Fifth In Line

Last Time

2011-12-04T13:21:00.000-08:00

II
After some finality, after finishing breakfast, after you are busy with your stories, yourself, you love you, when I am silent and you are left to solo activity, you primp, you convince yourself I am still in the same room.

Last of the Crises

2011-11-27T17:55:00.000-08:00

There is some peaceful, personal, active thing I think less and less about, but am followed around and crowded in by.

If I promise to visit, to wear a helmet or a warm coat or a warm loaf of bread, then?

If I promise to find out that fullness, to float up and bloat and bob because of it?

If I fan out the flames, to foment, to do to do to do, ta da!

I see you making faces. I catch you spread out across town, and not a bit too thin nor none too soon. I anticipate every necessary adjustment, every necessary inch of you, every glottal stop, every down and out.

Whisper me back to life and where no one else is or let in, leave it all that much more space.

Room

2011-02-23T23:42:00.001-08:00

In the belly of a bellow,

just past the halfway mark of winter,

our coughs and colds are less than daylong

and the heaving beast,

with whistling lungs,

with buckling, splintered legs

and shinier shoe polish camouflage,

creaks to a topple

to a wail of an out of tune crash of

too many voices.

Middle C is now Low D

and all the chords

are majorly mine,

piled in a puddle of cooling ivory,

stalling over sticky smudges,

popped knuckles rusted in place,

gracelessly getting to the next measure,

catching on to catching up,

off beat or rhythm, off key, out of tune,

out of time and town.

The dust alone dries out my voice,

and I cannot sing from the hoarseness

in a chorus, sing

in the absence

of Great Uncle Accompanist.

How did we get this knee deep

in scores, in piles of laundry and picture frames,

in the teeter tottering of imbalanced benches?

How did we get through the front door,

dead weight, wood, ivory, and Allah,

to suck up the space of a perfectly useful dining room

just to close the French doors behind us?

[retry]

2010-04-27T13:32:00.000-07:00

How to make this meaningful

and clearly about you -

These are not possible selves you like;

these are not alternat[iv]e versions of me.

These are pictures of impossibilities.

There is dressing up in your absence. There is too old now [for now].

Your skin is not milky or porcelain, paste or paper

or translucent.

(But it IS one or all. I’m choosing better words for you. You deserve).

You are stretched over yourself, your frame of face

and veins

Pointing the way,

Soulless, ocular,

To more gloss.

Your hair leaves no room for movement

Or scalp.

But you are a head in a jar with unattended, buoyant limbs,

Lacking power over their placement,

They float alongside more bobbing and bobbling

As you pass and pinball.

to Yours truly.

Inaccurate Assessments: Part I - The Rant

2010-04-26T07:42:00.000-07:00

I debate text message transposition. It is the year it is and I am indeed the least bit technophobic. I have grown into shutting down and out and, like my indulgence, have always tended toward it. I have prided myself on being stubbornly independent. I need no one and nothing, but my anonymous audience. Talking to myself has provided me with the necessary reprieve.

This brings me to inaccurate assessments. I am collecting feedback. I am not a day over 22, I am scary intuitive, I looked so cute last night, and I despise you.

I will be gracious, but I will not be demeaned. Somewhere in some book, astrology reminded me I do not forget any transgression or moment of pain inflicted by another. For me, it is like muscle memory. My body reacts. I will hold onto it for years and fling it back in your face in my defense. I know just the hurtful thing to say to you.

Inaccurate assessments: I am a hypochondriac, you are sick of my illnesses, and I always have something to complain about. I am your most high-maintenance friend.

Unofficial poll: You know one thing and it is that I am always entertaining. I have just as much to complain about as any other smart person. I am unattended.

I may tell you all about it, but I am in bed alone with all my sore throats, my low lows, the curveballs and inability to cope. I never ask for anything, but the opportunity to say it aloud. I never needed you. I have never asked. I am, for your own sake, just a drinking buddy.

I am increasingly aware of the melodrama. I pull back the reigns, shut down a little more, withdraw a little more, dim the lights, step back to observe, and am lonelier than ever. But loneliness has an undeservedly bad reputation. Any intended consequences or attempts to assuage my woes, temper my emotions, deserve a gentler and maybe more supportive approach.

Psychopathology Notes - The Poem

2010-01-24T18:55:00.000-08:00

Something ordinary done in an extraordinary way
-Coffee Now = Where are you going? When are you going?

A good paper is a done paper, a done paper is a good paper.

Don't rob Peter to pay Paul.
-Don't rob Margaret to pay Sally.

Stay away from medication-related research.

Breaking social norms
-Failure to launch

As Requested

2009-12-01T00:29:00.000-08:00

Welcome, december. jackets and canvas and wet warmth running around the corner of the open door to leave us alone, emptied. that is coldness and there is no single file. whether windows are sneaking in light. and the music is a collection of unfocused noise.

you’re welcome, gross thin feeling of insomnia and the fatness of trying to eat it to sleep. getting emptier. my soft soaking lungs. i pick up phones and know what is left for me at the end of the day.

welcome clothes and furniture and one in the same shifting like rugs, like slippery floors, like socks with holes and cold heals that don’t stick, don’t suction. from the bed, to the floor, to the bed. to the dryer. maybe to hangers.

welcome to where my knees don’t knock, stopped creaking, and moan. where the city is a different kind of collection. and i get bigger, softer. nondescript. i come running to get back at you, prepositions. to repeat odes. to american bento. and garb. repetition, and mistakes thereof. tell me ‘too far’ and you know what i’m saying.

