You Told Me to Die, Now I Can't Think Straight.

I am giving it all that it's worth
To crack through the bones of a child's birth
And wondering how the fish manage to sleep at night
With all that moving 'round it just don't seem right
Now I'm reflecting on those things that you said to me
I guess they weren't that bad, but they truly bled me
I don't think there's anything I can do about it...

Now you will find me up against a wall
Now you will find me crawling down the hall
Now you will find me on the tile floor
Now you will find me at the beach, wondering...

How the fish manage to sleep at night?
With all that moving 'round it just don't seem right
I watch the waves loving the shore
And wish that I knew how to love more
Now you're trying to take me home
And I would rather be left alone.
You'll drag me back, and I'll comply
As you lovingly tell me that this time things will go right
But I just want to walk into the waves and see
How the fish manage to sleep at night
Turned upside down, or softly floating upright?
I want to be a heavy ball that doesn't bob for air
And not your girl with blue eyes and long hair

I'll never stop thinking, wondering
How the fish sleep down there
Then I wake up, gasping for air.

How Strange to Think that My Thinking is Wrong.

I fit against you like the powder inside of light bulbs 

Like veins inside of heart pulp

Like rings underneath knuck-les.

Rita and George

     He kept alternating between his palms and the tops of his hands, looking them over, his heart rising and sinking... he had done so much. The things those hands that stood alien-like before him had done; acts of love, violence, survival, repetition, praying, grieving, wringing, writhing, caressing, torquing. And then his heart sank again... they looked so old and worn and tired. They looked like a couple of people who just wanted to lay down somewhere warm. He could see the blue underneath, the splotches of whiteness around the red and pink, the thin little winding scars. And over all of that, in patches here and there, the incandescent shimmering, the powder from his job at the light bulb plant. That was all that he could do for her anymore. Be dependent, be repetitive, be the same and do the same thing and bring home the same amount of money each week. He used to do so much more for her. But now that was all he could do.


     After looking at his hands for five more minutes, he shivered. He abruptly looked away from them and went to lay down in bed. Rita was shuffling around in the kitchen. He dreamt of walking through the field out back and seeing a girl in a blue ruffled checkered dress, her hair moving with the same timing as the waist-high grass. There was someone he could love; someone he could be different and new and unpredictable for. Someone who wouldn't know that he had skipped work just by looking at his hands, someone who wouldn't know that he had skipped lunch just by seeing his face, someone who wouldn't know anything about him at all but would want to learn. And he could redefine himself; he wouldn't have to tell her the routine that he lived. He could even lie.