Boxes in the Attic

Sometimes i feel like a boy who lost a parent

When he was a baby.

The widow or widower

Boxed up all their things.  

And placed them in the attic.

For me.  When i am old enough to go through the detritus of that life and begin to construct

A theory about just how many claims that existence

Can make on my me

 

Sometimes i feel like that boy

Filled with mourning and wonder

Lament and curiosity.

 

Only the attic

is the world.

The wide wild bewildering world

 

The boxes

are everywhere!

Clouds filling the sky some as wispy as the fey

Others as substantial as iron girders supporting the roof of a parking garage.

 

The sting of the coffee splashing up around an ill fitting lid in the morning chill.

Scalding my fingers and landing in the muddy snow.

 

Those boxes are the smile touching the eyes of the woman who gave me my change before i pumped the gas.

 

Those boxes are the heart knowledge

That you cant love somebody into loving you.

And the wicked will prosper.

And the body grows old.

And then the body dies.

 

This one life of mine is an excavation.  

Dusty boxes in an attic lined with pink insulation.

They can be opened like brown flowers that making squelching noises

As the four interlocking petals are pulled up and out.

 

This life is an act of discovery.

The truths  i am shaking the dust off of

The things i am holding up in dirty light.

 

They are awe inspiring and monotonous.

They are wonder filled terrors

And terror filled wonders.

They are who we are

And who we are not.

And what we should have been.

 

The Things I’m not going to tell you.

This is not like cooking.

Or interior decorating.

It is like snake handling…

or nuclear power plant management.

It is not something to be dabbled with,

flirted with,

or trifled with.

 

It is not a place for amateurs.

 

The boat is leaving.

If you are not going to run along this dock

now.

If you are not going to push people out of your way,

mindless that they have plunged into the water,

if you are not going to run and leap for all that you are worth…

 

It would be better if you just let them go.

But don’t you dare  wave good-bye.

You would not have earned that right.

 

If you decide later that you wanted to catch up.

If you swim along side when you can,

if you decide later that you’d like them to help pull you

into that little row boat…

You will only capsize them all.

 

Let them go

If you will not join them in that boat.

Swimming alongside when it is convenient,

doing what you can when it works out…

Deciding, later, that you might hope that they will pull you in…

 

If you do this you will only capsize them all.

 

I am not going to tell you that your life will be easier if you do it.

Here’s a brutal truth: This is not going to end well for somebody.

I can not even tell you that it will be better

by most definitions of the word ‘better’.

I am not going to tell you about the right thing.

You already know.

I am not going to tell you

that you already made your decision and if you were a man you’d live by it.

 

I am simply going to tell you

Do it now: decide. 

I am simply going to tell you

standing there is deciding, too.

So own that choice you chicken shit.

 

 

I think that’s the one thing that you have to understand.

You are making a forever choice now as they row away.

And they have to row away.

 

Even now, that perfect little child does not reach for you when you come by.

Even now, that perfect little child does not call for you in the middle of the night.

That perfect little child does not know what it is to have her daddy.

 

It is almost to late.

Run, run now…

If you’re ever going to run at all.

A hot button topic.

The hot-button mentioned in the title isn’t like abortion or immigration of the presidential election.  It’s an actual button: you know what I mean.  A round disk with a pin through it designed for being displayed on your collar or shirt or whatever.  This button I wore last night carried this lesson with it.  Let me explain.

There’s this series of books out.  They are vampire novels.  They have this tremendous following among teen aged girls and suburban moms… They seem to appeal to the quirky members of both these groups, those with a penchant for the macarbe. 

The final book was released Saturday.  I have this second job at Barnes and Noble.  I was scheduled to work last night.  We stayed open until 1 AM, and we had this big release party thing for the final book in the series.

And so one of the things those wacky managers did was arrange this tremendous scavenger hunt.  You know how it works: objects were strewn across the store.  These were listed on a page.  Hunters had to find where these objects were and mark them down.

So far, so good.  Except some of the objects were people.

About half of the staff were given these buttons that identified them as figures from the novels.  I had this one that had some made-up fantasy word at the top, and then the words “Vampire Mafia” at the bottom.  The idea was that people would put my name next to the slot on their page with the made-up fantasy word on their page.

It was a fascinating experience.  What it did was turn  me into an object, a means to an end for hundreds of people.  It’s not so much that I was no longer Jeff.  Let’s be real.  When I’m at Barnes and Noble, the use I have to people is not in my personality, experience, or insight.  The use I have is that I ring people up or help them find C.D.’s.

But atleast those things take some little tiny amount of ability or effort on my part.

I stood around and wore a button.  That was my value.

And though it certainly wasn’t a traumatic expereince, I had these insights.  There’s this whole symbolic thing.

First off, it’s hard to deny that it’s fun when people are happy to see you.  People would see the button on my collar and they would light up.  They would want to know my name, and if they didn’t read it off my my name tag lanyard thing I would tell them.  I realized it was absurd to feel so popular.  But this realization didn’t do much to water down the feeling.

