The Birthday Balloon

The Birthday balloon
seeps air. Slowly,
it falls. Empty.

Histrionics

She had the face of a silent movie star,
all moon-eyed and sepia.
I could never tell if I was the
Hero or
the Heavy.

I put on some swell performances--
crummy ones too--
but she seemed to believe
them all.

Or maybe she just
wanted to be in pictures.
Everybody wants to be in pictures.

All I know is I needed a girl.
Nobody wants to see a picture show
without a girl in it.
That’s rule number one.

I twirled my cane and laughed.
She held my arm.
The editor was to cut
between us strolling along the deck and
the waterfall ahead of us
plunging down
into the rocks.

We pretended that when we’d
get to the brim we’d just keep floating,
beyond the edge, into the sky.

Two quotes and a poem by Rimbaud

These are absolutely true to me.

"The two hardest things about writing are starting and not stopping."
-Stuart somebody

"A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and finds endless ways to squander it."
-Don Delillo


Novel

I.

No one's serious at seventeen.
--On beautiful nights when beer and lemonade
And loud, blinding cafés are the last thing you need
--You stroll beneath green lindens on the promenade.

Lindens smell fine on fine June nights!
Sometimes the air is so sweet that you close your eyes;
The wind brings sounds--the town is near--
And carries scents of vineyards and beer. . .

II.

--Over there, framed by a branch
You can see a little patch of dark blue
Stung by a sinister star that fades
With faint quiverings, so small and white. . .

June nights! Seventeen!--Drink it in.
Sap is champagne, it goes to your head. . .
The mind wanders, you feel a kiss
On your lips, quivering like a living thing. . .

III.

The wild heart Crusoes through a thousand novels
--And when a young girl walks alluringly
Through a streetlamp's pale light, beneath the ominous shadow
Of her father's starched collar. . .

Because as she passes by, boot heels tapping,
She turns on a dime, eyes wide,
Finding you too sweet to resist. . .
--And cavatinas die on your lips.

IV.

You're in love. Off the market till August.
You're in love.--Your sonnets make Her laugh.
Your friends are gone, you're bad news.
--Then, one night, your beloved, writes. . .!

That night. . .you return to the blinding cafés;
You order beer or lemonade. . .
--No one's serious at seventeen
When lindens line the promenade.

I misunderstood this poem. I thought it was about being 17 and getting drunk and trying to get laid. I guess it's about the way I should be living my life rather than the way I actually am.

Jigs Brown Remembers...

Mickey. I used to play euchre with Mickey and William Demarest on the lot at Fox and he would never shut the fuck up about all the tail he was getting. Ava Gardner. Mickey Rooney was married to Ava Gardner. That tells you everything you need to know about this world we live in. Ava Gardner, he'd say, tastes just like Sweet Potato Pie. Then he'd talk about how Olivier called him the greatest American actor and we'd say you know, Mick, he was being sarcastic. Olivier is the kinda guy who won't let anybody near a stage whose half as good as him. He'd never give a straight compliment, there's always gotta be a little poison in it.

Lousy partner Mickey was. He'd go alone and end up with two tricks. Mick, I'd say, what the Hell'd you go alone for? He'd say he thought he could make it.

He thought he was pretty hot molasses in those days but boy the world sure beat him back down to size, didn't it? He hasn't made a picture worth a hoot in 20 years. If he ever did.

Ugly man. Short. Bulbous. Just goes to show you in this business you never know whose got the dream stuff. Lotta great looking, talented people never make it outta the background and here's Mickey, little turd with stringy hair, a marquee name. It's a mysterious business.

Shorts

There are ladders growing
from the ground
like telephone poles.
Climb to the sun
Climb to a cloud
Climb to the smog
Climb to nowhere.

*

Music is no longer
a fist
It is an open palm
petting your hair.

