Crush (2 page)

confidence

but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,

while I'm out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,

and getting stabbed to death.

Okay, so I'm the dragon. Bid deal.

You still get to be the hero.

You get the magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!

What more do you want?

I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you're

really there.

Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?

Let me do it right for once,

for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,

you know the story, simply heaven.

Inside your head you hear a phone ringing

and when you open your eyes

only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.

Inside your head the sound of glass,

a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.

Hello darling, sorry about that.

Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we

lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell

and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.

Especially that, but I should have known.

You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together

to make a creature that will do what I say

or love me back.

I'm not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are
not

feeding yourself to a bad man

against a black sky prickled with small lights.

I take it back.

The wooden halls likes caskets. These terms from the lower depths.

I take them back.

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.

Crossed out.

Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something

underneath the floorboards.

Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle

reconstructed.

Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all

forgiven,

even though we didn't deserve it.

Inside your head you hear

a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you're washing up

in a stranger's bathroom,

standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away

from the dirtiest thing you know.

All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly

darkness,

suddenly only darkness.

In the living room, in the broken yard,

in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport

bathroom's gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of

unnatural light,

my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.

And the the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view

of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.

I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,

smiling in a way

that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,

up the stairs of the building

to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,

I looked out the window and said

This doesn't look that much different from home,

because it didn't,

but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.

We walked through the house to the elevated train.

All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful

mechanical wind.

We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,

smiling and crying in a way that made me

even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I

just couldn't say it out loud.

Actually, you said
Love, for you,

is larger than the usual romantic love. It's like a religion. It's

terrifying. No one

will ever want to sleep with you.

Okay, if you're so great, you do it—

here's the pencil, make it work . . .

If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window

is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing

river water.

Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it

Jerusalem.

We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not

what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,

a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over

and over,

another bowl of soup.

The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.

Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of time.

Forget the dragon,

leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.

Let's jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,

in gold light, as the camera pans to where

the action is,

lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see

the blue rings of my eyes as I say

something ugly.

I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,

and I don't want to be the kind that says
the wrong way.

But it doesn't work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.

There were some nice parts, sure,

all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas

and the grains of sugar

on the toast,
love love
or whatever, take a number. I'm sorry

it's such a lousy story.

Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently

we have had our difficulties and there are many things

I want to ask you.

I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,

years later, in the chlorinated pool.

I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have

these luxuries.

I have told you where I'm coming from, so put it together.

We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . .

When I say this, it should mean laughter,

not poison.

I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.

Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.

Quit milling around the yard and come inside.

II

Sunlight pouring across your skin, your shadow

flat on the wall.

The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.

You had not expected this,

the bedroom gone white, the astronomical light

pummeling you in a stream of fists.

You raised your hand to your face as if

to hide it, the pink fingers gone gold as the light

streamed straight to the bone,

as if you were the small room closed in glass

with every speck of dust illuminated.

The light is no mystery,

the mystery is that there is something to keep the light

from passing through.

A man walks into a bar and says:

Take my wife–please.

So you do.

You take her out into the rain and you fall in love with her

and she leaves you and you’re desolate.

You’re on your back in your undershirt, a broken man

on an ugly bedspread, staring at the water stains

on the ceiling.

And you can hear the man in the apartment above you

taking off his shoes.

You hear the first boot hit the floor and you’re looking up,

you’re waiting

because you thought it would follow, you thought there would be

some logic, perhaps, something to pull it all together

but here we are in the weeds again,

here we are

in the bowels of the thing: your world doesn’t make sense.

And then the second boot falls.

And then a third, a fourth, a fifth.

A man walks into a bar and says:

Take my wife–please.

But you take him instead.

You take him home, and you make him a cheese sandwich,

and you try to get his shoes off, but he kicks you

and he keeps kicking you.

You swallow a bottle of sleeping pills but they don’t work.

Boots continue to fall to the floor

in the apartment above you.

