why you were left alone so long only the spinning world would know. by now. you know it hurts looking back. you made friends easy and what friends. a formula for trouble and trouble looks like anything but trouble at first.
Tag Archives: memory
reading #72
(from) memory
journal #
i would never see Drama alive again. i came back 5 months later from rehab in Oregon, to claim him. they said he had been struck by a car at an intersection not far from where the our mobile home had been. i buried the poor little guy up in Martinez, in the hills. i felt terrible. but all the nightmare i lived over the previous 4 years, was over. i had been beaten, downtrodden, and become willing to let go of all my old ways. i resolved to live differently, to live right, if only i had a chance to live again…
diary
journal #
i was so very sick when i awakened. i was addicted. my unemployment had run out. i was living off of food stamps and the kindness of strangers. i was lonely, hallucinating, scared. i was searching every day for my cat who ran away. our home was a tiny trailer on a truck bed in Richmond, near the train tracks led to Oakland and the San Francisco Bay. i rode my bicycle slowly, calling out for little Drama on the surrounding streets. the only responsibility i had anymore was my cat and myself. and he was the only one who loved me anymore.
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| brothers drama and shy |
(re)telling the story
i can clearly recall my awakening. it was over five years back and i was close to street homeless. i remember the date, 12.12.12 and how some had attached to it an apocalyptic forecast. i was living in my friend’s truck and very alone. i was full of powerful feelings and fears. i was dreaming again of my family and better days long behind me. i was getting high around the clock, for i was addicted to methamphetamine and could not escape. i used it alongside the psych meds i had been described for anxiety and depression. it had become my medication. the allostasis in my mind was severe. i heard voices through walls. my depressive moments lasted long and deep. i was unkempt but i had access to laundry, electricity, food, and water. i had witnessed crimes on the streets and been assaulted and manipulated more times than i could count. i knew a dangerous dead end romance like i knew my middle name. much of my energy was lost to hypervigilance and traumatic recall. i feared people and economic insecurity. i listened to am radio talk shows like they were my only friends…
poor memory
projection of poor memory
You taught me how to survive. I taught you how to thrive. The tables before were turned, and I experienced a deep despair like the world no longer could care…even someone who feels forgotten will be remembered by someone they may have overlooked. I wonder if the feeling of forgotten is a projection of poor memory? How then to enrichen and coax the narratives into a kinder recollection?
a prayer. #archive 2015
i want only to live my life and let you go, please, may i have the courage to walk away and wish you well, healing and happiness and all the things cash cannot buy. no matter how many phone numbers are blocked, hurtful text messages deleted, email addresses registered as spam; no matter how many doors i lock and photos i delete and letters i recycle, nothing changes unless i settle with myself. yes i am branded, yes i wear your imprint on my heart. and how can i regret, what with all the goodness you gave me before we fell out? those moments in love were unbelievable. i am incredulous, shocked, having lost you. years have passed and still you find a way to me. to hurt me some more with the painful rewriting of our history. please forgive me, but i must for my spirit and forever walk away from you. when i remember you, i promise to try and remember when you were the greatest. we were the best and for a second. no one will remember but us, the flash the spark we were and then were over. and now i say goodbye. and i love you.
loss two
another loss -ii
We stayed up all the night long tradin’ EDM cuts and smoking, and kept mostly quiet about all the damage our exes done us, knowing in our hearts the damage we done them, too. This here was as close to the street as I ever got, out of luck on the room I had paid for every week for several months, (someone had spotted my cat and complained, again, pets were not allowed) with the half-promise of a room in West Oakland, from the mouth of a corrupt attorney with one foot in the dope game and high all the time. I had no other recourse, none at all! This was twenty eleven. I had only to be willing to scrub and paint a small room full of furniture and covered in multiple cat stank, and I could stay there for the summer. This was the house of a second attorney, an alcoholic moonlighting as a cat doctor at home, who got in over her head on Magnolia by DeFremery Park. The day I met her she asked if I wanted to make a quick buck, and walked me downtown while instructing me how to serve papers. I remember hesitating as I approached the window, a government agent behind glass, and looked back to get a nudge on from under the wild gray-hair, permanent slouch, and a wandering eye. She offered me a drag off her pint of Southern Comfort on the way home. I was fifty bucks richer, cash, and desperate. My unemployment had finally run dry in this boarding house on 28th @ Telegraph, telling time by Kojak episodes, and my friend whom I shared a room with finally got sick of me or spun out, and bailed. By that time I was already sharing a bed with a punk I met, upstairs, and not around much anymore. On my bicycle most of the days, a Motobecane i had mail-ordered online several months ago, and always brewing pots of some of the finest grounds from Indonesia I procured from Sweet Maria’s down the way, a local coffee distributor a stone’s throw from the Port of Oakland. Didn’t have a job and wasn’t really looking most of the time. PTSD was my common denominator, and divided up my senses, hanging them far and wide by the neck, until dead…
in my twenties and thirties
i was the kind who got kicked out of bars for mouthing off, demanding attention, who wandered off and misplaced myself in different American cities, found myself thirsty, dazed and alone some afternoons, in alleyways woke by the sun, after nights i would rather have forgotten but stand in my memory still … yet i could always find refuge in the nearest public library or local reading room where the silence could be so loud, you could even hear fingertips striking keystrokes to the tune of the turning of pages, and there in the warmth of centuries of collective wisdom could i manage to wonder how am i alive? there must be a God or the spirits of my predecessors looking out for me, i am so blessed and cursed, i am … my twenties and thirties were absurd at times, my natural privilege did not always work for me because i convinced myself i oughta earn anything. of course i held a job down most of the time and was responsible about rent and stayed mostly out of jail. i was neither thief nor leech on to another’s good fortune; i mean i made and paid my own way. i was often in a relationship. i thought i was in love a couple of times but in the end i wouldn’t work for it, i wouldn’t make the sacrifices and maybe, just maybe, i did not want to be loved. i was critically self-centered and bursting with pride as i walked solemnly toward my next humiliation. i think i wanted to be punished. back then, i was not interested in god.
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| Shine cafe in Sacramento. photo by K |
circa 09.01.2011
09.01.11
The truth is confusing, the confusion is disturbing, and reality does not give a damn. My heart holds vacancy for the life of them. and you. Still to attend to the sky in its entirety. Sea. The depths grow green to Royal blue. Where all lies over exposeD in a happy residue. Off center in allostasis. From the residual, extract the amplification. Subtract from that all that you already know or believe. The tattooed kneecap. the hair weave. The eyes tell of suffering behind capri ankles. The wrist-roll up to three quarters a sleeve. The honesty cannot be found from infusion thereafter. She was left to floats on water boiling. Like a poached egg. Then arises Thick, like crisis in love. Then arises as vapor- Clear
