Take The Picture Now

So Much For Sorry

takethepicturenow — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 07:12:28 +0000

They say they can’t drive and that they’ll have to stay at yours, in your room, in your bed. You don’t stop them, but you tell them you know exactly how this will end up, and they nod and agree like they understand what you mean, but they don’t read between the lines of your cracked lips. You see, you’ve been writing this story and that lets you invent new pasts to arrive at this present under the pretense of your very own future perfect tense. And they’re smiling, and you smile back with rows and rows of teeth ready to tear into them, because they think they want that smile and your chapped hands all over them, but they don’t know that this is a goddamn shootout and you never take hostages. And they’re still smiling, but it’s getting harder with your tongue in their mouth and they’re saying your name or something close to it, but it doesn’t really matter because this is just what you do. You try to leave people as wrecked as you are. You see yourself in every sigh and set of heavy shoulders you create. And you want to say you’re sorry, but you know sorry won’t cut it, so you keep your chapped hands all over them knowing that come morning they’ll be born again broken and you’ll still be the same.

On high

takethepicturenow — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 19:18:23 +0000

A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar, and the priest is crying, he’s at the only pulpit he can find. All the saints I know are dead. You tell him you know something about loss and the miracle of a body of memories that just won’t rot. You’re wearing your halo and its burning above your head, scorching the ceiling, a fever you haven’t felt for years, and you’re another misused martyr in a dive bar. The rabbi is mourning. I’ve never even met my messiah. You tell him you know something about waiting and the difference it brings between having faith in someone and what they say. You’ve been here before and you’re trying to swallow the only thing you think can bring salvation, but nothing poured over ice has ever been a successful candidate for transubstantiation. This priest is holding on to an old promise that his savior will be back and the rabbi wants to meet his redeemer, and maybe like you, they think they can find them here, and maybe like you, they think they are the same person. A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar, and their problems meet yours, and you tell them. If Christ was a carpenter, then maybe he built his own cross.

Soap Box Opera

takethepicturenow — Wed, 25 May 2011 19:00:36 +0000

Look at us sweetheart, you’re sandwiched between a new pair of arms and I’m in the kitchen cooking you two up bacon and stories. Let me tell you a new one sweetheart, wait, can I still call you that? It doesn’t matter now, I’ve already done it and you can’t take it back, but here, I’m feeling generous, take it, put it under your pillow and see which one of your friends comes at night for it and crawls into bed with you, tells you you’re beautiful and leaves your broken in the morning. Sometimes I feel you can hear what I’m thinking, and when you listen you wish you couldn’t. You’re falling apart at the seams. You’re looking for everyone who isn’t me. I blame myself for all of this because I’m vain, because I like being the martyr, because they say Saint Sebastian took credit for every arrow that broke his skin. I’m sorry sweetheart. That’s what I’m saying, but you know I confuse sincerity with the sound of my own voice. For the record though, sorry for saying these things, sorry for calling so late, sorry for thinking I could rewrite history with a bic on the back of a receipt. You remember that old story: four score and seven minutes ago you left me bruised and bleeding forget-me-nots and I thought I could change it through trail and error, shock and awe, but we know I’m no mountain mover. I said there was a new story somewhere in here sweetheart and I guess I lied, its just the same one I’ve been telling but with more car crashes and explosions, dramatic pauses and slow motion. If this new pair of arms is so great though, let them write a better one, I can lend a bic and the back of a recepit. We’ve all seen the words they leave you, what some would call love notes, but it’s just daytime drama at best, cracker jack copy at worst. But hey, who I am to judge? Look at me sweetheart, I can’t even write you a new story. You’re a needle skip in a record I can’t forget.

Scatter

takethepicturenow — Tue, 24 May 2011 08:10:35 +0000

This is a story we’ve all heard before. Trees and the smell of gingerbread in the air. Birds eating breadcrumbs show us where we’ve just been, birds eating breadcrumbs show us that we’re lost. The path ahead spells out disaster, but we go on ahead. In the story that we’ve all heard before, a witch wants to eat us. She thinks that youth lives in the bones, beauty in the muscles. In my story though, that witch isn’t as wicked as we thought, just lonely and mourning a loss, and she shows us the way home. This is how it always goes, like in the story I tell where I’m your lion killer and there in nick of time swinging my sword and you’re seduced and swooning in my arms, but you know I’m the only lion here, just a Leo and a kitten at best. Remember the one where we were slamming cupboard doors and breaking dishes, and I was yelling This is the only thing that will ever be real and I don’t know why but you agreed and we ended up on the table, on the couch, on your bed, and we were crying, crying and smiling: never happened. If it did though, this would be the part where we were finally happy, where we got what we deserved. That is the beauty with these stories though, we can tell them however we want, and we keep telling them, we keep believing them, we keep ending up in the same photos together, we keep believing this is real.

Sleep on it

takethepicturenow — Sat, 21 May 2011 16:00:23 +0000

It’s that dream again. You know the one with all the honey and grandfather clocks, and time is ticking in viscous strands. The sky is falling but its all papier-mache, just spit and newspaper, your sweet nothings and I told you so‘s. I’m holding your hands and you ask for them back but I hide them. You think I gift wrapped them and put them in the mail so they can surprise you on your doorstep, but it’s all rain, snow, sleet and hail here. You’re getting colder. You think I swallowed them so I could make a knuckle sandwich joke, and now that you mention that I wish I did. You’re getting warmer. You look down and see that I’m wearing your hands and you know I did this so you could feel what it was like to be me, but these dreams aren’t about empathy and cheap world play. They’re about you, they’re always about you, you in motion, you descending a stair case, you smashing into me. You can be anybody here in my dreams, anyone I wanted you to be, but you are always you. Your angles. Your vectors. Your wheeze. Coarse breath against a cup of coffee and a stack of pancakes. We’re at your kitchen table and I’m holding your hands, but this time they’re attached to your arms and I like them better there, thats where they belong. The food is getting cold and the coffee is counting down the minutes, but there will always be more coffee and pancakes, this though will be gone if we snap the freeze frame. You know I’m a big dreamer and this one right here is the biggest I’ve had yet, so let’s start boiling water and beating eggs into Bisquick, let’s never wake up.

