Afterimages like looking into the sun but I must relax and be present in doctor’s office before I can return to the scene of my affliction.
Aaron, in a meeting is parking the car near Industrious Therapy on 52nd Street while I take the elevator to 6th floor where I tap the screen and scan my palm before writing in waiting room filled with news reports which nobody wants to watch.
Skin doctor will observe my latest continuous example of flesh gone wrong as I try to breathe hopefully and without fear of yesterday’s potential for recurrent tragedy.
Help me. Help me help myself.
Pet Shop Boys sing of another world of homeless disco drama in 1993 Little Caesars favorite in my very theatrical headphones.
Putting pen to paper often helps when I’ve exhausted other options.
Breathe. Listen. Write as Aaron announced his ascension.
In the theater there is no escape no respite from disturbances however minor or intense.
I try to ground try to limit the annoyance and focus on the other worlds flashing before my eyes but it fades into a mishmash of barely recognized words and actions
I feel nothing except a mounting terror that I will disappear again and wake somewhere unknown.
I pull myself into the present but I’m just as lost as if I’d walked into a completely different film.
I want them to rewind but the projectionist is an unforgiving dick so I try to feel out what I’ve missed as I continue to struggle with language and context.
I ask Aaron where a character escaped to but the movement returns and I can’t hang on to the moment and having asked twice in his panic stricken voice I argue internally – what are we to do?
I turn from the screen which has become a spoiler reel which would ruin the film when I finally get to experience it in full.
I weep, holding Aaron’s hand as I’m left behind; he wants to see it with me but I’m not even there… just a cacophonous shell in which I hold my younger self and try to convince him that we are okay and that I know how to get us home.
Outside, confusion threatens destruction but I know north from south and east from west.
I head north and then east surrounded by revelers, I make note of the Avenue names until I reach Madison, when I realize I can navigate towards therapy, where instinct will kick in and return us safely to our home.
I was going to write to you about the nightmares you inspired but amidst distraction I scrawled: 2/27 and I decided to follow that path instead.
I do that now. I observe seemingly random behavior and allow it to take me somewhere unplanned until I reach the end.
“This is not the end.”
A bumper sticker on trashy artsy wall and:
“EAT MY PUSSY SO I KNOW IT’S REAL”
which strikes me as poetic and insightful, rather than profane… sad and beautiful until Madonna’s Sex Book Mix of Erotica starts playing and I dance myself to distraction.
The train is parked in Harlem where a desperate portion of Trump’s thousands are now kept in confusion, doubt and heartbroken tragedy: a trauma that will haunt them for all of their days.
Is this how they were shipped here? In crowded fear drenched train cars? Where have I heard that before?
His overcompensating tower shadows the city, forever tainting the old neighborhood of black spanish jazz renaissance…
How many other Cotton Clubs cross red, white and blue are infected with his orange sacrilege?
Written by Jason Wright July 2, 2018
Poem written but untitled on July 2, 2018.
Title given July 11, when Green Day’s “American Idiot” single was reported to have re-entered British charts in response to Trump’s upcoming visit.
Air conditioned train car is nearly empty but filled with conversation.
I wonder why it is that they talk so loudly?
Impairment? Desperation to be heard?
An aching need to be continuously annoying?
They’re young; perhaps mentally they are still in the noisy schoolyard and must scream to be observed in that wave of riotous infants…
Or maybe Mommy & Daddy never noticed them at all and they howl for attention, love and affection while Mommy drinks herself into a senseless stupor and Daddy lies forever six feet under unreachable.
Crying baby has yet to learn the lost language of abandonment which must be taught to more than two-thousand changeling children in perverse dollhouse TV replicas of unloving American schoolrooms.
The impossible pressing of flesh that distance provides may well be revelatory but God bless those who are spared such unwanted visions of cursed solitude.
God bless those who are forced by their innocence to endure such disturbances; such nightmarish realities that they may forever struggle to reclaim what has been or soon will be forever stolen from them.
May they survive, prosper, find comfort of some kind in their shared experience, those tear stained imperatives.
The shaking sweaty confrontation with one’s own reflection when memory is shattered, fragmented, splintered beyond recognition and momentary awareness is threatened with mindless annihilation.
Will I remember this later… or will an older Jason fight through a therapist’s session to recover the me he has lost?
Before I leave but after I wake there is an overwhelming terror; a senseless type of heightened stress triggered by my inner ticking clock, which never trusts and fears interruption.
After I leave but before I arrive there is inspiration, analysis and exploration, a journey into self where understanding will one day hopefully reside – this contemplation is nearly always external, as it’s flooded out of my brain down through my fingertips thumbtacked onto paper pages – an activity I have often despised which has become my truest salvation.
In the breazy 70 sunlight city streets of New York my indoor apathy is burned away to cinders… and I can smile at the rainbow swirls projected before me, which originate in last night’s misery once refracted through the murky depths, the prism of a cuckold’s constant lust which transform that sickening nauseating sensation into chemical reactions associated with sensuality; the impotent erection of the overstimulated yet never truly satisfied bottom.
The reasoning behind transitions is all but lust
– FUCK –
is all but LOST amidst an intensely brief panic when I lose track of my letters, memory once again escaping from the prison of my mind –
How could I have forgotten this horror?
Is this to be my future hell?
WRITE IT DOWN SO YOU CAN’T FORGET!
Time for tests and uncomfortable questions.
A lack of specificity resembles the oft forgotten pattern.
Not names but films, not train letters but direction…
This is NOT like THE ME that I have known until this recent phenomena.
Perfect score on memory test at therapist’s office though there is visual spatial strangeness – my cube doesn’t begin with a square and my clock is a Salvador Dali sketch:
“The Persistence of Memory” becoming an ironic and completely menacing title.
Nothing to worry about, she says and I hear these words, like poetry.
Tip of the Tongue Syndrome and lexical access occurs in stages…
I remain fearful but also amused, inspired and enamored with her decisional words.
Our time is up despite the continued ticking of my misshapen clock.
I play a numbers game in hopes of recalling the percentages, the statistics and rates and proportions of a love affair between two unknowns.
What is the sum total of a failed relationship?
There were seventeen summers before that summer when we met, and that was seventeen summers ago.
But we were both of us older than seventeen when we met and made love for nearly five hours, on the eighth day of the seventh month of the two-thousand-and-first year.
We spent nine weeks together; four of them happily.
I once waited seven days in his bedroom, reading five-hundred-seventy-six pages of “The Prince of Tides”… before I drove one hundred and forty-one miles, back to Ann Arbor and waited to be betrayed.
Betrayal arrived on my twenty-seventh birthday, the twelfth day of the eighth month, but I wouldn’t learn the truth for several more encounters.
On August thirteenth, which fell on the second day of the week, my stomach became partially paralyzed, and I’ve been sick every day since then.
Before he told me the truth, he sent me flowers, made love to me and tortured me with lies and abandonment… those flowers were like perfumed poison when I learned the truth and saw them wilting in my bedroom.
The last time we had sex was August twenty-fourth.
The first day that we met there were fireworks; beautiful bursts of poisonous flowers, omens which lit up our lives and then faded all too quickly… but our lust prevented us from seeing this prophetic truth as anything other than celebratory pyrotechnics.
Numbers are often deceptive because they don’t truly reveal the truth with the accuracy that they are ascribed; they don’t calculate the geometry of emotion or the calculus of grief and lust and shame.
Every number that walks through the door can determine our differential and satisfy our algebraic need for multiples; while concurrently erasing the totality of truth; simultaneous equations of salvation and destruction.
Numbers, you’ll learn, can be vicious… because numbers will often lie.
