Another Not Original: I miss ideas.

"When we take things apart, we get to the center."

spit and soda crackers.

Not An Original

Dallas Clayton:

LOS ANGELES PROPER

Your apartment
reads just like your blog:
found objects and beautiful images
of people you admire
and so much time spent
arranging them neatly
into a tiny space
that you don’t even own.

windmills

Scribbles

I'm downstairs by myself.
You're one floor above me and
occupying a separate altitude.
The lamplight throws shadows harder
than the blows that fell off your hard lips
throwing punches with your tongue and
the shadows like my company even
when you do not.
The hours of night walk laps inside
my bones and I pass miles just
by sitting still;
If only it weren't in
the wrong direction.

Story Telling

Today he tells the nurse he is in a Sigma Chi dorm room in Fayetteville.

The white columned fraternity house bears little resemblance to the

Flat, brick exterior of the building where he lays on a twin bed that folds in the middle.

Yesterday, he was in an army barrack at the end of WWII.

He never answers the nurse’s question, “Mr. Robertson, where are you?”

By reading the letters stenciled on the sign over the clock –

The Presbyterian nursing home.

There is always an association made in his mind

With something familiar from the distant past.

The present doesn’t exist for him anymore.

To him, I have stopped ageing, on the days he remembers my name,

And other times I am a visitor he squints at in veiled concentration

As he asks me about the weather in Excelsior Springs, Missouri

He wears a plastic wrist band like a concert goer waiting on

mixed drinks at the seedy bar of a smoke filled venue.

But this band sets off alarms at the end of either hall way.

There is no risk of him escaping to walk naked down the side of the highway.

If nothing else has killed my grandmother yet, that would.

He does not know why he is here.

The stroke that left him with a bloody chin that dripped

Down his worn, white t-shirt beneath

the bathroom sink is not an event

That registers in his available memory.

There is only the day before, when he spent the night in the pleather chair

Beside his daughter’s hospital bed in a cold cancer wing,

And today – finding himself in a room with an echoing air conditioner

And a shower outfitted with metal handles and emergency call button,

Wondering, perhaps, why a fraternity house has so many walkers and wheel chairs

Parked in the hallway.

If I visit him, he does not know I was here an hour later.

Often I use this as an excuse not to go and watch him

Diminish with the age he had kept an arm’s length away for years.

His black hair turned ashen over night,

and his cheeks have since sunk into the bones of his face,

A collapse that coincides with the confusion of loss of memory.

He does remember when my grandmother’s waist

Would have spanned the length of my forearm

If laid out flat, and the dog named Charlie Beagle

That bit people and frequently peed on the avocado green living room rug.

And he remembers my mother as still alive and occasionally

Looks to me and asks how Susan is doing.

Once, my grandmother took his hand and told him, calmly,

“Bob, Susan is gone,” and he stared at her, expressionless, and answered “Oh,”

As though that explained why she never left the hospital

And why he could not spend the night beside her anymore.

The next day, he asked her how Susan was, and my grandmother answered, “fine.”

My memories of my grandfather as he was mix with the man

Who stares at the TV and rubs his hands together, agitated.

I want to remember him as the man

That drove a white Buick as big as a house boat

With automatic, adjustable seats I could slide forward and backward

Even when in drive and he never scolded me for distracting him,

Just hummed songs I had never heard

And complained that my grandmother drove too slow.

He would take me to McDonalds to get the Disney toy and then

Let me spend an hour in blockbuster choosing three new releases
I would take and watch all in a row,

And he would watch My Girl with me and take his glasses off

To wipe tears out of his eyes when McCauly Culkin died of bee stings.

These are the things I find worth remembering.

Now, at 25, he asks me the same questions every time I visit:

What year am I in school and who am I dating.

He is able to calculate his conversation to convince visitors

That he understands who they are and what day it is.

And we want to believe him – that the seizures he has three times a year

And deliver him to the hospital in an ambulance

Are diminishing. That his brain is healing.

When weeks go by without seeing him I chastise myself

Wondering how I would feel were he already dead.

My grandmother visits him everyday but still harbors the resentment that he

Never had to deal with the death of their daughter by

Mentally checking out of the reality we deal with and that frustrates like

The line at the DMV or a jar of pickles with an untwistable lid.

My grandfather left two weeks before the morning she passed away

In the hospital room.

And it makes me question the amount of stress a human body can handle,

And if I’ve inherited the blood clots sitting like bombs in my brain,

If my memory is slowly waiting to abandon me the way

His abandoned the present and the way my grandmother feels

Abandoned by him.

I hope that when my memory goes, I can live like he does,

Preserved in the belief that everyone I love is still alive

And waiting down the street for a phone call.

