While I was Dying [Day 358]: Theatre

In the theatre, while waiting – silent
and watching the show alone,
not a single person came up to me.
There was a time where this would have
been the bane of my existence, the
persistent gnawing of wanting, needing
people with me and against me / their
fingers clawing my wrists.

In the theatre, I watch the show full of
figures, could be lovers, and imagine how little
of it really makes a difference, how my entire
life has been a long string of wanting, wanting,
pleading acceptance for the boy who didn’t get
any and still needs to prove to himself that
someone, somewhere will always want him.

I walk through my days mostly alone, in the way
that is never depressing when you’ve forgotten
the language of solitude. I do not push them
away as such, but covet bodies so much less
in the only and alone of winter.

I go to a show alone. I eat lunch alone. I teach by myself, and find myself alone when the students fly by night. In the apartment alone, and late nights of writing with only my own voice for company.

Once, I imagine, this would have broken me. No warm bodies for company, no cold bodies for pleasure. Even my own fingers do not explore knowingly – this, too, is a luxury I’ve absolved. The phone is dead silent.

In the theatre I watch the show and think about my body. But between scenes, I watch the audience. I discover the pageantry, the false peacock of me, me, me that clouds the air – the eyes.

I am in the theatre all by myself, surrounded by a hundred other people.

In din, I hear my own voice.

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While I was Dying [Day 357]: Stranger

I know
when we met
we were
strangers.

In many ways
we still
are, will
remain.

If I wrote about the first time I saw you, it would go something like this –

On stage,
in a whirl,
and backstage later.

It did not
take me long
to ask you out.

When I heard through a mutual friend that you’d been taking other hearts to bed, the bruising formed a ring around my chest. This, I thought, is like gunshot. This is Joan of Arc. This is how to make your heart a funeral pyre.

It’s not hard, when you don’t really respect yourself, to make a mating dance out of carving rituals. I could never find the knife against my skin and, believe me, I have practiced the art of emotional cutting too well. I know the worked grooves and strange needles of want – searching for stories to press like pin-points against my skin and breed blood.

When I found out he’d had you against something in a dim basement all of me quivered for a flicker of a second.

I didn’t really know you in the first place. And anyway, you didn’t really want me to get to know you. It takes years to love someone, and you never could teach me the language of your tongue to make us fluent.

You are a dream, and one I will not soon forget. You are a testament to my fantasy.

I can’t lose what was never mine.
I can’t fix what was always broken.
I choose love.
I love love.

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While I was Dying [Day 356]: Countdown

I have said “I love you” more in the past two weeks than in the last five years of life.

I have cried, and lashed out, and been vulnerable, and confronted so many of my inadequacies.

I have sat in cars with people and held hands and watched them cry and cried myself and felt their warmth and wondered about myself, and the too-bigness of everything.

I have given up things, and learned to love silence, and wanted new wantings, and found myself in the beautiful art unraveling.

I don’t know what this is, or how these people got here, or where the other ones are – but we held each other in our arms tonight and said I Love You like we were the last two people on earth.

Every moment of this journey I realize more and more how little I recognize myself in the mirror. I miss the things I was less than the thing I’m becoming.

Find me, willing.

This will be over in the blink of an eye.

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While I was Dying [Day 355]: 50 Told Me

go ‘head, switch the style up –
and if they hate, then let ’em hate,
and watch the money pile up.

(K. West – Good Life, 2007)

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While I was Dying [Day 354]: Here at the end of the Ocean

We are always authors, I think.
We must learn to love our words, and our stories, and fear the power of our storytelling.

I know you are awake in the ebb and flow
of your waves – the wave crashes down
on the moment, revealing a jewel.

I know you think you can control the
jewel – produce, rotund, its firmness
and work the polish like fire.

But still, sitting in the room with Rob
he mentioned something about organic
that is still on my mind this night.

And I told Marcea – the story you do not
want to tell is the story you need to
tell – my point is that the telling

is the act, the cognition, the piston –
but just a part. Recently, I’ve had
to confront a very long story in

my own life. Heartbroken, it is ending.
In moments like this, it seems so many
things are ending, particularly the

fish I have been trying to save from
drowning. I do not know what to do for
these moments except love, fully.

The water fills my throat and the story
is choked away by time and expectation and
want and – as the day draws to a close

I remember how pure the straining voice,
how deep the current runs,
how whole it is to ebb away.

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While I was Dying [Day 353]: Cathy

Once a week I see Cathy on the third floor.
I have never tried to sleep with Cathy,
and I thank God or chance
that she even exists in my life
to remind me what it is to
love someone with all of
yourself and never
touch.

Being good to her,
and good with her,
is the strongest test
of will I have ever
experienced. When people
describe how good the random
hearts and stars in the night
sky can be, they mean things like Cathy.

I wish I could be like you, Cathy,
with all that love in your heart.
I’ve never seen anything as good
or as noble as your smile and
it breaks me apart that
I’m even allowed in the same
space as you.

When you see me next week, you
will smile and you won’t ask about
any of the things I’ve done. You will
take my hand gently in yours and ask about
all of the other people – all of the other
stars in the cosmos of your love
and sweetness and desire.