You go to work the next day pretending nothing happened.

Your co-workers ask

if everything’s okay and you tell them

you’re just tired.

And you’re trying to smile. And they’re trying to smile.

A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:

Make it a double.

A man walks into a bar, you this time, and says:

Walk a mile in my shoes.

A man walks into a convenience store, still you, saying:

I only wanted something simple, something generic…

But the clerk tells you to buy something or get out.

A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river

but then he’s still left

with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away

but then he’s still left with his hands.

A Primer for the Small Weird Loves

1

The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater

because he is trying to kill you,

and you deserve it, you do, and you know this,

and you are ready to die in this swimming pool

because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means

your life is over anyway.

You’re in the eighth grade. You know these things.

You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know how to do

long division,

and you know that a boy who likes boys is a dead boy, unless

he keeps his mouth shut, which is what you

didn’t do,

because you are weak and hollow and it doesn’t matter anymore.

2

A dark-haired man in a rented bungalow is licking the whiskey

from the back of your wrist.

He feels nothing,

keeps a knife in his pocket,

peels an apple right in front of you

while you tramp around a mustard-colored room

in your underwear

drinking Dutch beer from a green bottle.

After everything that was going to happen has happened

you ask only for the cab fare home

and realize you should have asked for more

because he couldn't care less, either way.

3

The man on top of you is teaching you how to hate, see you

as a piece of real estate,

just another fallow field lying underneath him

like a sacrifice.

He's turning your back into a table so he doesn't have to

eat off the floor, so he can get comfortable,

pressing against you until he fits, until he's made a place for himself

inside you

The clock ticks from five to six. Kissing degenerates into biting.

So you get a kidney punch, a little blood in your urine.

It isn't over yet, it's just begun.

4

Says to himself

The boy's no good. The boy is just no good.

but he takes you in his arms and pushes your flesh around

to see if you could ever be ugly to him.

You, the now familiar whipping boy, but you're beautiful,

he can feel the dogs licking his heart.

Who gets the whip and who gets the hoops of flame?

He hits you and he hits you and he hits you.

Desire driving his hands right into your body.

Hush, my sweet. These tornadoes are for you.

You wanted to think of yourself as someone who did these kinds of things.

You wanted to be in love

and he happened to get in the way.

5

The green-eyed boy in the powder-blue t-shirt standing

next to you in the supermarket recoils as if hit,

repeatedly, by a lot of men, as if he has a history of it.

This is not your problem.

You have your own body to deal with.

The lamp by the bed is broken.

You are feeling things he's no longer in touch with.

And everyone is speaking softly,

so as not to wake one another.

The wind knocks the heads of the flowers together.

Steam rises from every cup at every table at once.

Things happen all the time, things happen every minute

that have nothing to do with us.

6

So you say you want a deathbed scene, the knowledge that comes

before knowledge,

and you want it dirty.

And no one can ever figure out what you want,

and you won't tell them,

and you realize the one person in the world who loves you

isn't the one you thought it would be,

and you don't trust him to love you in a way

you would enjoy.

And the boy who loves you the wrong way is filthy.

And the boy who loves you the wrong way keeps weakening.

You thought if you handed over your body

he'd do something interesting.

7

The stranger says there are no more couches and he will have to

sleep in your bed. You try to warn him, you tell him

you will want to get inside him, and ruin him,

but he doesn't listen.

You do this, you do. You take the things you love

and tear them apart

or you pin them down with your body and pretend they're yours.

So, you kiss him, and he doesn't move, he doesn't

pull away, and you keep on kissing him. And he hasn't moved,

he's frozen, and you've kissed him, and he'll never

forgive you, and maybe now he'll leave you alone.

At first there were too many branches

so he cut them and then it was winter.

He meaning you.
Yes. He would look out

the window and stare at the trees that once

had too many branches and now seemed

to have too few.
Is that all?
No, there were

other attempts, breakfasts: plates served,