The complexities of candy bars

takethepicturenow — Thu, 19 May 2011 15:05:24 +0000

He said that he loved her, not because he truly did, but because she had the exact change he needed.

If only we were saints

takethepicturenow — Sat, 14 May 2011 15:00:16 +0000

Here is a map laid out on your chest, capitals and clavicles, a finger finding the nearest highway and taking it all the way home. You, my firefly, slurring Sadness is a weight. And you keep saying that, but what has it ever meant? You take my hand and put it on your breast, and I take a piece of you closest to that real estate zoned for a heart and other miscellaneous concerns, and place it on the scale in your bathroom balanced between the arms of Christ on his cross which marks the distance we crossed to arrive at this silent night, holy night. I weigh this trembling piece of you against the proof of everything you drink, the crystals arranged in powders and pills your friends claimed were salvation, the clammy hands of bartender boys and all their ironies arranged in perfect performances mashed against your lips, and all of this tips the scale down deeper than the black box buried at the bottom of my stomach where I keep all the stories I can’t tell you. We both think we’re so right, so damn holy, but we have no idea what those words mean, how they taste or where they go after we say them, but that doesn’t stop us from ringing bells and banging pots until we get our wings. We both think we are saints, but saints don’t keep secrets, saints know how to pray without their lips and lies.

It is a new day

takethepicturenow — Sun, 08 May 2011 01:40:11 +0000

You are in a new bedroom with clothes piled on the floor and a TV that doesn’t work. You are lying in the bed, you are lying on your side, you hear water running, you hear dogs barking, you focus on the one delicate strand of light coming in through the window. It’s a new bed and a new day but your muscle memory remains and you go through the motions which are instinctual, which are carnal, which are for someone else. It’s a beautiful day, but you’d never know if she didn’t tell you, didn’t touch you, didn’t run her hands hot and burning across your chest leaving scratches that whisper. This is morning. This is the first day of your new life, like it or not. Breakfast won’t be on the table and the coffee isn’t ready. You want to go home, to your own bed, but you don’t get that, you get this bed, this morning, dogs barking and that water is still running. You keep waking up like this and you don’t even know where your own bed is anymore. Home is where the heart is, and in that home there is a bed where you think you left your heart, at least you’re praying hard that it’s there because you can’t keep retracing your steps and getting it wrong and slamming into brick walls and new bodies trying to find a way back to her, but you’re here now and whatever you have beating in your chest is giving its soliloquy and it’s as trite as a sunset or a picnic on the beach or a long walk on a short pier or whatever you’ve been told love is, so maybe this is home for now, maybe this is just what you need. You are in a new bedroom and it’s morning and the TV doesn’t work but you keep staring at it like it’s playing your favorite movie and you recite all the lines to her and she thinks you’re clever but what does she know, what do you know, what did you ever really know besides how to kiss a little harder and just what to say to end up in a new bedroom with clothes piled on the floor and a TV that doesn’t work.

Respiration

takethepicturenow — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 07:12:33 +0000

These are the hands that cut the through steam that filled the shower. These are the fingers that held the pen that wrote the words, the hope of a key that could open the lock, the distance between tick and tock, hook and sinker, ear to the speaker. These are the lines traced into paper, the sentences in a note, vectors to viscera, traumas in stanza. I attempt, I endeavor, chocolates, books, a letter. I try my best, I crack and fracture, a fissure, a canyon, a gorge, a gouge, a wound: rupture, rapture, stitch and suture. I inhale, I hold my breath,I was there, manifested and wanted. I exhale, I expire, I am here, moisture on a mirror, steam in the shower. I am a lamb to your slaughter, a fish out of water, you’re the cream that got the cat, the water off a duck’s back. I am falling into your gravity, and your gravity is beauty, and your beauty is an equation, simple arithmetic, add, subtract, carry the one thing I lost, dot the i’s, and dot this map at a place called now, this is my destination, my arrival, a four year vigil. We are here. We are never going back.

In which things are spelled out

takethepicturenow — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 10:00:22 +0000

The girl with the perfect teeth is holding herself next to me, and I know I’ve seen the tongue behind those teeth somewhere before, in someone else’s mouth. I say someone else’s tongue like I can’t quite place it, but let’s stop playing around, it’s your tongue behind those teeth, and the more I think about it, the teeth are yours too. So we have this girl, and she is right next to me, and since she has your perfect teeth and your familiar tongue, I pretend it’s you. I don’t tell her this of course, it would ruin the moment, and so we go on, her body pulled close to mine, out of a need or a desire or a genuine ignorance of what would come next, the way I’d get her home, my hand on the back of her neck, pulling or dragging her into me depending on what angle you were looking from, fingers wrapped around her hair: did I mention her hair was blonde? Well it was, and it’s not quite your hair, but in this light anything is possible, so for the sake of argument, let’s just say it’s your hair too. And with my hand there, she’d be into me, she’d have nowhere else she could possibly be, and she would honestly, swear to god, think that she wouldn’t want to be anywhere else, wouldn’t want anything but these hands on her, over her, inside her, my body slamming into her like a car hitting the center divider. Is this really what we wanted? To find out that the one’s who want us aren’t always the one’s we love, and the one’s we love don’t always want us. Tragic, trite and clichéd, but it’s all true, you and I, we’ve made it that way.