Cathy, I will remember our time on the
third floor, and the lines on your
palm until the moment I die.

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While I was Dying [Day 352]: Be kind

for everyone you meet is fighting a tough battle.

I know we are all collections of spirits. I believe in the past life, that the old man and the black dog and the wood oak have lived through me.

Today, though, it is not my past lives that burn in the fire. When, broken, we sit in the diner with only our own hurt – she is good to me.

She is better to me than most.

Taking my hand, she reminds me of the asking, and the taking, and the body. She tells me just how my fears mirror hers. How do you take them? And what will it mean? And how are hearts so callous?

When, even, I tell her about my deepest shame – that I am like a sick beast of burden when I get lonesome – she is understanding.

He told me earlier this week that the amazing thing about weakness – if you tell people what you hate you’ll often find them despising the same.

So, today, I am a penitent convict.
Hoping for good days.
Loving like the first breath.

I am grateful and humbled and only here through the grace of the arms that have picked me up in these moments.

Present, and alive, and bruised, and here.

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While I was Dying [Day 351]: Why I gave up

1. Eating meat

I’d wanted to give up meat since I was a little kid. Anyone who knows me knows how far-fetched that concept seems. I subsisted on a meat-atarian diet for about 20 years, and yet here I am – nearly 3 months into a vegetarian diet.

I eat so much better than I used to. I am happier about it, living closer to my vision of myself, and feel a lot better about going out to eat with people (even if it’s sometimes hard to find a food option!)

2. Soda

I went on a hard-core water binge when I lived by myself in Muncie two years ago. And there I was – knee deep in the old soda habit late last year. I started drinking a lot of soy milk after I quit meat, and that made things a lot easier.

Mostly, I’m just glad to be away from it. Sticky, sugary, and altogether gross.

3. Facebook

Because I have trouble with self-control. Zadie Smith really turned me around, but at the end of the day I just wanted to feel more connected to people. I hated feeling like a piece of data, and I still do. I don’t think our communications are meant for everyone, and I want to cultivate that truth.

Some decisions you don’t look back on. I haven’t regretted this one for a second. If you want to talk/skype/call/email – I’m here. But I need to talk to you, and you need to talk to me.

4. Twitter

Because, people, I AM WEAK.
I replaced Facebook with Twitter, and I can admit that. At the end of the day, it falls prey to all the same pitfalls – and so do I. Not enough moments in a life, and not enough of them spent making my real life better.

5. Tumblr

Because we will do things that prove we hate ourselves until we stop doing them. Some stones are better left unturned, even if you think you want to know – you don’t.

Leaving tumblr meant making the harder choice. I’m trying to live, incidentally.

6. Pornography

Because I value men and women. Because the re-wiring of the brain makes me nervous. Because the week I quit I asked someone out, and was rejected, and learned how to take chances. Because I would rather be shitty at sex and honest about it than have learned everything about intimacy from a computer screen.

7. Sex

It was indiscriminate and ugly. It was like The Days of Wine and Roses bad, folks. I liked myself less, everyone else liked me less, and I realized that I have an insatiable and powerful appetite for taking. So yes, I tell myself no every morning. And every time I walk down the hall. And every time I go to dinner. I tell myself no a million times a day because if I don’t I lose myself in myself.

Today I am trying to be more than my want.

8. You

“It is the curse of an addict to chase the thing that destroys you.”

– Shane Hawley (Wile E. Coyote – 2010)

“Dear Lord come save me,
the Devil’s workin’ hard,
He probly clockin’ double shifts
on all of his jobs.”

– Kendrick Lamar (HiiiPoWeR – 2011)

I woke up today as an addict.
I will go to bed tonight as an addict.
My addictions do not give me strength,
overcoming them does not give me strength,
I am a man dealing with circumstances within
my control – I am the spirit trying beyond,
beyond the body.

Tomorrow I will wake up.
Tomorrow I will forgive myself.
Tomorrow I will pronounce my own name.

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While I was Dying [Day 350]: Cross

This is how the morning went.

The song is dinging in the background – quiet, french. Maybe swedish.

Everything is melting. We are all thawing out.

And in the rush, while my body is hot with clothes I should not have worn – too heavy, too old – it is hanging there.

A single white cross hangs off the lowest branch on the tree. I stop.

I am kneeling beside the tree. My face is in the bark, dirt and bloody. I am praying harder than I have ever heard before. The singer’s voice is like a mantra, and this is holy.

Beneath the dead limbs, with the cross hanging over me, I ask Jesus for everything he has. To take hold of, to transform, all of this cataclysmic nothing I feel on this morning.

I pray for everything to blow away, and to feel whole again. To heal the swollen bruise that was the night before. To teach me how to love simply, and honestly, and all too well.

I ask him to please crack me open and let the vulnerable spill out. That someone, somehow, will know my heart better than this silence.

And they are all watching me at the bus-stop – the boy with wild hair and grass on his shoes and mud on his knees who is praying, praying, shouting so deeply within himself.

The cross hangs over me like the man I could become.

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While I was Dying [Day 349]: I would

cut off my right arm to be someone’s lover.

(J. Lekman – If You Ever Need A Stranger [To Sing At Your Wedding], 2004)

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