All the Time

2009-10-15T23:19:00.000-07:00

All the time. All of it.

we celebrate the games we’ve played and we’ve played them well. We celebrate our celibacy. The first rented room is always the ruined kind. dead flying things, moths most likely, in the lights

face to the ground, roots under rocks, and looking at iron-nickel wondering if i could see its increased gravitation. i'm spending the last of my twenties making flash cards. this isn’t what matters to me, but what distracts me. i have broken down concrete concepts until they’re simple one liners. i use them now.

i put myself out there, in there, sweat into my hangover all over your bed.

Jared thinks in terms of Facebook status updates.

Jared is writing a series of self-help books:

“Jared Gains Perspective”

“Jared Works it Out”

“Jared Chooses His Own Adventure”

“Jared Busts Out a Low C in Choir”

“Jared Engages in Retail Therapy”

Ruled by thumb and the rule of

2009-07-23T18:24:00.000-07:00

I wrote this after living in Portland for one year. Now with one year left, it seemed relevant, even if outdated.

my sweat, my sweatshirt, my underwear

my back/pack, rubber/bands, my joni mitchell.

my staples and paper clips and adjustment to the safety pins. my push. my otherwise undeleted. my senate hearings, my weird, my weirdos, my men.

my advice columns and personal ads, my online shopping, my casual encounter, my casual romance, my casual relationship. my restaurateur, food snobs, beloved std.

my music, my misses, my cavities and candy, grammar, work-ethic, and cripppling inhibition.

my intentional misspellings, forward slashes, and self-conscious back/lash. my making of name and losing of voice and operating of phone and paying of bills to budget to back/stroke, to guilt, to guile. my fast/food, my drinking, i throw up, my rack of ribs, my cough and cover.

my shelter, my education, my expense and experience, my jazz and soundtrack, background and brothers. my three sisters, my three sons, my bicycle and impending impotence.

Anywhere

2009-05-25T00:12:00.001-07:00

You responded. Social networking sites have made us all think in terms of status updates. 2009 has ruined my writing and made any new poetry trite and forgettable. You think that’s perfect, but it makes sense. I added that to another list I’m not allowed to make.

Then I consider what’s relevant: current questions of great intrigue. Summer and sex are on everyone’s mind, and these questions have afforded me a certain amount of ridicule. To one close friend, my responses are pathetic. Another half-heartedly attempts to assuage my concern. Nobody cares about themselves more than themselves. I am smitten with me. I am the cutest couple.

And I depended on these same sights to see what mattered, to see where everyone was, at one moment. I found myself like the depicted insane in overacted old movies: pulling at hospital gowns, but only because I needed to see my shoulders, screaming slurs at no one, but blurry nurses and the potential for relief: the morphine drip. I didn’t want to seem a seeker, a term Jane had used in our last session. That was about the dentist and it seemed legitimate.

This was too played out, but I was 30 hours in without food or water and could only roll my eyes when she said “resident.” Then my nurse went on lunch and no one could find her or cared to come back to tell me. At some point, Jody was on the phone and I struggled to find the name of the hospital. I was anywhere.

There was an oblong rock rolling over in my stomach. I tried to sleep sitting up. I tried to drink water. I tried to look around, but everyone had work to do, work to go to, work to stay at and I had to keep my hand over my headache. I was anywhere, and I was the only one there, and barely so.

It's not always briliant. Sometimes it looks like this:

2009-01-20T20:33:00.000-08:00

Genesis:

Here's where I stand, here's where I stand to affect a bigger change, and here, then is my change. Nothing revolves, repeats, or is that revolutionary. This is not my coffee shop, this is not my tide, this is not my nagging colon, this is not, simply.

Exodus - Exit Us:

This is not simply put, this is not some hole, or whole, or gaping completion or otherwise ineffective prefixes. Regardless, it could not then be youth, or even something comparably tender.

Through Chapter 15:

I keep reading without saying anything out loud and I keep writing for an equally silent audience. Today I said it comes from a different place than speaking. One does not substitute the other. They are not complimentary, parallel, or even paradoxical. I will say I don't want to say these things out loud, and through my cryptic writing, I have a very public way of working out something private, while keeping it private. Today I thought I was brilliant, and follow suit.

Turns out, I care.

2009-01-05T22:32:00.000-08:00

I am anxious. I am anxious about school because I didn't spend any time being anxious about it before classes actually started.

I am anxious about Ross and how my family is going to cope with the current news. It's not what we originally thought, not nearly as bad, but it is something we weren't prepared for and somehow, it seems worse.

