flog - freewritelog

Tonight I breathe shallow

I held fire in my hands today.
Two propane canisters that I had
stored in an army artillery box
had slowly leaked
throughout the box and onto
my other plumbing supplies.

Propane rusts
unlike any liquid or gas
I’d ever seen.
It bubbles as it corrodes.

The influx of oxygen,
as I opened the artillery box,
ignited it in my hands.
I quickly closed the box,
disbelieving the perversity of
my magic.
I opened it again.
The box ignited again.

Bigger and hotter.

This was evidence for those
who say sequels aren’t better.
I threw the box on the cement,
scattering the contents and
quickly unraveled the garden hose
and doused the flames.
That was three hours ago.
I came inside, sat down and
hadn’t moved until
I started typing this.

Lightning hit a transformer

and knocked out the power at
my house for seven days last June.
I couldn’t make coffee, couldn’t
open the refrigerator, couldn’t flush
the toilet or take a shower.

I couldn’t watch television,
so I had to re-learn to watch
things that weren’t six feet
in front of my couch.
I watched the clouds
debride the sky into
this ugly orange pink mess and
I watched the rhododendrons
bloom their vulgar blooms as
a counterweight to that setting sun.

Obviously, I couldn’t
turn on the computer,
so I couldn’t write about it then.
The closest I came to writing
was when my nieces and I
ran around the yard and smeared
lightning bugs on our T-shirts,
trying to catch enough of them
to spell our names.

As always, she was there at the start of it

A few weeks ago, her youngest son
ran in the Boston Marathon.
She was not there to see it,
but she was there the day
that he qualified to run it.
She was there at the start of it.

Was there the night before the race,
when she and both her sons
drove by the first house that
her sons ever knew. Neither son
much remembered it, as the decades
have built different memories for them,
but they know the house and they knew
what it meant for her to see it
that night, before her son raced.

The older one did not dream of races.
He dreamed of experiences.
Of doing things.
Of being places.
And she was there to see him off
the morning he left home.
He’s been doing and being ever since
and she was there at the start of it.

And when they left for
Boston without her,
she did not say a word from hurt.
She knew that her sons were happy,
the oldest one being there and
the youngest one running;
doing both together and
she was there at the start of that, too.

The daydreams are never what you expect them to be

Watching her walk away
across the parking lot,
away from the bed, bath and beyond,
away from the old navy,
away from me,
I knew she’d be in my head
far longer than she should be.

I knew I’d be replaying that afternoon
as the on-demand movie in my head.
I had that fucker queued and ready to help
make my drive to Pittsburgh easier.

Should’ve known better than to trust
my technology; to trust a playback ritual
that I’ve not yet perfected.

Watching her walk away,
across the parking lot,
I would have bet pints of blood
that I would be daydreaming about
that ass or about those
fantastically exposed collarbones.

Not that inexplicable flash of cardinal
running through her eyes
when the cloud cover interrupted
the mid-day sunlight while we sat there;
laughing nervously face to face,
instead of confidently hitting “Send” and
ripping through the ether with false bravado.

And He's Everywhere, This I Know

One more day
has passed in the career of a
professional cubicle dweller
mildly relieved to be
working a four-day week
thanks to Good Friday.

Nothing extraordinary
happened today.

No life changing events,
to my knowledge.

Disregarding for a moment
the insistent meddling of
Jehovah’s Witnesses as a
traveling troupe,
I was glad to see that they
had been around today
while I was gone.

I came home with my
empty Tupperware lunch container,
which was now devoid of a
turkey and swiss on rye and
one apple sliced and found Jesus,
folded neatly in my door.

Because NOAA Tells Me So

The april snow
blanketed the daffodils and
crushed their
upward mobility,
but came as no surprise to
those not pulsing
with chlorophyll.

Oh, modern convenience!
Behold the DOPPLER!

I no longer
need heed
the carpenter’s tales
that my grandfather
ladled upon me
during childhood.

I need not listen
to those tales,
or to the rattle of bone
in my right knee,
despite the keen
ache of either.

I have satellites,
63,000 miles
from the dirt
telling me what
I already knew.

The agony of friends away

in cities like
Cumberland or Ogden
or San Francisco
is not the distance.

It is never the actual distance.

Distance can be
overcome and the internet
has murdered geography,
left it without breath and
staring upward blankly.

The agony of friends away
is that the pony express internet or
carrier pigeon cell phones or
smoke signal twitter can not
undo the silence.

The silence you get used to
because the distance is constant
and kills the spoken word.
The silence you get accustomed to
until you get bad news.
Until you feel helpless and inactive
and typing on a keyboard
wishing otherwise.

Her facebook page can only take her so far.

There’s a door to
the roof of her
apartment building,
which overlooks
the main street
downtown.

The door kicks open
from the steps outside
and she goes up there,
to the roof,
some evenings to watch
the people
walk up and down
the sidewalk,
aching to be seen.

She listens to
the traffic slow and
she listens to
the music from the bars
quicken and she
remembers the times
he used to take
pictures of her up here,
in the sudden
slant of evening,
while they
drank coffee that
had cooled
faster than
they did.

Education, Be Damned

Riding my bike into the blustery headwind
was harder than I thought it would be.
Those same winds woke me during the night
and carried into the early April morning.

From the safety of my apartment,
they’d sounded like they’d slowed.
Took my bike out on the asphalt path that
slices through the woods of Portage and
Summit Counties and found that the winds
had not quit. They had been lying in wait.

So I pedaled into those winds and labored
to bring any portion of them into my lungs.
Five miles seemed like ten and I hit
one last hill that crushed any unblown desire
to go further. I turned to head for home.

As I circled my bike and headed back down
that fateful hill, a cardinal flew into my path.

If I would have hit him,
it wouldn’t have been portentous and
neither was my not hitting him fortuitous.

I did not care for his regal plumage.
And I did not care for his latent symbolism.
His natural pride could kiss my ass and
his inherent hope and nobility mattered not.

I did not hit the bird, thankfully;
as even these winds wouldn’t have been able to
clear that regal plumage from my spokes, which I
would have been forced to do.

The Unasked Questions Are the Ones That Get You Every Time

There’s a split in
the oak table that he
made in his basement;
every board run through
the planer until each
was level according to
his eye.  

An actual level,
at that point in his life,
was a useless appendage.
Each board, once leveled, was
hand-glued to the next and
held together until dry by
parallel clamps that normally
hung from the floor joists
above his head.

The table was then sanded
and finished and given
to his daughter, which she
used to finalize
the papers of his meager estate
when his mind failed him
before his body did.

 
There’s a split in
her oak table that’s
grown wider in the years
since his death and
even though she still
receives mail
addressed to him,
that doesn’t wound her
nearly as much as
the split in her oak table does.