The Best Time Of Day For Those With Anxiety Disorder

Midautumn,
the sun is beyond
the horizon
earlier,
low cloud cover
has returned,
it's past 6 in the evening
and I know that
it's too late now
to do the things
I should have done today,
today was another failure
but I can breathe again,
deeply,
until the morning.

My Friend Had A Church Wedding

My friend had a church wedding:
we were late and came in just before it began.
I had brought a girl I was dating, and
we had come with a friend of mine and his wife.
The groom had known us for years, he had
attended both our weddings, only mine
had ended in failure.
We settled in just before
they walked down the aisle
together,
I'd never seen this done in a wedding before
but I wish I did,
no one was giving the bride away,
the bride and the groom were adults
and they were walking down the aisle
together to finish what they had started together.

They had the same smile,
brilliant in the stained glass light.

I thought about the years he'd
watched my friend and I get married,
have children, build lives together,
wondering when his chance would come.
Later he was taking pictures with his new bride
while my friend and his wife and my date and I
were drinking, we were standing at a table as close as
possible to where the waiters were leaving the kitchen
with trays of hors d'oeuvre
and my date and I were telling various comic dating stories
and I warned my friend and his wife:
be good to each other. It's a
jungle out there.

What I didn't tell them was what I didn't tell
my date:
that sometimes you hold onto things
that aren't working
because you don't want to admit that
you're alone.

Relocation

A light in the parking lot
was out and Lovey held onto me,
one arm around my neck,
one hand in his mouth,
sucking his on his last three fingers,
we walked back a narrow sidewalk
between low hedges in the dark,
this is it, I say.
I open the gate, we enter.
I turn on the lights and put him down
and he runs to a 9 inch rubber ball
that I'd left on the floor for him
in the living room, there is no other furniture.
I sit down, cross legged on the floor
as he kicks the ball against the wall,
chasing it to the fireplace, then kicks it towards
the room that will be his,
I turn on the light there and he crawls into
the closet and shuts the door, giggling.
He doesn't know this yet,
but I've failed him.

At Night The Water Comes

At night the water comes in
from the Pacific, hovers in the air
until the temperature drops,
adheres to the grass, the windows,
metal, plastic,
drips down from high places,
collects in low places

Me. I collect it,
pools of it, in my hair,
clothes, eyes
as I wait,
wait for the sun to return and
pull it all back into the air
before I drown in it.

Recognizance

It's still dark when the alarm awakens me,
I had slept with the window open
and the air is cold in my room,
there's not enough time to heat the house
so I shower quickly, dress,
get the paperwork I need from the coffee table
strewn where I left it the night before
next to three empty beer bottles.
I walk outside, down my block,
alongside a freeway that stretches
beneath me.
People are delivering newspapers
around me, milk,
fresh produce to supermarkets,
gasoline, cars collect outside
donut shops, coffee houses
I arrive at my destination,
a man looks at me first through
a video camera, buzzing me through
a metal door, then addresses me
over a metal grated opening in
bulletproof glass.
I give him papers; I have to pay for storage,
and pay for the tow truck, and then pay money
to the city. He types things
on a computer and tells me to wait out front.
Long night? he asks. I don't answer,
I walk out front and wait under the
last of the night sky for a bearded man
to bring me back my car.

Bear Trap

They don't let the planes take off until
seven in the morning.

I sit in front of my house, facing east
through a fog that has just arrived.

I listen to the heavy spinning of turbines
as the planes ascend.

I have been on these flights before; I remember
what it was like to move through space at this hour.

People parade by me, a 737 at a time,
invisible beyond a grey haze.

I am awake now because I haven't slept, I waited
through the night for the planes to return.

Planes are flying, cars moving, people walking
all around me.

I know the world is out there, people are in it,
I just can't seem to get my feet to move.

Kinescope

We were in the park
in Chicago, Illinois,
Autumn, 2000.

