Snakes and bones and musical thrones.
Wife’s long gone. The son won’t come home.
Here you stand, king of the hill.
Miserable and angry, a bitter pill.
You set it afire to watch it all burn,
Now all you can do is sit and yearn
For the things you had fore you run them away.
A love, a child, and friends that would stay.
I rolled up in front of John’s house to pick him up for the funeral. I love a man in starched cowboy duds, I do. I hope everyone comes to my funeral in starched jeans because it shows a certain awareness of the importance of the occasion. He looked great. Dad would have been so pleased. Or maybe Dad would have called him a damn quitter. John gave up drinking a few months ago and really seems to have his shit together this time. It’s nice to see. He was not a pretty drunk and he wore it like a mean vagrant now and again.
Mom owed us a debt of gratitude for even going to her service at all though. She disliked both of us to the core. It gave me chills to even think of her. The condescending glare. Always looking so damned disappointed. Kind of like Stacy, John’s perennial girlfriend, who was standing behind him.
Stacy didn’t even bother to dress up like a two dollar whore. She had on flip flops for the love of all things good and holy. It matters not a tiny speck of dust that there were rhinestones on the straps. And on the thighs of her jeans, on her bag, and you can call that a tunic all damn day long but we all know it’s just a long ass t-shirt. I rolled down the window.
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The old house has fallen.
I don’t know what part gave in
Or gave up
First.
Or if every last beam and joist
Just saw it coming
And gave up the ghost
All at once.
Why, aren’t you a haughty bitch
In a nasty mood?
Slinging words like razor blades,
Tearing down simple beauty
Because you have failed,
In your desire for a life free of effort.
Last Night at the Peekaboo Club
by Kelly Yandell
The bar stool made Lin’s butt hurt. He was sitting inside the door of the Peekaboo Club. A bouncer. There was one more door to go through before you saw any real action. His job was to make sure nobody came in stumbling drunk, and make sure they paid the cover. Slow nights on the stool always made his butt hurt, but he had long ago tired of seeing the dancing. It was dark and boring in the hall, but better than watching men be idiots. The girls were all better looking with their clothes on. He’d rather buy them a cup of coffee in the morning and hear about their real lives.
He got up to wander around the dark vestibule but there was no place to go. Dante knew nothing about Hell. Be careful what you ask for. He looked through the small window on the door that separated the vestibule from the main bar. The walls pulsed. It seemed like more than noise. It was sonic torture. He was letting the new bouncer work the main floor looking for wandering hands, looking for drunks out of money. Those types had to go. The vestibule was as close to peace as he could find and still draw pay for his last few days working at the club.
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Creativity lives in the fragile.
A place where your skin is thin
And your armor is weakened
And you are as easily brought to rage as tears.
Music is ecstasy and becomes your heartbeat.
I remember dreams I had lifetimes ago.
I was standing at the edge of a cliff,
Clouds above, and below.
A towering leaf filled oak
Standing beside me on the precipice,
Roots bare and exposed but never falling.
We looked out over the clouds.
No bottom in sight.
Stand your ground,
Or fly.
But there is no fall.
There is no pull down,
No gravity.
No fear.
Just a wonderful view,
And a mind that has no footing at all.
“Close your eyes momma,” the little girl said. She held a small chunk of concrete out in front of her. Her mother had just taken a seat on a stone bench in the neighborhood triangle. This space was too small to be ever called a park, a green space in theory, but the neighborhood garden folk had planted such good trees that there was no grass to be found. More often the triangle was a salad of dried leaves and rocks, chunks of concrete fallen from trucks, various stones from the drives of this stately home or that one, carried down the road by a heavy rain. But they are nice spaces. Roughly the size of a two car garage are these several triangles scattered about our meandering neighborhood. But they are a break from the pavement. A little more shade. A place to let a child or dog wander for a moment and stand on a rock and jump down. To climb up and jump down. To climb up and jump down. Again.
