Super 8

Twenty four years ago
my best friend and I
were standing outside our school,
waiting to get our class schedules
but really looking for girls,
one that I had liked had looked
at me and said "Francis,
your father is here", and I
turned, looking behind me,
and a priest was behind me,
his black robes absurd in the summer heat
and I laughed.

I have to remember to tell my son this someday:
when you're sixteen years old
life moves like a Super 8 movie,
it jumps and skips
and you look away and look back
and you're someplace you never expected
to be,

Five months after this day it was
cold again and I had left my best friend's house,
my clothes packed in suitcases in his garage,
it was dark and he was going to bed,
I snuck out a side door and walked out
up the neighborhood,
a few blocks away was the junior high he'd gone to,
I walked around it to the baseball field,
the dugout was a bench, aboveground,
protected by a chainlink fence,
I laid down on the bench,
the fog rolling in, diffusing the light,
I held onto myself tightly
and waited for the night to get colder, colder.

Pluto

My exwife parked in the middle of her driveway and I can't fit in, I drive up the corner of the driveway, across a trapezoidal piece of concrete where the trash cans go on Wednesday nights and stop, blocking the driveway. 15 miles from here is the house I grew up in, in this spot outside of this house my father poured the concrete, it is still there; he poured it on my third birthday. I don't remember this. I know it because I've been there recently, the trapezoid is still there, he engraved the concrete when it was still wet, our names, the date, our handprints. We've been here. We've terraformed this small space, marked it, temporarily. I don't remember it, but we were here in the late spring of 1972.

This is what I'm reminded of. There are no markings where I've parked. What marks this house is the mail in the mailbox, the toys in the front yard, ephemera, I knock at the door and my son comes out, he's been given an electric scooter and he asks me to assemble it for him, he gets tools for me, it takes 10 minutes and he asks me to watch him as he rides it up and down the sidewalk. I want to leave but he wants to play longer. I watch him. I wonder where my place is here, my mark on the concrete.

These Things That Are Not Mine

Open air, cold on my face,
I'm awake but spinning,
around around around around
I know things:
this ground underneath me
is not moving
what my brain is telling me
is wrong,
try living with that knowledge
when all you know is what your brain
tells you
how far can you shake
your faith and still have it?

What is it that you live by
when everything's gone?

I tell people I trust my brain,
my reason,
but the reality is that
I'm happiest when I jam the
signals from my brain
over all frequencies
long wave, short wave, microwave,
and let the angels take me

Confidence Interval

We were laying together afterwards, her leg curled over mine, her head resting on my shoulder, sleepy, I pushed strands of hair off her face and kissed her forehead lightly and she rolled away from me. I pulled my hand from underneath her and rested it first on the small of her back, then, closing my eyes, beside her hip, curling a finger around the string of her underwear. She stirred, still facing away from me.

"Why do you always do that?" she asked me.

"Do what?"

"Hold onto my panties like that when I sleep."

"So you can't leave me in the middle of the night," I said.

"I'm not going to leave you," she said.

"Don't be ridiculous," I said. "Everyone does."

"And you think that that's going to stop me if I do?"

"No," I said. "But it's all I have to hold onto."

What If The Steak Was Shaped Like A Cow?

Just to refresh your memory:

I hadn't talked to you in nine years
and I was with my friend drinking one night
and we text messaged you
and you blew it off, (you tend to do that)
and that was okay,
I sent you an IM a couple of days later
and we started chatting, at our desks
four hundred miles apart with the world
going on around us,
sneaking a conversation into the margins of our day
over a technology that will probably be obsolete
by the time these words see the light of day,
but the technology is unimportant,
none of it is really, I bring it up only to remind you

That it was early on a Friday and I invited you out
for a drink for happy hour and you pointed out
that I was four hundred miles away and I asked
how soon you could get to an airport
and we worked through our day and I bought you
a plane ticket, and five hours later I was waiting
downstairs for you at baggage claim wondering
whether we'd even recognize each other,
and you had a couple of mojitos at a Cuban place
close to the airport, you sat against the wall and
I looked at your hair in the candlelight, your flight
home leaving in an hour,
you wanted me to kiss you when I dropped you off
at the airport, but that too is unimportant,

And so is the next time I saw you, three weeks later,
when we went back to my house and I opened the door
and wheeled your bag in, sitting on the edge of my couch
and you leaned against me and I kissed you, the door still
open, your purse still crooked in your elbow
the sun setting outside, and suddenly gone and us still on the
couch kissing, and hours later still on the couch and the light
of the rising full moon through the window and in your hair
as I looked at you and leaned up at you to kiss you kiss you again

None of it important probably.

The important things were maybe the things we knew that we
hadn't told each other yet, the things we didn't tell each other
the next time we saw each other a month later either, which turned out
to be the last time we saw each other for a couple of years, the things
that were scarring us

But then again, maybe not.

I'm not the person to judge these things, I live my life inside small containers,
a pack of cigarettes, a bottle of beer, my skull,
but I know this, I know it:

However far apart life takes us, that happened, it was real,
and we were alive.