--IT’S SCARY TO LEARN HOW VULNERABLE YOU CAN BECOME

 

…I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately.

Boy, death is something I really hate. 
But, after contemplating it, I’ve come to realize that without death, life wouldn’t mean as much as it does.  It wouldn’t be so sacred.  In fact, it might be fairly meaningless.

A long time ago I saw this movie (whose title escapes me now) where there was a creek with this magical water, and if you drank it, you never aged and had immortality.  It wasn’t a very good film, but the premise stuck with me.  Instead of being overjoyed, the people who drank the water regretted it.  They stayed the same age forever, unable to experience life as a year older.  Life had lost its purpose for them.  They didn’t have to fear car wrecks or heart attacks or brain aneurisms.  They were immortal and it felt, to them, like they’d cheated on the biggest exam of their life and were being eternally punished for their crime.  I’m not explaining it very well, but it was the first time I understood that death serves a purpose, as does aging--that they're both important and crucial.

A friend of mine’s dog died yesterday.  She was incredibly distraught.  If you don’t like animals or don’t have a pet, feeling anguish over the death of a dog will seem inane to you.

I have a dog, Lucy, probably the best dog on the planet.  I spend more time with her than I do any other living being.  She follows me everywhere.  We often communicate without speaking.  I know when she gazes up at me while I’m at my desk, with that certain, desperate sparkle in her eye, that she’s asking, “Can I please have one of my favorite bones?”  And then when I give it to her, (actually I tease her a bit, saying, “Is this what you want?  Huh, Lucy?  You want this?” before tossing it on the floor), she does this really cute thing where she pounces around it and spins and pounces and spins some more, as if the bone is a living thing, a new puppy perhaps, before finally clutching it in her jaws and taking it to another room.  (Take my word for it, it is really fucking adorable.)

Another friend of mine was in a horrible auto accident, hit by a drunk driver going over the lane on the freeway.  I saw pictures of her car.  It was mangled so hard it looked like a crunched beer can.  The EMT’s said they were shocked she wasn’t killed immediately.  She’s fine now, though when I saw her at AWP she let me feel parts of her arm where there were still windshield shards of glass imbedded under her flesh.  Since the accident six months ago, she’s had shards popping out of her skin every couple of days.

When I think about death, or near death experiences, I feel very lucky.  I believe in God, I believe in Heaven, though a lot of that seems like mumbo jumbo and I simply take it on blind faith that it’s real.  Still, I don’t want to die.  I want to live.  I want to do things that make me feel alive.  I want to be with the people that make me feel more alive.  Those are two of my resolutions for 2017 and I’m going to try very hard to make them come to fruition.

I’ve been incredibly fortune.  I’ve had an amazing life.  If I died tomorrow, or even today, I’d still be able to say I was lucky enough to have done more things than most people dream about.  I’m not bragging.  Not at all.  I’m just saying I’m one very fortunate guy who is blessed for inexplicable reasons.

…Okay, so enough about death.  After all, it’s Friday, the weekend looming.  Here are a few things that make me think:

-"I think I'd like to be remembered as someone who beat the odds through just plain determination. ... that I persevered. Because I think that being somewhat of a pest to life, constantly plaguing and pursuing, will bring results." Sylvester Stallone

-"Is the life I'm living the life that wants to live in me?" Parker Palmer

-"You're only given a little spark of madness. You musn't lose it." Robin Williams

 -“The failure of love might count for most of the suffering in the world.” Marie Howe

 

-“The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.” Audrey Hepburn

-“I could hardly look into his eyes.  I looked more often at his mouth, and could raise my eyes only briefly.” Marie Howe

-“The pot at the end of the rainbow is not money.  I know because I have it.” Marin County

-“Over a lifetime, there are only four or five moments that really matter.” Deadpool

-“If you want to fly, you’ve got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” Toni Morrison

 

 

--I DIDN’T THINK ANYTHING COULD BE THIS PAINFUL

 

The One Lie I Never Told You

I’m doing what I shouldn’t do,

listening to those songs where
everything is perfect and magnified
like frail wands of light
splayed across balled-up bed sheets.
Someone might call that sadistic
and they’d be quite right.
When I stare out the windows
the trees whip in the wind
full of the energy and wrath I wish I could muster.
Is it pathetic to be jealous of evergreens?
Of the wind?
I tried trusting the moon
with its wide, jolly face,
but he turned on a dime, gave me the cold shoulder
and nonchalantly slid behind some clouds.
The birds have no answers either.
They just hang there on a branch
taxidermied, staring back as if I’m a
carcass even they wouldn’t consider eating.
To know that you are somewhere,
breathing and blinking,
life oozing in and out of you,
is to have my ribs split open,
my heart diced into steaming clumps
until they steam no more.
So I’ll go now.
I’ll stop the music and pull the curtains.
I’ll let the darkness tell me
what to do next.
I won’t think of you even once,
though we both know that’s a lie.

