portraiture

I am now, and have always been, a disaster. Impulsive, volatile, undependable. Selfish, loutish, brimming with unyielding rage. I’ve never been able to hold a job or sustain a relationship, seldom grateful for a blessing, quick to hold a grudge in the petty vise of my heart. Thirteen years ago this October my father died, a few months after my mother broke her hip and was stuck on the floor of her house for ten hours before she was able to drag herself to the door to let help in. After a few months of commuting back and forth, I moved back to my childhood home in a town I despised and had left happily behind, ostensibly to “help” my mother. I was 41 then, I’m 53 now. The last twelve years have been a steady descent into deepening depression and madness, punctuated by a few daily routines and occasional chores. No one who knows me speaks to me without anticipating some sort of outburst of rage and vitriol, and no one who loved me hasn’t learned to regret it. I am a deficit now, as I have always been.

None of this is new. I haven’t had a good time since my early thirties. My mental illness and personality defects have remained largely untreated, self medication and unhinged furies taking the place of therapy and medicine, and other than a patch of group home work where my stubborn ability to hold the line and ability to take a punch proved assets, I have been an unmitigated burden upon the world. I lack direction, talent, and ambition. My long term plans usually end in suicide, and almost every time I awake I am saddened that I am still at it, even though we all know my particular jig is up. As the nations of the world race to extinguish life on earth, I’m here wishing I had something to smoke while all you jolly partisans burn your houses down from the inside.

I think I had a mild cardiac event earlier this evening, overcome with nausea, vertigo, and a cold clammy sweat. I haven’t dropped dead, unless I’m continuing my streak of crummy narcissism and gaudy verbiage into some baffling afterlife, but I feel poorly enough to be hopeful. As I write this, I’m sitting on the toilet thumbing the keys on this iPad, ignoring the little pains in my chest and left arm, planning on a shower before I crawl back into bed. All my aspirations are dead, no romance, no written legacy, no cabin in the woods. I am a fat, bald, diabetic without the illusions necessary to sustain the momentum of a life. I close in a cold sweat, dropping a note for some posterity that never asked to hear from me. I doubt I’m dead yet, but it feels like I have a shot at being gone. It’s not the sort of assurance I hope for, but it seems a turn for the worse on this long awful downhill slide. It’s no bullet to the head, but for the moment it is the feathered thing I am holding tight.

slump

It is the busted blue weight of this sky too early for all the other starlights, the long shadows and ghost town gutters, the shoulders slung so broke and old. It is the screams shook loose by the humdrum bass line and the fizzle jangle of the feedback guitar, earbuds boarding up the building. The weary reportage from a place torn by the wars to come, the high hill above the bent of time where the roads offer up their journeys, a bitter mouthful of smoke and oaths. The backbone backs down, and the high point shrinks into the rear view mirror, this listless passage gutting the husk. The day ends in smug punctuation and the scent of burning flesh. The coffee is still warm and goes down strong and slow. The calendar says there’s no more homes to go to.

The wind skates the pavement, slips the brickwork, fills every crevice with its long restless broke tooth tongue as it sweeps and swaddles, a lavish passing and a spill of flies. Traffic glides by as the day grows old, the hint of mingled means and seasons as the summer leans on the leaves. Hunched over this trash heap with bug skittered skin, all reason given only to sweat and ache. Dull in the clabbered atmosphere, the perceiver a slow sinking, the story of drowning as told by the fathomless depths. Despair in a shady patch, an anatomy of all ending. Clothes stick and billow, depending on the position and the breeze. A flag knows no direction save the way its blown. No clever name, no fitful description, just the beaten in your bones.

Maybe there is a letter, maybe there is a meal. Maybe you line up with the world according to your wants and local topography, the day breaks and you know what to do. The daily trespass and the old soft shoe might do, there’s no telling what people might be. What is there worth the telling, what is there that makes you stay. The tautology of the bilious palaver, the countdown of the hit parade. The nothing always has its fill, the grip a slipping rictus, the fall a long slow draw. Too much and not enough. The walk of shame, the dwindling of the light. The same old song breaking like a neck.