I'd Run With the Wolves

They say that youth is wasted

On me and on all of us.

I'm far too vain to notice.

I'm far too young to care.

I'd run with the wolves. If you'd let me

I'd run with the antelope too,

Just to feel the hot breath

Of my own self in pursuit.

I'd stand on the edge of a building

A knife stuck in my chest,

A crowd of humans behind me--

The way to Heaven at last!

Angels play their instruments gladly

In the sun that browns their skin.

Then they play their instruments sadly,

In memory of all their sin.

The road to hell is paved

With diamonds and gold and fur.

You walk it, your feet grow warmer.

I walk on it straight to her.

In the fading light of the bedroom,

A hand caresses my neck.

The touch feels so familiar, until

I awake in the dark and the sweat.

A wolf joins the pack as a killer,

Which is why I choose to stray.

I'd rather the blood in my mouth be my own,

I'd rather feel the heat than the shade.

Under The Knife

The obstacle is the knife. And the surgical mask. And the latex gloves. And the scrubs.

It's the nurses' anxious eyes, the patient's pale skin, and the rhythmic blips of the heart monitor.

It's the medical journals, the notes from the conference in Tokyo last fall, the lessons forgotten from medical school. It's the remembering and the forgetting, and the worry that I might forget or not remember again.

It's the acknowledging. It's appreciating the phrase, "It wasn't your fault." It's understanding, "It could have been any of us."

It's keeping my breathing even, steadying my hands.

It's scrubbing down, snapping on, stepping into, reviewing, peering over. It's reviewing again, assessing, re-evaluating, assessing, re-evaluating, assessing, re-evaluating.

It's angling the light. It's taking the knife and making the first incision along the same line as the last one--who's not yet cold in the morgue under my feet.

The Sun Through The Clouds

Mitch stood in the sand and let the waves wash over his black leather dress shoes.

"These are the highest quality Italian leather," the saleswoman told him, "They'll never crease from day-to-day office wear."

"What if I wear them in the ocean?" Mitch asked.

"Why would you do a silly thing like that? Now, size 10 fit all right?"

The salt water licked at the polished black leather, it swirled and eddied around his heels. It snuck over the cuffs and soaked his black nylon socks. He wiggled his toes and felt the wet insoles squish.

It was cloudy, but the heat of the sun pushed through the thin grey veil. This was Santa Monica after all, the sun was relentless.

Mitch took off his glasses, the thick-framed ones with the designer's name printed in silver along the temples, and dropped them onto the wet sand at his feet. He unbottoned his shirt and dropped it too, delicately on to the sand. His belly ballooned within his white undershirt, stretching the cotton tight under his yellowed armpits.

He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and gave up the bills to the breeze; $1's, $5's, $20's, $100's. With a flick of his wrist he sent his Driver's License spinning like a frisbee out into the surf. It floated there for a moment, visible only as a small blur to Mitch, and then it was lost under the next breaking wave.

The waves beat on and on. His trousers were soaked to the knee. He pulled a small scissors from his pocket and cut off large chunks of grey hair that he had grown to shoulder length and heretofore kept healthy with fish oils and Vitamin E. The strands of hair, long wispy pieces of his DNA, he too set free on the wind.

He felt the urge to drive the scissors into his thighs, the backs of his hands, his ribcage, his eyeballs, his ears, the roof of his mouth. But, no. They would allow him on the ferry soaked, shirtless and bald maybe, but not likely bloody and blind.

"Yes," he said, "size 10 fits fine."

I've Made My Mind

I re-read the letter I had written to myself before the surgery. It was a summary of my life: family history, names of close friends, former professions, ex-lovers, current lovers, likes, dislikes, allergies, addresses, phone numbers, computer passwords. But at the end I had written a strange sentence: At least now, everything will be for certain.

I thought it a strange thing to write to myself, and I told the doctor to include that thought into my new Thought-Bank. "At least now, everything will be for certain" is a strange thing to write to one's future self. He included everything from the letter, of course. But, per protocol, did not record anything of the first five hours after I woke up from the surgery.