 

A Reason To Burn

The razor is dull,

a useless guillotine,
a tool not unlike me.
The mirror’s no better,
telling me I need a reason to smile
as if it’s someone else’s life I’m living.
The water’s cold against my skin
but it’s not frigid enough.
The sun is already up.
And the eagle just flew by.
And the lake is rippled like a frosted cake.
And tomorrow will show up, too,
the dependable employee every boss can count on.
So I’ll just take these empty plans
and make a fire of them,
watch them smolder, hear them crackle,
so full of oxygen for once,
finally finding their purpose,
burning burning burning,
warming the coldest room
on the planet.

 

Somewhere Else

Somewhere else things are happening,

a day replete with surprise or boredom,
Lover’s Day having already nodded its head good night.
Hours ago there was still something to hold onto,
look forward to,
boats bobbing on the India Sea,
a khaki canopy rippling in the breeze,
beach sand and every kind of wave
right there at our feet.
Somewhere else things are happening.
I hope they’re everything you need,
the peace I couldn’t give you.

 

 

 

--PART OF YOU POURS OUT OF ME IN THESE LINES FROM TIME TO TIME

 

2017 AWP: Askew & Akimbo

How to talk, or write about, AWP? 

How to talk about you? 

How to talk about Jesus or the universe, for that matter?

Or the silky violet sunsets that somersault over summer skies, making a fool want to skinny dip in the lake, even at such an old age, even when it’s freezing out? 

Isn’t that a tall task?

Oh boy, it’s not easy, that’s for sure.  Not many things—beyond the mundane-- are.  But I will try.  In a way, I will.

Let’s see… what did we have this time around?

A crush of Convention Center bodies. 

Walls (walls?  really, I’m speaking of walls in this day and age?) of books wherever one looked.

Lots and lots of laughter.  (We’re talking belly laughter, mostly).

And equal parts drinking (if I’m being honest here, which I always am).

 

A Broken ankle.

 

Grey's Anatomy come-to-life.

A Nile river of murmuring, a mumbo jumbo chorus, a cacophony of voices, peripheral vision working over-time, having gone bat shit from hour one.

A tick on the skin below the eye, even on the pupil itself, pulsing there, typing out rabid code that no one can decipher.

A sledgehammer to the heart--once or twice or thrice.

An anvil tossed over the side of the boat, hitting the target—Boo-yah!  Got you, Sucker, and you weren’t even looking.

Have you lost weight?  Come on, I know you have.  You look happy.  Ah, but you look well.  Thanks, so do you.  Well, goodbye then.  See you next year.

Do you remember that AWP when we ______________________ and you said _____________________  and I believed you?  I think I replied with something like ________________________ and you grinned a shy smile, saying __________________________.  It was cute, but really fucked up as well.  Well, wasn’t it?  Come on, wasn’t that really messed up?  Tell the truth.

Next time, please don’t ask me about the weather/Seattle rain/Seattle summers/the suicide rate in Seattle/Nordstrom/our President/their President/the President’s daughter’s fashion line that’s been pulled from Nordstrom/if I’m going to the vigil/if I’m writing a novel/if one of my kids is in college now/if I’m having a good AWP...

And please don’t ask me open-ended questions either.  That’s a shit ton of pressure for a twig like me. 

Just talk and I will try very hard to listen.  I will watch your marionette lips move.  You are real, and I will know it’s so because your lanyard will tell me as much, but I am not so real, and that’s the problem right there.  I am that mannequin in the store-front you passed by without noticing how badly her handbag matched her shoes, or didn’t match her shoes—see what I mean?  No?  Well, what I’m getting at is I’m a train wreck around all these people.  I’m that collision right before metal meets metal, just before the ultimate crunch.  Boo-yah! squared.

Next time, let’s just admit that this is bigger than both of us.  But honestly, I mean truly, I am proud of you for having won a Pushcart Prize and for being on ________ Podcast two different times last year.  You made it!  Goddamn it, good for you.  I am happy for your success and I am so sorry for your loss.

