Near Fantastica .com - February 2007 Manifesto

February 2007

A Few Lines For Lovers

The last time played
The film, your story told
The stranger shadowed
So awkward and unaware
You knew so little

There was a time when the seasons ran
Colours so quick of firm description
And truth kissed your life
Automatic and assured

But tonight forbearance beckons
In the small hours I founder and quake
The child discarded may have been of another
That I knew nothing of
To cover her tracks
Only days after I took the ring

364 Days And This Morning

Dear San Diego,

A year ago today I was speeding north up Interstate 5 through the wilderness of California, the sunrise spiking my eyes like needles, like the gruesome images of hands and legs and feet come off bodies and thrown in piles outside some field hospital.

I didn't stop until Bakersfield for gas, for coffee, for long enough to stare at a payphone next to the toilet and wonder if I should pick it up. I would do it again in Fresno, Redding, Medford, Eugene, and so on up - but I never did.

I woke up this morning to an empty apartment. Parker's been in San Francisco a lot lately, so it's just me and Mr. Cushions and the alarm clock coffee maker that, no matter attempts to reset it, always goes off at exactly 7:43 every morning. I have no idea why she doesn't replace it; I have no idea why I haven't mentioned it to her.

I guess I'll check the mail this week being that the papers are due to arrive to notify me that she's filed. I left a voice mail on her phone some weeks ago in a drunken stupor telling her where I was and how she could reach me so that we could finalize things. Hanging up, it was bizarre to think that I hadn't spoken to her in person for what now seems a lifetime, and only on the phone as recently as the early summer. During that last conversation she was her usual impersonal self, altogether bent on extracting blood, on squeezing every last ounce out of me that she could. She said that she was in love, that she had met someone three weeks prior and that she wanted to settle down with him and have his children. She felt the same about me after she left the fellow that she had discarded perhaps a month before we met, years before. She was waiting tables at the time and he was leaving her flowers and notes pleading with her and she was painting him to me as a lunatic, just as I am sure I am being painted a lunatic. Like me, she discarded the chance to start a family with him, and like me he became little more than a means to an end, transportation from the back roads of some shit kicking rural town to a job at a trendy eatery in the city where men ten years her senior could be enticed by her body and face and offer her an ever greater escape from the past that embarrasses her.

By 8:02 I have a cup of coffee in my hands. I stand at the kitchen sink and drink it and look out the window and try and take stock of my life. I thank the powers that be that I am not ill, homeless, or trapped in a land of conflict. I thank them for bringing me here and letting me drop my hands, knuckles to the bone, for the first time in decades.