I admit that at this point in my life I’m tired of writing and publishing in fragments. Still, some of my favorite passages emerge in the sleepless hours between family time and work, so I’ve decided to scrape all the near empty midnight docs and pour them into one strong and clarifying soup. I hope you enjoy these mixed messages and unusual musings from Old Year Me to New Year You.
I want to make it perfectly clear, my love of the deep ball may kill me, but I will pursue this flight path until my organs and my imagination fail me, my imagination which is itself a kind of organ, shredding opposing defenses since time immemorial.
* * *
I had a dream that the world was waking up and I had missed it. There was a Mardi Gras parade winding down my street. I recognized the Top of the Bottoms medley, the Eliza Jane refrain. I raced to grab my mask and found it on the dresser, but I couldn’t find my clothes. The music was fading by the time I got to the open window. The saints were marching in without me and they wouldn’t come this way again.
* * *
Tonight I can hear the cacophony of coyotes and geese. It sounds like two rival sports teams being cheered on from opposite ends of the campground. First it was the coyotes winning, then the geese. Now I’m not sure. Have wild dogs entered the mix? Are there any pro sports teams in America called The Wild Dogs?
* * *
A confession: I don’t always open or close my parentheses. There are unresolved formulas that dictate my life, incomplete lines of code afloat in my system, pictograms and symbols stuck in my teeth. I like tattoos that are barely visible and require a perceptive viewer to notice. My last work of body art was a stick and poke tattoo of an ellipses just beneath my third eyelid. It complements my two regular eyes, which have been described by local poets and stick figure art critics as two gentle parentheses rolled onto their sides.
* * *
My daughter complains that the moon is shining too brightly through her window for her to be able to sleep. “It looks like an alien planet,” she says.
* * *
The interviewer asks: What would you like to see more of in poetry? “Stakes,” the editor replies.
* * *
Whatever happened to A? He spent the rest of his life attending reunion shows no matter how many of the original band members had died. He identified the exact point in young adulthood where his destiny was mostly set but his dreams were still alive, and he’s been rewinding to that moment and celebrating it ever since. As for me, I’m on the reunion circuit, too, as the last surviving member of an unknown supergroup.
* * *
Right now there are a thousand Instagram therapists in my pocket telling me I should spend money on experiences, not things, but how much do those experiences cost? And how much have I unknowingly modeled the same thing, looking young and carefree in my archived posts while real-time me sweats over bank accounts and balance sheets? Not that I blame any of us. I’d go to the ends of the earth and spend all of my savings to not feel dead inside.
* * *
Writing as a means of saying something, of expressing what you believe and the value of our time on earth. Writing not as anything grand or philosophical, just a series of exercises to stack together until you have something substantial. Writing as an aura, a mode of being that you never have to live up to, an activity you use to describe yourself but rarely actually do. Writing as a means to generate income, a series of applied assignments undertaken for purposes of promotion or commerce. Which one are you?
* * *
We’re cutting up our alphabet soup in tiny pieces, we’re mincing words again.
* * *
I read a headline about how, for ecological and ethical reasons, we shouldn’t buy roses this Valentine’s Day. “Forgo roses? Never!” the poet in me shouts. And yet I remember that spectral bus ride through the mountain roads on the way to the Quito airport, peering into the valleys and seeing endless rows of glowing greenhouses stretched into the night. “What are these?” you asked the driver. Roses, he said. They grow straight toward the sun here. The perfect roses, millions of them, an ecological paradise upturned by a sprawling grow-op to serve our romantic appetites up north, in service of symbol and cliché.
* * *
My 22-year-old hairdresser is talented but he cusses a lot and wants to get the fuck out of this town and move somewhere with mountains to play music and go hiking. He is just over half my age and seems to be a nice and talented young man who maybe does too many drugs. A parental urge kicks in to say, hey now, don’t be so nihilistic, set some goals and come up with a plan. But the more he talks the more I find myself agreeing with him, and by the next time I make an appointment I hope he’s already gone.
* * *
My great grandpa was called Footsie because a train rolled over his foot in the West Bottoms when he was a boy. He was a bookie and a minor league baseball manager and had some vague association with Al Capone but it’s not the kind of roots you brag about. We are a humble people. We enjoy the Kauffman center but miss the old Denny’s. At least in theory. The food was never that great. The food was never what it was about at diners. Like Chubby’s with the checkerboard floor, which later became Sidney’s and had a great karaoke night, a hangout space for my first gay friends, some of them not yet out. We always stayed out as late as we could. First dates in coats borrowed from our parents, who must have laughed at our choices but drove us to and from the movies without judgment. Who picked us up from the haunted houses. Over the years the Edge of Hell looked less cartoonish and more like a real place, a psychological state for anyone who overstays their welcome. The 12th Street Bridge on a rainy night after all the photographers have gone home. A lone woman in a long coat, smoking a cigarette. The six story slides. The drop in your chest. What future is there for all of this, what afterlife? Is proximity to the underworld an asset or a liability for out-of-state investors? I’m not going to stick around to find out. I’m going to jump that train and stick the landing this time. I’m going to play spring ball and nobody can stop me.
* * *
A banshee squawkbox, National Private Radio, a homeopathic mode of disappearance. Elizabeth Hardwick writes: “I am afraid of the country night and its honest slumbers.” The awkwardness of trying to explain to some farmer that you’re on a mental journey, out exploring the countryside on a whim, trying to get out of your head so you can re-enter it again in time for the harvest.
* * *
We had a substitute teacher when I was in first or second grade. I don’t remember her name. I don’t think I knew exactly what a student teacher was at the time. She taught us about the history of Kansas City and showed us how to do the foxtrot. I don’t think any of us actually learned. It was strange seeing this woman—whose name I don’t remember, who maybe had a short ponytail or hair pulled into a bob—teaching a bunch of 7-year olds this old-fashioned, sexy footwork. She told us not to tell people outside of Kansas City about how great it was here, otherwise everyone would want to move here and it would change. It took me twenty five years to figure out what she was talking about, and by then I’m not sure it would have made a difference. I wonder where she is now and would like to ask her what it was she was trying to teach us, to find out if she’s still living here and see how her opinion about the place has changed. I’d like to ask her, for old time’s sake, if she’d like to dance.
lucas wetzel 