I think I saw the real You looking back at the stupefied real Me at some point.  You were shining so very bright, like a radioactive fire fly while texting away on your cell.  Your light burnt back the shrubbery and azaleas.  Right then You were the most beautiful butterfly ever hatched.  All of your fans saw what I saw then, so it must have been real.

We were all there, all 10,000 of us happy campers.  Don’t numbers count for something?

I’ll try not to linger over all that.  I’ll try to remember the people I didn’t see this time around (Sara Lippmann, Meg Tuite, Bud Smith, Ben Loory, Michael Gillian Maxwell, Katherine DiBella Seluja, Shaindel Beers…) and  those I did see but can’t remember all of—Jensen Beach, Windy Lynn Harris, April Bradley, David Atkinson, Michael Seidlinger, Ben Tanzer, Nancy Stohlman, Brandon Hobson, Jan Elman Stout, Gay Degani, Christopher Allen, Grant Faulkner, Christine Texeira, Bill Yarrow, Tammy Sherwood, Chelsea Werner-Jatzke, Gloria Mindock, Annie Pluto, Liz Pettie, Jennifer Carr, Joani Reese, Matt Bell, Roxane Gay, Francis Badgett, Ralph Pennel, Dorriane Luax, Molly Peacock, Sherrie Flick, Lori Brody, Anne Elizabeth, Nancy Petersen, Sandy Longhorn, Pamela Painter, Diem Jones, David Galef, Kathy Fish, James Thomas, and of course, Robert Vaughan, Robert P. Kaye and Karen Stefano.   

Next time, I’ll try to keep my chin up and my eyes focused on the carpet.  You can find loose change that way.  It helps defer the cost of all those over-priced drinks.

 

 

 

--SHE TRIED HARD TO HELP ME, SHE PUT ME AT EASE.  SHE LOVED ME SO NAUGHTY, MADE ME WEAK IN THE KNEES

 

…As you know, I was in Portland/Vancouver for the weekend.  It was both fun and magical.  Tomorrow morning, barring my spinning out on sheets of roadway ice, I’ll head to the airport and then to Washington, D.C. for a writers conference along with 10,000 other writers, about 1,000 of who I’ll actually know.  Sometimes it seems like all I do is screw around.

…I hope you have a great week, that you are safe and warm.  I’ll be back here on Monday. 

…I’m not sure what I’m going to read, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be this, a story that took 1^st place in the Flash Fire Fiction Category (winning $100, hey it’s something, better than a bruised rib) and is the closest I come to writing a happy ending:

 

                                                                        Waterbed

            When the fire burned down our garage my sister could only ask about the waterbed.  “You can’t burn a waterbed, can you?” she asked, her goggle eyes big as pucks.

            She was mine alone to love, like a strange painting or the neighbor’s lonesome cat.  Our father was always away and our mother, well, she didn’t care for retards.

            The man who interviewed me didn’t work for the fire department and I could tell he thought I was the culprit because he charged forth in hot pursuit of a motive.  I could have given him plenty.

            The smell of a fire gets on something; it bores in and can’t ever really be removed.  Rank skunk spray you can get rid of, but fire, it smolders in the fabric forever.

            Jeanie was sis’s name but we changed it up, always with the letter J though: Jezebel, Janine, Jacqui, Junebug.  She rather enjoyed the idea that she could become so many different people so easily.

            When my mother was at Mr. Taylor’s house comparing bird watching stories, Jeanie liked nothing more than to sneak up to my parent’s bedroom and flop about on the waterbed.  She became a mermaid on that thing, so happy.  A queen being ferried betwixt regal landscapes.  A damsel on a raft.  A silly girl, not so smart, who at least knew how to swim.

            When our parents divorced the first thing to go besides Pop was that waterbed.  Mother stabbed it to death with an ice pick and later the carpet man spent the better part of a day fixing things, flooring-wise.  He even carried the rubber matt out to the garage like some defeated sea creature slung over his shoulders.

            I buried it and it’s in a safe place now.  Jeanie and I step over it every morning on our way to school, me to mine and Jeanie to her special one.  I tell her someday she’ll swim again and, as she smiles, I think she believes me.

 

--SOME THINGS YOU GUESS, AND OTHERS YOU JUST KNOW

 

                                                              Just Do What I Do

            She says, “Come, kneel down next to the bed with me.”

            I’m not sure if she’s kidding.  I’ve never been one for prayer.

            “We’ll do this a long time,” she says, “then things will be better.”

