Too cold to snow.

If I’d been brave I would’ve looked him in the eye and said that I didn’t want to work with people who didn’t value my time but instead I waited and waited. Twenty minutes late the interview was, and there was I, perpetually early. But the best part of all was that I didn’t really want the job anyway, I found out that I’d gotten another job, a far better job, higher paying and in a college, a man from financial aid called to tell me about it an hour before I ventured out into the negative-five-wind-chill-factor Ohio afternoon. I decided to go to the interview anyway, I had already gussied myself up, ironed the suit and curled the hair, and to hell with them anyway. I knew they’d keep me waiting but I didn’t have to take them seriously, I didn’t have to give a fart about what they thought of me, and there was a delicious victory in knowing that but answering their stupid questions anyway.

Before he let me into the room with the questions and answers the secretary announced to him that I was there, that I had been waiting. He looked at her and said in the most condescending voice he could muster that he knew Ms. J was there, that he had seen me. He left for a trifle longer and the secretary looked at me and we each rolled our eyes and laughed and then he finally called my name, all formal-like, and I walked in wondering why we can’t at least be nice to each other on the surface. This is what the kids see, these meaningless little power struggles. So I answered their questions, knowing full well what an ass he was, thinking that he probably wasn’t listening anyway, and at the end I told a joke and everyone laughed. I got up and left, all of us smiling, and me thinking that I never fucking had to come back here.

Choosing what one does with oneself is a glorious and powerful thing.

*************************************

For the holidays I will be warm in spirit and in body because I am going to the Bahamas where the sun always shines, the seas are the color of fluorescent turquoise, and the rivers flow with milk and honey. And if ye are good, and love one another, I will post pictures of the magical tropics when I return. May you all write bravely on, in my absence.

That's the way the world ends,

Driving to Elyria this afternoon, to pick up the Honda, riding with my father in his truck, where the world is far away and everything is safe and put off for a time. Beyond the windows a desolate expanse of snow-covered corn fields, barren tree lines and rusted farm machinery slipped by, the lonely vistas of winter that only a native of these farmlands would find crushingly beautiful. We climb the hill over the train tracks and come upon several ambulances and fire trucks blocking the intersection where we're going to make a left. We slow with the rest of traffic, the grey sky weighing heavily on us all, and wait through a few changes of the light.

There is a truck off the side of the road in the snow-filled bank, there is also a car in the middle of the intersection and the entire front of it is completely smashed and ruined and as we make the turn to the left I peer into it and can see blood on the airbags and they're wheeling somebody away on a stretcher and their face is covered with a towel and I don't know if they're dead or alive or if it's a man or a woman. We continue on, to pick up the car, and the firemen and paramedics remain, to work on the dying, and the grey sky shows no sign of breaking up.

On the way back now, I'm in my car with dad following me in the truck, and I can see the lights of the ambulances off in the distance as I approach the intersection to make my way home. They've towed away the car since I've been gone and the State Patrol has arrived. And then there is a mighty gust of wind and snow like ice daggers are kicked into the air in cylindrical cones and there is only one thing that would make snow fly like that, and it's a helicopter. Its rotor comes into view, about 100 feet from where I'm sitting in my car waiting for the State Patrol to wave me on towards home. It hovers and turns and thinks about how its going to get its belly off the freezing ground for a few pregnant moments and then points its nose down and is gone. I watch it fly away and remember how Emily used to say that she says a little prayer when she hears the sirens of an ambulance, and I say a little prayer now, as I watch the helicopter glide through the grey sky with someone dying inside.

The State Patrol waves me on and I make the right towards home and I'm back into the vast expanses of Northern Ohio emptiness and I wonder how many deaths it takes for the paramedics to not cry. Five? Ten? The first one? And I think that I would have made a horrible paramedic because I would cry every time. And then I think a thought which is a stray, which comes from nowhere I can trace and leaves me without much explanation. I think that winter is the perfect time to die. But only in Northern Ohio, and only on a day like today, when the sky is grey and hovering low to the world and wondering whether it should release its snow on us or not.

not with a bang, but a whimper.

the dark veil.

You don't know when or how it started, the forgetting. One day it was easy to be cruel, one day you wanted to show them that they were stupid, that you were smart. Once you uttered the words, you realized that there was a time in the past that you wouldn't have recognized yourself.

Jaysus, you say in your head. Jaysus, in your always lilting commentary, what the feck hev I doon?