Therefore, my memory now begins with reading the last line of a letter I had written to myself the day before. While reading the letter I was eating a sesame-seed bagel with strawberry cream cheese, sitting in the cafeteria of a hospital that smelled unquestionably sanitary. The woman to my right had grey hair that shot off her head at alarming angles.

My second memory is of the doctors teaching me how to use a toilet.

This is, I supposed, what any second beginning is like. A doctor explained to me the concepts "apartment building" and "supermarket." They sounded terrifying, and I asked if we could return to colors, or possibly adjectives.

"It's your mind," she said, "we can put into it whatever you like. Now, do you recall 'repulsive' ?"

All The Violence of All The World

I walked into the Arizona desert as the sun was setting. The cliffs to my right were stained blood red in the waning light. The cacti were smaller than I thought they might be. I left the car engine running back there on the side of the road, a Neil Young tape hopping from Side B to Side A and back again. Three empty bottles of Jack under the passenger seat. Empty, the passenger seat, for the last 1,000 miles.

I heard a rattlesnake, or the wind in the brush, and it reminded me of the story my grandmother told me of the highest mountain in Africa that disappeared into the clouds. Only one man ever climbed all the way to the top, and he was so stunned by what he saw that he never came down.

"What did he see?" I asked.

"All the bloodshed across all the world," my grandmother said. "He saw beyond the seas to the other side of the world where women killed their babies, and men killed the women for killing the babies. He saw where the white man came from and how he used the guns he brought to Africa to kill his own brothers and sisters. He saw hatred to the west and to the east, and he feared the end of humanity."

"What shall we do?" I asked.

"There is nothing we can do," she said.

"Surely," I begged, "there is something!"

"Be good to those around you," she said, "take care of them, and when the violence of the world closes in around you, they will take care of you too." She kissed my cheek.

A bee landed on my cheek in the Arizona desert that night as the first stars came out. It did not sting me, but I felt the violence of the world closing in and I vomited on a dry sage bush.

Love and Hate

In the house I grew up in, we had magnetic poetry on the fridge. Nobody ever really spelled out anything profound, but once when I was about eight, my mom spelled, "Do not trust anyone." It stayed on the fridge untouched for years while other poems came and went. School papers, wedding invitations, summer vacation pictures, coupons, newspaper clippings that mentioned my father, church bulletins, obituaries, recipes, while-you-were-out notes, to-do lists, to-buy lists, to-sell-at-the-next-yard-sale lists, parking tickets, court summons, business cards, inspirational magnets, dentist appointment reminders, labels of favorite bottles of wine, niece's artwork--all danced on and off the face of the fridge in the eternal waltz of time hurtling onward, except for my mother's poem.

"Do not trust anyone." The phrase stuck in my head when I went to college, and I remember when the girl I was dating explained birth control to me and how we really didn't need to use condoms, I said, "I just really don't want to have a baby right now." What I was thinking was, Do not trust anyone.

I had a job as a waiter for after that, and there was an old man who came to the restaurant every Wednesday and always complained about the food. He ordered the same steak each week and complained to me how bad it was. I told the chef once and he admitted that the man had been coming for years, every Wednesday. He complained so much that the chef now pissed on the guy's steak each week when he cooked it. "The kitchen stinks for a while afterward," the chef said, "but that old fuck gets what he deserves. And then he's right at least, the food should taste like shit." It was the most disgusting thing I ever witnessed.

So now when I order at restaurants, or get in the back of a cab, or let a stranger use my camera to take a group photo, or sip out of the same bottle of Jack Daniel's as someone I just met, or dance with a girl at a club, or unsheathe a new razor head, or read what SPF 30 really means, or listen to the President make promises, or let my dog sniff another dog, or turn the paper to the continuing story on Page A12, or cross the street before the little white man appears, or play catch with my nephew, or try on a shirt in the fitting room of the store, or worse a swimsuit, or worse a hat--I think of my mother's unbroken poem, "Do not trust anyone." And I shudder.

Runnin'

The night I left without telling anybody, the dumb dog tried to follow me out the front door.