Worse than the occasional realization that it was all about the button were the people who’d lost track of the fact that they’d already recorded me on their page.  People would get annoyed.  (Generally, half-jokingly annoyed, but still…) “I already found you.”  “I already have you.”  “I don’t need you.”  “What good are you.”

And so I have these realizations.

The first is that words are so powerful.  Even when they are rooted in nonsense, a fabrication, meaningless, sometimes we grab on to the words that people say so much more than what is behind those words.  Part of me really enjoyed hearing people so excited to see me, people wanting to know my name.  This part of me didn’t at all care why these people wanted to.

That stupid little button and the scavenger hunt as a whole seem like a pretty good metaphor.  There are all sorts of ridiculousness that people want to know us for.  There are all kinds of meaningless reasons  that people act like they’re excited about us, when in fact they are just using us.

Conforming to society’s expectations to what counts as attractive, that’s one of the most obvious buttons.  Having some form of power, status, or wealth.  We want to be seen with these people, or we want to use them for what they can do or what they can get us.

As stupid and meaningless as it was, if somebody had asked me if they could wear my button, I would have given it up rather grudgingly.  I don’t believe I’m alone in this, the idea that I’d rather feel important for foolish reasons than feel unimportant for the right ones.  I count it a blessing that I was able to take the button off and leave the scavenger hunt.  There are some buttons that don’t come off, some scavenger hunts that don’t end.

The accordian

I am no great lover of the accordian.

 

If you forced me to sum up my feelings about the thing

into just one word

I’d probably settle

on “dorky”

 

I was therefore surprised

to find that the thing

is actually quite a symbol

of Life Itself.

 

Have you ever noticed

how isolated elements of life can feel so familiar

when taken one by one?

Yet somehow

thrown together, taken as a whole.

They just feel so strange.

 

I am not surprised by the existence of war

or my daughter’s sweet kisses.

I am not surprised by the smell of patchoulli

or the flavour of success…

Until I think about the fact

that they all inhabit the world together.

 

And the humble accordion.

A Frankenstien’s monster of a thing.

A keyboard torn from a piano and turned on its side.

thrown onto a bellows of a  blacksmith.

and some buttons thrown on the other side for good measure

wielded by the sort-of kid

they put a “kick-me” sign on the back of

in movies set in the 1950’s.

Who would concoct such a thing?

 

The notes themselves

if you just listened to one or two

these would be in explicable

except for the clear assertion that they are not music.

 

If you chose a moment, two moments

out of my life.

They, too, would be inexplicable

except for the fact that they are not music.

 

When you string those notes together, though

well sometimes

sometimes it is still not music.

But other times?

other times, it is.

 

There are times that the accordion is stretched out so wide

that I think it is has expanded to fill up the size of the world.

And there are times at that is compressed so small

I wonder if it would fit in the back pocket

of somebody’s lederhosen.

 

The MacBeth’s Washing Machine

Wooshtup. Wooshtup. Wooshtup.

You out-of-balance washing machine,

You agitated agitator.

You, you come around

and around and around

to the same things again

and again and again

I didn’t see it comingI don’t deserve this

I gave him the best years of my life

Wooshtup. wooshtup. Wooshtup.

For years

We all watched and we all new

that you both stopped loving each other.

It was in our eyes

and his eyes

and in your eyes

that

it was coming to

this:

Woosh-tup Woosh-tup Woosh-tup

I see you rear up on your corners

like a wild animal trying to break through a square, metallic cocoon.

I see that if you are the washer then he is the dryer.

There is smoke–

Is that smoke? coming from the laundry room of your matrimony.

Did anyone, in all those years of marriage,

Clean the lint trap?

wooshtupwooshtupwooshtupwooshtupwooshtup

The Ineviabality of Cannibalism

It is not a bodily consumption

that I am engaged in

it is something subtle

insidious

universal

built into who we are

built into what we are

That is why it has taken me these thirty years

to agnowledge this truth:

We eat the dead

And,

 we eat those nearly dead

and,

 all of us are nearly deadWhen I exist

 

in the mundane

details,

when I am a politely

chattering member of civil society

I compromise with Truth and settle on this image:

There is a teeter-totter

and there is me, on one end

and there are The Parents on the other

Gradualy, these things slide impossibly up the incline:

Strength, hieght, wieght, wisdom, words, wealth, power, control

 I

 do not know when the balance shifts

I

 know only that suddenly,

 

half a life-time later

I am looking up at them:

and they are:

weak,

small, dumb, mute, poor, powerless, out-of-control

When

 I was a school-aged boythe up-down up-down up-down metronome monotony of the teeter-tottergave way to a playground version of Russian Roulette:

 

a show-down/stand-off:

who

will jump

off first?

My parents jumped off,

Dead.

My child took their place

Nothing changed

except that everything changed

Something primal betrays me

Something primal begins to crawl out of me

defying gravity and peeling paint faded of color

What I am

enters into him.

My gradual ascent

my gradual return to where I began

commences