            My sister is older, stronger and smarter, but too optimistic.  She thinks rainbows are real.  Unicorns are her favorite animals.

            “How?”

            “Watch me.  Just do what I do.”

            Our mother drove Dad to the bus terminal an hour ago.  I figure we have another two hours ourselves until she arrives.

            “We could run away.”

            Sister’s fingers are laced, her eyes closed.  She shakes her head.

            It’s hard not to be resentful and jealous of adults who can come and go when whatever whim hits them.  Even Dad is smart to get out.  He’s not as stupid as she thinks.

            I watch Sis, her eyes scrunched closed like wrinkled berries, her knuckles pink fruit from the pressure.  Her lips move soundlessly.  I cock my head but can’t make out any syllables.

            When I try to copy Sis, I find myself on a raft roaring down a black river.  I don’t know how I know it, but up ahead is a sheer drop off, a mile high waterfall.  I am soaked from the cold spray.  My raft collides against hidden boulders but continues its manic sweep with the current.  Eventually I get to the edge.  The raft slips out from under me and I begin my descent.  The fall takes my entire childhood.

            When I open my eyes, I’m on the sofa with Sis.  Buddy, Mother’s boyfriend, is staring at me, then Sis, then switching over to me.  “Eeny Meanie Minie Moe.”  His pointing fingers hold a smoldering cigarette so that his hand seems to be on fire, and in a way it is, he is.

            “Get me a beer, Darlin’,” he says to Sis.  I’m squeezing her hand and now I squash it harder, yet she tugs away, her face saying what she can’t, “Just do what I do.”

            “Come on over here, Boy,” he says.

            Mother has doll eyes, as empty as paper plates.  Something between a smile and nothing sits on her face.

            When he coughs, smoke rises like gray fog from the slit of Buddy’s mouth.  “Whyn’t you dance for me.”

            I want to be back on that raft.  I want a different ending.  But then Buddy pinches the burning cigarette into my arm.  The skin hisses.   Buddy chuckles.  “You know I mean business,” he says, so I shuffle my feet, trying to do the tap number Buddy likes best.

            After twenty minutes, Buddy says, “Now switch, you get me a beer and Shelley, you come dance for ol’ Buddy.”

            We pass like sentries.  Sis won’t give me anything, no advice, which is really her way of saying the same thing: “Just do what I do.”

            When I come out of the kitchen, Buddy’s pawing as Sis does some sort of ballet stretch.  Buddy’s eyes are greasy, his hair is oily, and he smells like tar.  “Just sit that damn thing down,” Buddy says to me without taking his swirling gaze from Sis.

            It’s one thing to pray, it’s another to do. 

So I get back on that raft.  It’s going to take me with it wherever it wants to go, not where I’m heading.  But it’s a better ride that this one.

            I plunge the knife through Buddy’s shoulder.  I keep plunging—five, six, seven times--because I want to make sure there’s no way he’s coming back for Sis after I’m gone.

            The blood splatter is hot oil, but I make myself feel arctic river water instead.  I flip over the edge of the cliff.  It’s a long fall with an uncertain landing.  Still, I don’t scream or make a solitary sound.  Unafraid for once, I await my landing.

 

 

--THOUGH IT’S POSSIBLE I’M DREAMING, DON’T WAKE ME YET

 

…I just ran 12 miles and I’m a little sore.  It was colder than heck out.

Afterward, I stopped at the convenience store which conveniently stocks my favorite brand of Gummie Bears—Lifesavers Wild Berries.  Yum.  I’m a sucker for Gummies.  My daughter and I once scoured the country trying to find the very best ones and we finally located them in, of all places, Universal Studios at a candy shop there.  These Gummies were very tiny but so sweet.
Now I’m sucking down a Corona.  I can’t, in clear conscience recommend eating Gummies then popping open a beer.  Don’t do it.

...I’m posting early as I’ll be headed to Vancouver before the crack of dawn in an attempt to beat the expected snowfall.  The drive might be treacherous, but if I make it there alive it’s going to be fantastic.

