Sunday Comix (Journal Entry the Ninth)
2000-08-22 - Written 2000-03-12
Thoughts:
Hole in the Hole (a poem)
close the space
make it smaller
get a little closer
build a hole in the hole
shrink the space
this space between us
dance a little closer
so close to me
close this hole
make it disappear
not even light
can escape us now
fill me with unleaded
burn me tear me drag me
touch me drive me shag me
dancing so close
so close to me
build a hole in the hole
fill your hole with me
this missing piece of me
I'll fill the hole
the missing piece of you
we can fix the hole
the hole between us
build a little hole
a little hole in the hole
in the hole of the hole
of the whole
we are whole
dance a little closer
just little closer...
just a little closer...
Choices (an essay)
She sits at the small semicircular table. She paws through her mail, opening anything that does not contain the statement �amount owed�. Her cigarette still in hand, she draws a mug of tea to her mouth. �It doesn�t say, �cept for in small print at the bottom, I found it.� She says, taking another sip of tea to stable herself. �Costs sixty dollars a month.� She�s talking about life insurance of some sort, which is far more expensive then her life can afford. It doesn�t matter that she has no insurance, security, or money, nothing ever matters. This woman has been sitting at the table for the better part of twenty years, wasting her life away in a sea of Marbro and Salda. Her eyes hold the evidence of her mental instability; the pupils are small as pinpoints, the bloodshot cornea yellow as the crud beneath her fingernails. I�ve been starring out the broken window, trying not to pay attention to the fate of my mother. I follow one of her cats across the yard with my eyes. The fuzzball walks in the snow, looking for something to eat, because its owner has run out of cat food again. The cat�s owner has run out of food for herself as well. Over the years, she�s become used to not eating, used to sitting in the dark, used to being insane. She�s been insane since her kids left. But then, her kids left her because she �wasn�t stable enough� for the court. Even though her kids are gone she�s not lonely. She has her cats to talk to, and keep her happy. And when that isn�t enough, or when they avoid her, she has the voices in her head. They don�t tell her to do anything, they don�t really tell her anything. They are a murmur in the walls, whispers just beyond her senses, driving her to hell in a flower basket. On Tuesdays, a federal care worker comes in, damn government. The government is the power which has allowed her to sit at that table, to be senile and to pay some of her bills.
�Jason, you never talk with me anymore.� She says, her words a slur of unfamiliar blurbs, her plaque encrusted tongue exposing itself to me. I lean back in the broken chair, formulating a response to a question I had not really heard. �So, when are you going to quit smoking, and get a job?� She just goes silent and stares into the base of her empty mug. �You can�t live like this forever�� I say, even as I think, �why not? you�ve done it for this long, haven�t you?� Even after all this time, she still seems optimistic. She still thinks that she has a reason to live, still thinks that she�ll be out of debt in a couple years. She thinks it could be worse. She could be back in BMHI, strapped to a bed, without visitation rights, starving from a lack of cigarettes� again. My attention slowly drifts to her frail arm, which still bears a scar, horizontal across her left wrist. She wasn�t out of life yet, she wasn�t going to give up this time. But when hell is the only thing more torturous than your life, it�s hard to keep on living. She rubs out another cigarette, smoked down to the filter.
It scares me, that I might inherit this, that her life might be mine. It scares me that my sisters are so much like her. My eyes become lost, looking at a package of rolling tobacco on the table. I could steal it, mix it with some other substances, and sell it for a decent profit. Then I wouldn�t be poor, then I wouldn�t be like her. I might be worse. It�s scary, what it all depends on. The choices we make.