The possibility looms before me with the promise of a life that can be started over,

A blank slate every morning where I will never again have the wherewithal to question

Why a nurse comes in to my dorm room to tell me it’s dinner time at 5 o’clock every day.

Records

First Draft: Spring 2009: Little Rock

Domesticity bores me the way broomsticks
bore the backs of closet doors.
Monogamy tires me like a tilt-a-whirl
that doesn't tilt or like bathrobes
worn as a substitute for ambition.
I grow weary of the rules.
They flake away at my resilience like
sand on the sphinx,
like winter on Napoleon's army.
I crave a collaboration.
An end to vacuum cleaners and clothes
I shouldn't wear.
The schedules are now defunct:
Three meals a day
Bills due every first
One kiss after breakfast
Be restrained.

I'm ready for a rebellion.
To not put away my laundry.
To drink coffee after midnight.
I touch things I've owned for years
and wonder if they feel the
difference in my fingers that
you do. How my prints have arched
their lines to encompass
everything. More than mop handles
and grocery carts. More than light
switches and fine stitched embroidery
on pillows. I'm ready to collect dirt
under my fingernails.

Frozen Things: Draft One: College

The frost on the windshield gathers thickly in sheets and I stay
occupied in exhalation, white breath expanding like storm clouds
inside of the car, the steam rising from my hot lungs and throat.
This is the morning: frozen power lines, birds gripping the crisp
branch of a wire, threading the world by a voice,
circuits and sockets, the dry grasses pushing mortar
through cracks in the sidewalk.

I dig my hands into pockets, tighten my toes round the clutch,
there are things to be thought about:
mathematics, life in a cave, the damp walls
dripping with the absence of water, of life;
I am alive in the shadows.
There are things to be carefully considered like
what shall I cook for my supper and did I eat enough
for my breakfast: crumbs of toast, melting jam.
Frost faces staring back from a car at a stop light,
the desperate action, quarter turn to the left,
soft push on the pedals, restraint.

I wanted you to be here, this time.
a warm mouth in the morning heating
my cheeks and my lips, the blue cavity I take life in through.
December to January, there is no difference between
the falling of snow or the frost of a night freeze,
each blanketing my body inside of my bed,
alone under covers, clenching the case of a pillow
inside my red fist, wanting, wanting.

originaly just a paragraph, almost six years old.

this is called: unloading your clothes at the goodwill.

I handed your shirts in stacks,

the slight warmth of your body

still clinging to pilled fleece and fibers.

we cleaned your closet out in one fatal blow –

ordaining the racks of a thrift store with

designer jackets and heels,

cracked leather running shoes,

your black pants with the strawberry print.

It feels like I'm stealing from you,

giving your clothes to the poor.

Creating space between each of dad's polos,

an entire bar devoted to hangers.

I look for you in your bedroom behind the door,

speak to the wire mouths of empty hangers,

the carpeted floor where your bare feet

stood to pick out a shirt every day.

They only tell me you

don't live here anymore.

A Rebuttal

I have a relationship of convenience

With my toaster oven.

With spatulas.

Whenever I need cheese melted or cookies scraped

From a pan, I know that small appliances and

Hand held utensils have my back.

I don’t need Pottery barn or Williams Sonoma

To make me slovenly as house cats

Luxe is not my style.

But convenience – yes.

I have a relationship of convenience

With frozen entrees and my cell phone.

It’s true – I use them.

But they like it that way.

My blender will do whatever I say

And I’m never concerned that dish detergent

Will play around behind my back with the laundry soap.

I could be a luddite, or Mennonite,

But why inconvenience myself if I don’t have to.

I like that I don’t have to wake up at 5AM to feed my car

In the dead of winter.

This relationship is low maintenance – a lube job

Whenever it starts feeling neglected,

But I knew that when I signed the contract.

So why this negative connotation with convenience?

Because I love him and he is comfortable as

Worn socks and helpful as a toothbrush,

This means our relationship is bad?

So what if we’ve broken up twice before,

I was always taught it was ill advised to shut and lock a door

If you left your keys laying inside on the foyer floor.

And I prefer houses I’ve already lived in rather than trekking out

And climbing fences, falling into a briar patch

Is not pleasant. It hurts.

I’d rather stay where I fold my shirts and follow a routine.

I’ve tried on other boys but none fit in the shoulders without

Stretching the seams.

Besides, they were all just an interim between

Our arrivals and partings.
And I know, that in nature, only vultures

Circle things that are dead, but nature

Doesn’t have microwaves or water heaters

So the comparison is misapplied.

Because I like the convenience of things.

But I know they are only a bonus

And I could live without things that plug in and blink

When my food is ready

But while he is convenient with screwdrivers and rearranging furniture,

I couldn’t be ok if he weren’t around.

I could live without a blender.

But probably not him.