…So I’ll be back here Monday.  Until then, here are some things worth pondering:

“HEY. it's so very easy to feel small and crumpled up like a wad of paper just now. here's me reminding you that you can still put a single word to a page, and then another, and pretty soon there is a line, and a single line can save your life. sometimes, as noted, it's a big fucking deal to make a sentence. same with life. i get up out of bed (don't want to), i put my clothes on (don't want to), i leave the house (don't want to), i go into the world (don't want to) and then i watch for micro beauty everywhere i go so i can keep moving.” Lidia Yuknavich

"The best inheritance you can leave your kids is an example of how to live a full and meaningful life." Dan Zadra

"If you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every time." B.J. Marshall

"If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can transform one million realities." Maya Angelou

"Your imagination is the preview to life's coming attractions." Albert Einstein

"Some people try to turn back their odometers. Not me, I want people to know why I look this way. I've traveled a long way and some of the roads weren't paved." Will Rogers

"Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Louis Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein." H. Jackson Brown Jr.

"I never said it would be easy. I said it would be worth it." Pete Egoscue

 

 

 

 

--LET’S GO MAKE SO ME BABIES ALREADY, IN THE SHOWER, WHILE I’M DOING MY BEST ANDY GIBB.

 

…Oh, gosh, it’s finally Wednesday (what a weird spelling for that word, btw), which means it’s that much closer to Friday.  Thank God.

…I watched three more episodes of The Wonder Years and only cried through one, so, I see that as a kind of victory. 

What a great show.  Best kid actor ever has to be Ben Savage.  If not, tell me, who has a more expressive face than that?

…I had a couple of happy poems published recently at The Slag Review:

https://slagreview.com/2017/01/17/len-kuntz-two-poems-issue-3/

…A good friend of mine, who I really admire and adore, Bud Smith, wrote this.  I love it.  I hope you do as well: (It doesn’t have a title yet ((Are titles even necessary?)).  But I might call it “Lady” or maybe more simple and fruitful, “Liberty”.

Every day I drive past the Statue of Liberty on my way to work. I pass by the Statue of Liberty on my way home.

In the morning, in the darkness right before the sun comes up, the Statue of Liberty is lit up with a glow projected up, and that glow is one of the only things I can see through the blackened trees.
In the evening, when I return home and the sun is just about to set, there is that amber glow of sunset hitting the buildings in NYC and hitting the Statue of Liberty, too.
The whole world is a great big junkyard. America is a great big junkyard. Entire world is. Everywhere you look, every single country, a magnificent junkyard. Some of those junkyards have beaches or mountains or better art museums than others, some of those junkyards are dusty, some of them are hardly anything but lush jungle that humans can't cut down fast enough.
The reason America is my favorite junkyard, the junkyard I love best, is because of the Statue of Liberty. We have this idea that anybody can come to our junkyard and anybody can leave our junkyard. But every once in a while some dummy goes and messes up the Liberty part of the Statue of Liberty.
Our junkyard might need a different statue, instead.
A statue for each town. The Statue of Xenophobia. Each town gets one.
So then we can take our children to the center of town. Make it a custom. 4th birthday, take the kid to the center of town and explain the town's Statue of Xenophobia.
"This statue is here because everyone in this town should be afraid of everyone that lives outside of this town. Learn it now. Be afraid of everyone outside of this town."
If that doesn't work, how about a Statue of Xenophobia for individual blocks?
Just the other day I was in Paris and looking at the Statue of Liberty replica that was put on an artificial island on the river Seine to protect their harbor. The Île aux Cygnes, the replica is called.
The Statue of Liberty was of course a gift from the French, and placed at our Ellis Island to welcome immigrants. But hey guess what, we gave France back a replica of the same statue. A gift.
How about that? There is another version of the Statue of Liberty and it is on the other side of the world. Just chillin'. It's sitting on the river, and the sun hits it too.
A few days before I left for my trip to Paris I ran into someone I haven't seen in a long time and while catching up, I mentioned I had my bags packed and was headed to Paris for the week to check it out with my wife.
This is what they said, "Are you out of your mind? You can't go over there? Isis! Terrorists are all over that place. World has changed."
But the world hasn't changed. Ever since civilization popped up, it's been a series of junkyards closing in on each other. Some of the junkyards have better jazz than others, some of the junkyards you can get the best food you've ever eaten on any corner. Some of these junkyards, you can walk up a set of marble steps and learn anything about civilization you'd ever want to know. Other junkyards aren't as well stocked.
I believe in America and I believe in the Statue of Liberty. And as any student of the past will know, this country has done its fair share of severely screwing up in concern to people who aren't white skinned, and well, looky looky here, we're doing it again.
Take your children to the center of town and explain, this town isn't the end of the world. Point in any direction. Say, the world is vast, the world is sprawling. Do not be afraid of people beyond this town. This state. This country. This junkyard.