"Shh!" I said and pushed his face back though the screen door. He whimpered and licked my hand. "Gro-oss!" I wiped the slobber on my lucky red pants.

"I'll bring you somethin' nice," I told him to make him feel better, but I knew I wasn't never comin' back here. No sir.

It was cold and by the time I reached Jeremiah's farm I was darn sorry I only had one pair of socks.

"Silly girl," my mother would have said. "Stupid bitch," my father would have said.

No lights were on at Jeremiah's farm. Even though me and Jeremiah played ball toss together at school, I was afraid of that big white farmhouse. And Jeremiah's big white daddy.

Over the next hill the woods got thick on the south side of the road and I knew that somewhere through them trees was the train tracks and on the tracks was the trains and the trains went to New Orleans and to New York City and to California.

Jeremiah told me his daddy been everywhere and in New Orleans they got crawfish they call "prawns" big as your arm. In New York City everybody shouts all day and night, and they have a rule that you can never turn out the lights at night, and all the cars are painted yellow. And in California it's so sunny and hot all the time that everybody walks around butt-naked, and even still they have to go in the ocean to cool off 'cause I guess they don't got no shade or iceboxes or nothin'. That sounded scary to me, but Jeremiah thought it was fantastic.

I jumped onto a moving boxcar that night, no idea where I was goin'. I prayed for New Orleans and baby, I been doing nothin' but runnin' and prayin' ever since.

Raise It Up

At the last toast at the end of the world my father will be at the head of the table, raising his glass to humanity. "To you," he might say. Or, "To us." Or, "To God."

While buildings are crumbling and the land is sinking into the sea and the trees are on fire, I'll have my eyes on my father. "Let us be thankful for what we have been given," he will say.

It will be at this point that I'll sniff my drink to see if the bartender went easy on the gin, like my mother said I should. It will be strong. "Thank God," my father will say, his timing impeccable, "for the lives we have had."

I will try to pull the lime out to suck on it, because that doesn't count as drinking before the toast is over. My finger chasing the green slice around the ice cubes in my glass will remind me of the Titanic and how that must have felt like the end of the world to those poor bastards. "Our time is short," my father will continue. "Without hope for a future, let us find peace in our end."

At this point the roof will be swept off the house and the dry grass in the front lawn will catch fire. Like I said, impeccable timing. "Let us find comfort that humankind has lasted as long as we have without destroying ourselves." The ice in my glass will be melting at this point, and my sister will suddenly disintegrate into ash in the chair next to me.

I will steal her drink and pour it into my own. No need to be wasteful here at the end of time.

Finally, my father will raise his glass high above his head. "To life everlasting in the great world to come," he will shout over the hurricane-force wind that will blow fire through the house and swirl up into the darkened sky.

I will raise my glass and take the double-drink down in one big swallow. I will shut my eyes, and feel the flames on my cheeks and the fire of the gin in my throat.

What We Do Know

What we don't know is how Cynthia Cartwright, queen of the red clay court, lost at the French Open last year.

We know she had a lover who lived above a pie shop in Paris, and his apartment smelled of baking even in the middle of night when Cynthia visited.

We do know she never tried to learn to speak French, but stuck to rudimentary phrases like, "Baguette" or "Croissant."

We know she liked to carbo-load and that she was allergic to green grapes. She never drank white wine.

We know she told white lies and black ones, and made many promises she didn't keep.

We know her lucky green racquet with gold trim went strangely missing the night before the semi-final match.

We know she growled like a lion when she was losing, and she yipped like a puppy when she won.

We know she was the best in the world for five years running and nobody--not even Rena LaPena who wore her country's colors, red and magenta, at all times--could beat Cynthia.

Some people say she got sick from the musty, sweaty odor of Paris. But no, she knew the scent of her lover's briefs. Some think she ate a green grape before the match, or was tricked into it. Maybe a black cat crossed her path, or the grounds crew forgot to water the red clay and she forgot to notice. Or it was that she lost the green and gold racquet. Maybe the screams of so many years of accumulated fans was too much, finally.

I think she simply never, ever wanted to leave Paris in the summertime when the sky is blue and the flowers are blooming sweet.