*

There are no grails here
Only red plastic cups

Where I Work

It's a long corridor, a hallway to nowhere, with a window at the end facing a wooden fence. Our apartment is a commercial space between a Karate Dojo and a Mercedes Dealership ("Just like us" I tell people, although I'm not exactly sure what that means). It once was a coffee shop, although it was meant to be an art gallery, with lots of wall space and hardwood floors.



I wouldn't write about it otherwise, but I feel that I have an uncommonly good workspace, which, unfortunately, means that isn't usually conducive to work. There's more pressure because I can't make any excuses ("Uh, my roommate wouldn't leave me the fuck alone" "The guy next to me wouldn't turn down his fucking headphones").



I used to write in Coffee Shops (Luck Bros. in Grandview Heights, Ohio is a great one) because as David Mamet brought to my attention, if you sit around the house all day writing people will wonder what the hell you're doing, how come you're not out at a real job, but since my brother was kind enough to let me move in with him and he's never home, I don't really have that problem.



It can be a very lonely place. Sometimes I feel like I'm sitting at the end of a gun barrel. Sometimes a birth canal.

The Wine Key

His desk was an emerald city of empty wine bottles, with one serving as a vase for a long dead rose. All the water had been sucked up or evaporated and the stem was stiff and crooked but still had little pricks and thorns sticking out.

He was not picky about wine and had an unopened bottle of 2005 Australian Shiraz ($6 at the gas station) sitting next to a plaster effigy of a religious figure. He couldn't tell you who exactly, but his Uncle said it was St. Joseph, and people commonly buried his statue in their yard if they wanted to sell their house. He took the bottle into the kitchen but couldn't remember which drawer the wine key was in because it was one of those utensils of very specific purpose, but vague genus and species. He looked in the silverware drawer, but it wouldn't be in the carefully shaped trinity of slots in the tray and he didn't see it in the little trough next to it where the wooden spoons and ice cream scoops and spatulas all ended up. It wasn't lurking underneath with the saw-toothed knives and graters. He looked in the drawer with the utensils made for bigger jobs; ladles, cleavers etc. and amongst the add-on pieces for various electronic apparatus' (beaters, blenders, bowls), but he could not find the key.

Wine Key. What an appropriate name! he thought. It unlocks a whole other world to you; A world of squashed grapes and finely chosen adjectives, of breathy, poorly thought out declarations of love, of headaches; A world of years or centuries of dirt and rot and wisdom.

He didn't know how on earth one would open a wine bottle without a key. It seemed like a fairly dumb business decision, to only sell wine to people who could afford a key, but then he thought the cheaper wines all come with the more user friendly twist off cap. Could he bite the foil seal off? By god, he might have no alternative. He picked up a steak knife and thought about the logistics of prying the cork with it. He figured he could probably push the cork down to bob in the purple sea if he had no other choice. He looked in all the drawers many times hoping the key would appear, even the ones filled with phone books and take out menus and rusted batteries. Maybe he could just break the bottle off at the neck, like they did when they christened a boat, and carefully decant the wine into a separate container, an empty vase or an old milk carton.

Then he spotted his brother's tool box laying on the counter. His brother collected arcade machines and their living room was something of a workshop where he Frankensteined old Ninja Gaiden cabinets to Bad Dudes joysticks and Street Fighter II: Turbo motherboards. The toolbox was open and he saw the spiraled metal probiscis of the drill sticking out.

He grabbed the drill and pumped the trigger. The bit squealed and spun around and he felt joy rush through him. He pressed the tip to the soft cork of the wine bottle and the drill ground through with ease. He popped the cork out with a deeply satisfying "thunk" and took a swig.

He opened the cabinet to find that all of their glasses were dirty. They didn't have any proper wine glasses, but their commemorative Muppet and Wreslemania cups were all in the sink brimming with a green stew of who-knows-what-refuse amongst the pans and stink of rotten tuna. He looked in another cabinet and found a measuring cup with a stout. He took it down, poured himself 100 mL of wine and went back to his desk.