My friend had gotten married
at long last,
we were outdoors drinking,
and he came out and joined us,
he had an early digital camera with him
and we cycled through the pictures,
reliving a reception that we had just
walked out of for a cigarette

We did the same thing the next morning;
his father in law had people over for breakfast
and we plugged the camera into the television
and watched the slide show
cycle over and over
reliving priceless memories that were 16 hours old,
"Did you see that? Do you remember when he did that?
Do you remember that toast? That was beautiful!"

For thousands of years music was something
people played,
they sang, built drums, flutes, guitars
then learned these instruments, built songs around them,
took these songs from place to place.
After Gutenberg music became the way you
recreated something someone else had thought of,
after Edison it became the way you listened to
what people had done somewhere, sometime,
in a soundproof room in New York City

The Iliad was spoken around
fires, in caves, under stars
for 400 years before Homer put it on paper

There's no life in these words.
The best I can do on my best day
(and I rarely have them)
is a video capture,
stealing something that was once live,
turning it into magnetic impulses,
zeroes and ones,
then putting my name on it

Statistics tells me that a monkey
with a typewriter can do what I do
given a long enough timeline,
the art is in what you do,
but I'll be watching.

What My Tattoo Means

Today I'm going to lose
50 million skin cells,
100 strands of hair,
9,000 brain neurons,
I'll take 17,000 breaths
and have 100,000 heartbeats

I'll smoke 25 cigarettes
and drink 15 beers
and eat a half bowl of cereal
with the small splash of milk
left in my refrigerator

Hank would be proud,
at the typer, Heineken open on the table,
Stravinsky on the AM radio,
girls out buying him another bottle,
but Hank's dead, you're out of beer,
there are no girls and the words aren't coming
So get off the fucking couch.

Chemistry

It seems much more complicated
than it really is
because people over intellectualize it,
they use strange terms like
valence bond theory,
or molecular orbital theory,
Schrodinger's Wave Equation

Forget it all.

Forget Linus Pauling,
Eigenfunctions,
the Electroweak Force
and just remember this:
that the covalent bond
is nothing more than the nucleus
of me and the nucleus of you
turning to each other
joining our hands together
and sharing some of our energy.

Not To, You Know, Sound Bitter Or Anything

The sun was setting behind the head
of a pretty girl who was in the process
of telling me that we shouldn't see each other
anymore, and as soon as she said, "Look. Uhh,"
I knew what was coming. I slid down in my seat
and my mind wandered, to this:

A story in the news about the world's fattest man,
who, in 2006, had weighed over 1,200 pounds,
and who had gotten married in Monterrey, Mexico,
bedridden for six years, his bed was decorated in white
and brought to the ceremony on a flatbed truck,
on the advice of his doctors he did not eat from the 5 tiered cake

I leaned forward and took the girl's hand
as she apologized, conversations around us
getting quieter, the young man at the adjoining table
putting an acoustic guitar in its case,
I looked away from her to a cupcake we had shared
and not finished, its frosting glistening in the decaying light

Shipping Forecast

The general synopsis at 0600:

Yellowstone: East 5 to 6, clear.
Nebraska: west gale 8 to 9, expected soon, poor.
Rhodes, Steamboat, Franklin: west 2 to 3, occasional showers, poor.

I Learned This Strategy From The Guy That Moved My Cheese

The trouble with the size of the world
is that sometimes it takes you too long
to get to and from the things you want to do,
the things you love

But the key is to make use of the time
spent in transit; for instance, just yesterday
I was driving in crowded but moving
traffic on the Santa Ana Freeway
under a descending orange sun
and the thought occurred to me
that life isn't a movie, that people can't
just instantly call up the clever thing
to say at the right time, the profound
thing, the thing that will settle the argument,
calm the bully, stop the hurt

And what someone really ought to do is write
a small book, pocket sized, that you could carry
in your pocket like a Spanish/English
dictionary, and when someone stole your space
at the mall you could get out of your car
and quickly thumb through the index to
Parking: Snarky Comments

Everything indexed for easy reference:
Children: Vegetable Reluctance
Fast Food: Incorrect Change
Relationships: Goodbye: Responses

I got home and sat at my laptop
but all I could write was this:
1. No, wait. Please don't go yet.