I drank a beer and it put me to sleep immediately. I woke up an hour later to too little too late, to text messages, to low blood sugar. I made couscous and tried to substitute almond milk for chicken broth because I didn't have chicken broth and water never seems to work. I ruined couscous. Can you imagine? I made stir-fry. It didn't turn out as wonderful as I had hoped, but I grated parmesan over it and somehow that saved it. Still, stir-fry hurts my stomach.

I am standing up on my own and writing to an invisible audience. Being unrelenting is lonely, but I think I must do it on purpose.

Guess where I was when I wrote this:

2009-01-03T21:20:00.000-08:00

I am somewhere in between –

Ode to our drunk, coked/out “youth” in line for dirty bathrooms

and the 30-year-old sophisticates still riding high on bicycles.

I am fooled, I am foolish.

Through thick and through thin.

2009-01-03T21:15:00.000-08:00

Lately all I can eat is spinach. Lately all I cannot be is a drunk. That is a lie. There are so many resolutions to be had, and all of them about me do not alleviate the confounding guilt I feel for attempting selfishness.

So I stick around, there is no new news.

On Anna Karenina

2008-12-21T17:50:00.001-08:00

When once I had Plath, today, Tolstoy made sense.

From Anna Karenina:

Page 423

"He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realization of their desires... He was soon aware that there was springing up in his heart a desire for desires - ennui."

Page 436

"At every step he experienced what a man would experience, who after admiring the smooth, happy course of a little boat on a lake, should get himself into that little boat. He saw that it was not all sitting still, floating smoothly; that one had to think too, not for an instant to forget where one was floating; and that there was water under one, and that one must row; and that his unaccustomed hands would be sore; and that it was only to look at it that was easy; but that doing it, though very delightful, was very difficult."

Page 438

"He felt for the first moment as a man feels when, having suddenly received a violent blow from behind, he turns round, angry and eager to avenge himself, to look for his antagonist, and finds that it is he himself who has accidentally struck himself, that there is no one to be angry with, and that he must put up with and try to soothe the pain."

For a Final Post: An Examination of Fake Love

2008-10-22T18:22:00.000-07:00

I wrote this six months ago. I like the writing, but I could care less about the content.

For any way I was wrong and not enough, I’d made concessions and complied and never wondered when you would call because I would call first. I knew it was okay this way, with you. And now I compare and can’t remember why you were so awful.

But I digress. No, I concede. I let you be how I remember you, which incidentally isn’t very well. I love or am in some comparable mire. I search for it again so I can relax and understand it’ll hurt this much with someone else and I didn’t let go of that torture in vain.

I wish I had something better to say than anything about your uncomfortable dirty mattress, the dog, the dander, the grease like tar. The hair adheres so I won’t forget you two.

Piss water beer, boxed wine, well whiskey. I couldn’t care less. I just want my off switch and, my parents’ money, dip my hand in the bees and compromise integrity for a tall, dirty, cheap drink.

On Giving In: An Excerpt

2008-10-20T22:06:00.000-07:00

To say nothing is going to change my world is too grand a claim, too banging beat of percussive droning, minor keys, moving with an unknown orchestra, and give into the song, come with the song, let the song change my world. Let it be the song for the moment.

It is always an ode, a couch at five in the morning, a crowd of watching friends wanting me to be happy (this could never be). I’d like to think my back porch, my cigarettes mean something more than my slowly yellowing teeth and the coughs from colds that last too long. This may be a hard winter for me. I don’t know how to move through the wetness, to pull together the weather, to ride through it and to ride it out.

August's

2008-10-19T22:16:00.000-07:00

Jared takes the tank, and the softer earth for sinking under weight (in tons).

This is not the news we’re fans of, not the watery drink, not ice that moves nowhere. I make trips southerly.

I am hopeless, a devotee, possessor of no knowledge worth knowledge. I change my tickets, my chances, cancel reservations and hear no one.

I am ambivalent, but not ambivalent enough. I am still bothered by the periphery.

It’s in every boring detail not worth sharing. I used to be that immature, but no one can be as invested as I am in me. My poverty, my diseases, my addictions aren’t.

Solzhenitsyn & Pachelbel

2008-10-18T19:28:00.000-07:00

In collecting the condoms, in falling asleep inside of you and in short or light of HIV, I've given into pessimism and it[']s poetry.

I was embarrassed for years, but you ended up being the fool. I'd forgotten about the suites when all anybody took into consideration was the cannon. And finally now I am no fool. I'd forgotten about Solzhenitsyn until his death brought about your issues and my alleged illiteracy. The writing is used, ragged, and I believe in the city even if I stopped believing I'd get there.

Better Than Fair

2008-10-18T02:44:00.000-07:00

I felt an excess of women in the room, an excess of mattering, that the presence of one other penis almost went completely unnoticed until it didn't and then it was all I could focus on.

I didn't even notice the chairs. I was focusing on the counter, on hysterics, on missing art. I'd found some poor sad sap to listen to my rant, reach for my headphones, from floor to ceiling.

There is no point in pointing. I would just shower and sweat, wash the sheets and sweat, shave and chafe and sweat.

I would move in, unable to afford your license or the clown-car that is New York, read Russian literature or translate and waste all the brilliant phrasing I've been hoarding. I approve of lanugo.

I roast, I tan, I sweat lines and rue the week.