Fed On
Your boyfriend’s watching the news, watching lives find their endings, and
he turns off the screen because he can’t deal with it. Later he’ll call his
other girlfriend and they’ll talk and cry as she says she can’t bring herself
to do this anymore, this being-together, she just can’t deal with it. After
she called a friend, a friend she hadn’t talked to in years, since the time
of meds and visitations, but this friend will be fearful of the end of her job,
her livelihood always impending, and she’ll tell her old friend that she loves
her but she just can’t deal with it. That night her apartment will be broken
into by an ex-boyfriend who who feels that the emotional costs she took out
of him entitles him to things she owns, things which represent the two of them,
which will find a home tonight out in the river, where the train bridges creak
and ring, and the couple who live across the street will watch this entrance
through the window, this breaking and crying, and they’ll hover over the phone
like a lost cloud, wondering if they should call, but the paranoia which comes
with illegal deeds the two partake in occasionally has convinced them they just
can’t deal with it. The two, both women, have been shunned from their families
because their families just can’t deal with it. The heads of these families,
all those dying of polysyllabic diseases which get caught in the throat even
by the professionals who counsel over costs and incisions, they lay in beds
in empty rooms and sleep in their rare and clotted blood, alone, because nobody
can deal with it. All the words you hold in your mouth because to say them will
bring potentials, and you don’t want to deal with it. All the dreams you push
to the back of your head, because to think of the now is to know how little
you’ve tried, how far you’ve fallen, and you just can’t deal with it. There’s
a place floating just over your head where you go, sometimes, when you lose
the ability or the will to care. And the last time I saw you, the last time
you looked into my eyes, I saw you there, floating, somewhere far away.
(12:07.05.19.2005) [/alpha] #