The woman turned to her husband who had taken a seat beside her. They were young, handsome, content looking, but one never knows. They looked like characters from a novel. Oddly lovely. With a blonde headed doll of a daughter with curls and bumptious glee. The child was now ordering to her father, “Cover your eyes, Daddy.” He closed his eyes. Insufficient. Clearly. Even to me. A lurking voyeur. He was practically cheating. She needed him to buy in completely and that meant picking up his hands and covering his eyes, peek-a-boo style. Read More
A Short Story
Judy straightened her white ironed shirt and pulled a pale blue sweater out of her bureau. She tied the arms around her neck in an attempt to look casual. She wiped the kitchen counter with her hand on her way through to the front door. Threw the empty wine bottle in the recycling bin. I think I was supposed to bake cookies to make it smell like someone might actually want to live in this hell hole. She tried to look like she wouldn’t give away the house to the next vagrant who passed by if they had a ball point pen so that she could sign it away.
Lillian’s sporty white coupe sat in the drive. She had tried to sound aloof on the phone. But this was it. This was the house. Window boxes. White marble countertops. Space for entertaining. An extra room for an office for Derek. The photos had sealed the deal. He’ll have to love it. She could make him love it. But she was desperate to conceal her excitement. Her panic. She knocked.
Judy put on her game face and opened the door. “Please come in,” said Judy. “Make yourself at home. It was Lillian, right?” Dear God, you’re so young. Please be an heiress somehow. Please want it. Please. She forced an open smile.
They shook hands and Lillian’s eyes began to scan the house in poorly hidden wonder. It was everything she wanted.
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You know by a child’s cry whether the offense or injury is dire, and I swear you know by a dog’s bark when there is something horribly the matter. I was fifty yards down the hill towards the pond at our ranch in Clay County, Texas, when Birdie, my then young English Setter, started to barking at a new pitch that told me something was gravely wrong. So I headed back up. When I crested the hill she stood alertly looking at me at like she wanted to show me something and like she didn’t really recognize me at the same time. Then she decided it was time to play again, and ran to us, past us and off down the hill I had been headed down with Sally. She ran feverishly, thrilled, to the water’s edge. I followed, thinking I must have misinterpreted her bark, or heard her wrong. I shook my head at the antics of this goofy dog, our first English Setter in a line of Golden Retrievers. To my eye, she was utterly her usual joyful and muscular self, propelling her body through every moment, spring loaded at all times. This was about three years ago.
*****
My life is still mostly in Dallas. One can become aloof about the existence of death by nature there, surrounded by dark parking garages and speeding buses and people, so many people whom we do not know, and whom we have no interest in really getting to know. We begin to think death comes only from bad people and dreaded slow diseases. But barring a freak accident involving a busy tree trimmer swinging through the canopy who doesn’t see me below and drops a branch on my head while I walk through my neighborhood, my chances of being killed by nature, or association with it, are remarkably slim. Stress might get me. My lifestyle might get me. A thoughtless moment piloting a very large vehicle may get me and others around me. But nature is mostly held at bay, pushed out, manicured down to its least threatening forms. The occasional tornadoes notwithstanding, nature is mostly neutered or paved here. I can be outside all I want without really ever being outdoors, with the flood of life and wild that outdoors should entail.
*****
Read More(This is a piece I wrote for a class a few years ago. It is probably the moment I started thinking about the idea of Fromness, which I explored in some length in A Texan Theory of Fromness.)
I am of the red dirt.
The basketball post set with a bag of concrete into a flat spot of grass and gravel. Rusted. There must have been a net at some point.
The fillin’ station on the right that hasn’t been anything but a hollow shell for fifty years, when they used big chunks of green glass right along with the hewn stones.
I’m from the evangelical church where no one shows up anymore.
I’m of the railroad tracks.
I’m from where the bluebonnets start and the hawks swoop and the buzzards sit in the road, hard working janitors.
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