Friday Night
The dogs are barking again.
I'm sprawled on a heaping trash nest of clothes and towels and papers and plastic bags. I stare at the ceiling. I've been staring at the ceiling for hours. My ceiling looks like the moon's surface: sickly yellow-pale like old cottage cheese and riddled with craters.
Each bark is like a hammer blow to my head.
There are flies everywhere. My head is filled with buzzing. Blow flies and flesh flies and bloated house flies like black motors flying. They descend on the overflowing piles of trash. They dance in and out of the open drawers of the cabinets that lie upended on the floor. Everything in the room is crooked. The kitchen sink is clogged with stagnant ooze, where food chunks float on a sea of oily grease.
Someone runs above me, THUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMPTHUMP
and the dogs chase after them barking, yelping, baying like the hounds of hell.
Things moving behind me, things moving in the mirrors and in the windows. There are voices, like swarms of flies, the voices are needles drilling the buzzing into my skin, and there are thousands of them. It fills up the back of my eyes. They are talking about me, but I can't make out what they say.
The dogs are barking and barking and barking.
I’m standing on the table with a hammer and I swing that hammer over my shoulder and into ceiling. The dogs are going crazy as I bring the hammer harder and harder into the ceiling, punching holes, showering plaster on the carpet and into my hair and screaming face.
Have I been screaming the entire time?
Shouts from upstairs and I hear the neighbor's big booming voice as if he's right there in the room with me, “I’m going to fucking kill him!”
Stomping feet down the stairs, like an earthquake shaking my apartment.
I throw the hammer one more time at the ceiling, where it bounces off and thuds to the carpet, and I run into the decaying, stinking kitchen with the dingy lightbulbs and grab the wooden block of large butcher knives and carry it back to the door. I tuck it into my left armpit and my right hand lands on the doorknob like a distorted fly, separate from my body.
The pounding on the door intensifies.
The dogs are still barking. The room spins in a blurry funnel of colors and noises, and the neighbor is yelling something with his fists battering the door inches from my face.
The fly opens the door.
Black Dog
there are moments
at the mirrors edge
or in fullness of flight
perhaps on the porch
in dusk's dim light
the dust from toil
soiled on hands
or in that moment
as I crash to land
to forget (myself)
glimpsing a fragment
and holding sight
as if in grasping
for the night that
ebbs and slips away
then the dog starts up
at the end of day
always
Repression
There’s nowhere to cry in college
except silently in the dorm’s unisex bathroom,
crumpling onto the toilet like a wad of used paper...
wishing you could fall in and drown.
Sensing the tears bubble up,
You tilt your head back and squeeze your lids shut,
willing the hot brine to reabsorb
In vain.
You allow yourself one minute.
Sixty seconds to suffocate, stifle, swallow, silence sobs.
Then wipe away the salt mines from your ruddy cheeks
as you stare in the mirror at your pitiful swamp eyes,
wimpy lashes dangling haphazardly from the corners.
You hardly recognize yourself.
A haze of self-loathing fogs up the mirror.
The girl across the hall’s alarm goes off.
It’s 1 AM.
What the hell is she waking up for at 1 AM?
It’s a tinny, recorded sound of a dog barking.
Her beloved puppy from home, you imagine.
She doesn’t turn it off.
Guess she isn’t here.
Guess she’s at her boyfriend’s place tonight.
Incessantly
it barks barks barks barks barks barks barks barks barks barks barks
from the other side of a locked door,
brainwashing you as it rings in your ears.
Your exhausted mind throbs to the relentless repetition.
It’s even worse than the mocking pornographic symphony
of whimpers and moans
when her boyfriend stays the night.
Your tears shrivel up.
Fire broils in your belly –
that fire that fuels you through this misery of days.
Before you flush the wretched thought away with your emotions,
before you look in the mirror
and paste on another Ivy League smile,
you imagine suffocating the bitch.
Shutting the damn dog up.
Amnesia
Ghost on an ephemeral train ride
can’t understand words flitting by
universe dismantled - no spare parts
fleeting images of sepia ashes
landing place just out of reach
Ghost on an ephemeral train ride
compelled to roam on endless path
soul puzzle pieces on weary feet
can’t sample invisible sun imprints
a stranger crawling in through my skin
Ghost on an ephemeral train ride
smog covers indentation of existence
trapped in steel bars of unknowing mind
circling empty in the wind’s bluster
dancing through barriers of paper cages
Ghost on an ephemeral train ride
Wolves of prey howling for me
gnawing teeth on my psyche
I’m a downright stranger inside
shut jaws of damn wolf dog omen
before I lose faint glimpses of me.
Germ Warfare
For the first time since I was seventeen,
I woke up alone. You are gone,
and you took the children with you.
How can I ever get out of this bed again,
much less go downstairs, make coffee,
eat a banana, listen to Morning Edition,
take a shower get dressed go to work
smile say hello?
I can feel the emptiness in the house
without having to read your note;
I already know what it will say.
I can even see your bottom drawer is still open;
I must have been out cold last night.
By the end of the day, the neighbors,
my sister, my parents, your parents,
they'll all know you've gone. I will probably
still be in bed.
I will be abandoned. Left. "He left her" is
what people will say. She's separated.
What would I call it, if anyone bothered to ask me?
I read an article last week, about germs,
how they are everywhere, and you can't really
get rid of them
or really live without them,
and it made me think of all the other inferior species
that roam our lives: the dog that barks too much,
the cat that sheds everywhere, the rat in the walls,
the hamster who dies a week after you buy him.
But even a dog who barks too much is just trying
to tell you something, isn't it?
They use germs to kill other germs:
the anthrax of neglect, the sarin of indifference.
Taxes, birthday parties, working late, sick kids,
a whole life lived on the backburner
and eventually, through the constant shrill,
there comes a sudden and terrifying silence
and you don't even remember
what a dog barking
sounds like.
Biting dogs don’t bark
I'm a shape-shifter, a chameleon, without karma. I've survived everything that damned bitch has thrown at me. Life, that is. I don't believe in the spinning wheel, because it doesn't believe in me.
Yeah, fuck you, you're all ducks.
I got through life by changing, by adapting, changing my plumes to suit, singing the right tune.
Sometimes, I'm a cactus in a dune. Cowering, bending, but never breaking. Always going with the flow.
But my pet peeve (ha-ha): insolent yappy Pomeranians that constantly tempt fate. Yeah. Shut your dog up, or feel my wrath.
STOP THAT FUCKING BARKING, YOU STUPID FUCKING MUTT!
Oh my God, who am I? Yelling at the dog, for doing what dogs do?!
It's official, I've lost my mind. Pfft, who am I fooling, I lost it a long time ago.
And now I'm talking to myself. Might as well, no one else ever freakin listens.
Least of all that damn dog.
Who am I? My mother says I am her amazing, mature young person. My teachers say I am a responsible, quiet student. My classmates say I am a genius, or crazy. But, who am I really? I don't actually care that much for rules. I do wish I would let myself flirt. I don't love being alone as much as I say. I often want to yell back in class. I'm not sure I'm a genius. I am not as brusque as I sometimes act, or as friendly. Am I insane or just strange? Would I know if I was? When all is said and done, who am I?