And still you can't help yourself. There is a big teacher, her face shows the wrinkles of a nearly constant hateful sneer, she is to be feared, she does not appear to be there for the wee children. In the office at the end of the day, casual conversation, she relates the story of the retribution enacted after a particularly raucous few days with a substitute. Me, the substitute. She tells me about the wee ones, fourteen referrals written up in all, Saturday school for most, a suspension for one, the verbal lashing, the destroying of smugness, the breaking, the breaking. Like an animal, I savor the particularly bloody morsels of her style of justice, remembering each wee one and their taunts (stupid, liar, liar, shut-up) and rejoicing in the news of their suffering.

Jaysus, Mary and St. Joseph. And who will suffer for the wee ones? Let ye who be without sin cast the first stone.

I'm standing in my coat and I'm suffocating, the smell of the school (pencil shavings and old carpet), the high-pitched chatter of the after school hangers-on, the florescent lights, the teachers, the yelling. And this woman's face and her telling me about the righteous suffering of the offenders. They are wild and we are to step on them, to crush them until there is no more resistance, until the path is made clear to them or until they are broken completely. My forehead is dotted with sweat and my eyes are swimming, drunk in the florescent hell of insecurity and unearned power. I hate the school, I hate the teachers, I hate the students, I hate the overpaid administrators who are never there anyway, I hate the system set up for failure. I run out as fast as I can and the cold outside hits my sweaty face like a ton of bricks.

'Tis a feckin waste. 'Tis a feckin Yank waste with the soul squished out flat with naught left but the steam of yer piss.
Aye, 'tis, 'tis.

*******************

I had a dream yesterday afternoon (I took a nap) and in the end I was drowning. It started out with some kids somehow and ended up with just me and this one kid, this little kid who used to come to the Saturday food distributions and who was probably seven years old but looked like a grown man of thirty squished into the body of a little boy. Too much worry for one so young. We were walking through an Ohio-type forest, looking for safety, it was raining and we were winding down a path that followed a swollen river. I misplaced a step and fell into the river, slow like, with enough time to look up and see the loss in his face as my head slipped below the surface. In the water all was warm and wet and mushy and I could scarcely move and I knew I was a goner. Take a moment to think, I thought, and clarity came upon me and I remembered someone once told me that in the end drowning is a peaceful way to go. I put my awareness on the top of my head and though to myself, okay, let's do this.

Here's to you, and here's to me, and here's to the both of us dying just like this.

suckerpunch.

This big goddamn kid, huge for his twelve years, unruly, belligerent, loud. Stupid. He has a place in most of the “special” ed classes in his junior high school, and more than likely he had a place in those “special” classes that they offered in his grade school, too. So many years of being special and dammit if he’s not insecure now. Dammit if he doesn’t have a shell three feet thick and tough as christ.

He has devised a way of mucking through the daily hell that is being the stupid kid in school; he is an outrageous and sometimes even violent clown. He pulls his nylon blue cap tight down around his afro, over his face, asks at the top of his lungs if he has the respect of the class literacy aide. And for a moment the teacher stops asking him to answer the question already and is busy yelling at the other kids to stop laughing. (Clown one, school zero.)

He is sad, he is pathetic, he is alone, he is someone who will never make it out of this working-class county in this working-class state, he will end up in jail with his uncle, his future does not belong to him anymore.

It’s freezing in the classroom, part of the board of education’s budget cuts. At the beginning of the school year they told the teachers to be tolerant of the cold this winter because it’s saving them five-thousand dollars. It’s the last period, it’s just the clown and another kid, just an easy and pointless worksheet to finish, one more day out of an impossible number of days, over. But not quite. The clown yells at the literacy aide, tells him to brush off his dirty shoes. He yells because I had asked him a question. Because he didn’t want to read. Because he is more insecure than I can ever possibly imagine. I sit down in the low chair next to him. I look him in the eye and I stare at him. He yells another pathetic joke. I stare at him still. He covers his face in his blue nylon cap again, pulling it tight, looking at me through the fibers. I stare where I know his eyes are. He looks away. Looks down at his worksheet. Pulls the cap halfway off and asks, in a very bossy and self-important voice, for help with the rest of the assignment.

The whole thing, from beginning to end, is a goddamn fucking shame.

Rumi, for the remembering.

All day I think about it, then at night I say it.
Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing?
I have no idea.
My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that,
and I intend to end up there.

This drunkenness began in some other tavern.
When I get back around to that place,
I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile,
I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary.
The day is coming when I fly off,
but who is it now in my ear who hears my voice?
Who says words with my mouth?

Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.

This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say.
I don't plan it.
When I'm outside the saying of it,
I get very quiet and rarely speak at all.

*************

We have a huge barrel of wine, but no cups.
That's fine with us. Every morning
we glow and in the evening we glow again.

They say there's no future for us. They're right.
Which is fine with us.