like they're memories of T.V. or something. He feels a little sad about this because he should be able to go back closer to them. Especially the day the goat died.
The goat died because the neighbor hit it with his car. David thought it was weird because the goat was pretty big and hard to miss. David didn't see the goat after it was dead. He was at school when it died and by the time he got home Animal Control or whoever had come and taken the goat's body away. He remembers that his dad told him to go skateboarding after it happened. So he took his skateboard down to the basketball courts and sat on it, looking at the chain-link nets swaying beneath the hoops until the sun went down.
David realizes that after the goat died his cousins stopped coming around as much. And that it got colder and that his dad started working more and didn't grill ribs very often. Maybe on like Fourth of July or over Labor Day weekend but that's about it. And David started hanging out with Malcolm behind the Acme a lot.
David is lying on her bed now and she's above him, with her dress still on and she's very far away. Talking to him. Talking to him about. What? The music is off and when he closes his eyes he remembers in a very different way than before, like being there, because he can hear and smell. And when he opens his eyes he sees that she has three library books on a shelf full of ceramics. So he closes them again and tries to turn on his side. Because her sheets smell like mangoes. Like mangoes. Like mangoes.
2.
On the evening of the last day of Malcolm's life, David walked slowly down narrow, chilly streets toward Malcolm's house. He thought about Mona and how it had been raining earlier. He thought about the joint they had smoked in her bedroom and how afterwards they had fucked with the window open, letting the rain mist on to their naked bodies. He thought about he had walked downstairs and out onto the porch, how he had walked past Mona's mother who was speaking Spanish on the cordless phone, one angry eye fixed firmly on David as he descended the steps to the street. He was not thinking much about Malcolm.
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