Feral Poetry

(t.w.: self-harm, addiction, mental illness)

“not tonight, Mr. Young Ghost.”

he had come in too drunk to crash, Mr. Young Ghost (alcoholic, schizophrenic, heroin addict), had it only been a little i’d have let it slide, he’d have zonked out in the corner on a floor mat (the bunks were always full, ALWAYS fucking full, this country has been killing itself so long, it’s an art form), but he got punchy at this level, so

“no, sir, Mr. Young Ghost, not tonight”

i said, he grumbled understandingly. i was always calm with him, he knew that

“next door?”

he grumbled acceptingly, we started walking.

next door was county detox (drunk tank is kinda accurate but the staff are trained and caring) not my french circus, not my french contortionists (i don’t like animals being forced to perform). too drunk for the shelter, go to detox. easy peasy pizza squeezey

take him in. now he’s theirs. he asks to use the bathroom. they say yes. (he’s been calm with me but they should have checked his pockets like they always do, i feel guilty saying it, but there it is).

“k. later.” i said

“later.” they say smiling. i know them. we’re friendly. i’m heading towards the door.

then one’s yelling my name.

“he’s got a knife! he’s got a knife!”

run back. three people cower behind me. Mr. Young Ghost in front, slashing at his left forearm with a pocket knife. my hands go up, palms out like i’m casting a fucking forcefield, step forward…

knife points at me. step back. i’m talking, god knows what.

“put it down. please. let us help you. yadda yadda yadda”

voice behind me, yelling at police on phone.

“please, Mr. Young Ghost, look at me”

he does

“put it down”

i’m begging.

“please”

he drops it. my foot kicking it behind me. my palms on his shoulders not quite pinning him to the wall. red/blue lights in the window. cops in, guns out, they calm quickly. i hold his hand, keeping his arm still for the EMT’s. the cops ask me to ride with him in the ambulance. hold his hand the whole way. he struggles in the soft restraints when i let go and they wheel him into the emergency room.

debrief with cops. they’re quietly impressed. ride back to shelter in police car. wave at people in other cars from backseat. get a selfie to send friends.

check on detox folk. they’re shaken. they hug me. they say thank you. finally get back to shelter to tell the new girl what happened. it’s literally her first day. she comes back though. she was tough.

boss and coworkers sing my praises. new useless middle manager sends me flattering email. offers counseling for the four of us. not interested. work there another couple years. other things happen during. then moved on.

i don’t tell the story often. it’s bleak and violent. but people who hear it sometimes tell me i was brave. and maybe i was. it’s nice to think so anyway.

in reality, it was a vivid blur of blood and panic and, if i’m honest, is a memory i simply kinda wish i didn’t have. i have a few memories like that. i assume everyone does.

the story doesn’t end cheerily, but there’s hope in there somewhere. there usually is.

Mr. Young Ghost recovered from that night and i saw him many more times in good ways and bad ways and a year and a half later he died.

i never found out how. you often don’t.

I am waiting at the station. There is a bench, the seats divided by shallow wooden slats. These days, I don’t have to worry about whether or not I will fit, my body takes up the space of half a person, I am fading away, until a boy grabs my wrist, he says, “I’m afraid for this world, in which trains can go in two directions.” I can tell he does not know his father. “My name is Jared,” he says, and waits.

He is gripping a journal with bone-white knuckles in one hand, the way that a boy who has had love slip through his fingers is trained to. I want to tell him, “Put the book down, Jared, speak, only when you are spoken for. This world is never as kind as you’d expect, never as cold as your fingers and toes tell you.” Instead, I pick his little fingers off like scabs, the determination frightens me.

We watch the trains go by, Jared and I. Sometimes I count the cars as they flash past. Jared asks me, “Where are you going?” Sometimes they pass in an instant, and I think of dying. Jared asks, “Why are you here?” Sometimes it is all I can do not to run alongside, the cheap thrill that could save me but just as easily kill.

I want to tell him about the grocery aisles I know, about more excess than he can imagine, I want to quench the hunger in his balled-up fists. Violence comes quiet to us, the ones who listen, the ones who take. I want to take him with me where I am going, the racing pulse that will carry us there, I want him euphoric as his father reaches out behind. It is nice to be a passenger sometimes.

I am carving a name for myself in this moment. Jared notices and shrinks back from the blade. I bite the inside of my mouth more times than I can count. The skin is always scored, one point, many, the numbers swim in pools of blood. A young girl, overjoyed, yet I cannot see above the surface.

Maybe I am looking for God. I crave the mineral longing, the carnage, the flood. Maybe I am the one I seek. Jared stares like he knows me, like he can taste what I taste, see what I see, but I know he is not my reckoning, he cannot see over the table where I sit. Only a child, yet so wise, I want to tell him, “Stay, Jared, do not run away just yet.”

He physically beat his success story and there was seldom any mercy to be extended. By the time he accepted in his old age that he would never get a gold star for his attempts to erase blood and history, it was too late to undo any of it. But before he understood his own demise, and the unpredictable nature of my expressions, he beat me to act out, just how much he resented his mestizaje. He beat me because at any moment, like a babalu, I guess, I could come out of the closet? Or out from beneath the bed. He hated himself while idolizing the wealthy white women we'd see on 5th ave, while simultaneously, may I say, speaking highly of Malcolm X. The brother was confused? Or do you see, can you admit by now?-- that this is a schism caused by a very sick society.

He literally commented aloud, that time while on 5th, something about white women never having cellulite. As if cellulite and being white were two worlds that shan't/ever could meet, and I said, excuse me? And right there, at a red traffic light between 5th and Lex, we fought. I was driving and I was never having any of it again.

My dad's favorite movies were as follows: Ragtime (whew, this one) A soldier's story (close second) The sound of music The ox-bow incident A raisin in the sun Imitation of life (he was covertly banking on this one) Battle of Algiers all the Italian anti fascist movies Sophia Loren starred in The Nuremberg Trials The prisoner of second avenue Dr. Zhivago Hello Dolly (favorite scene with Louis Armstrong) and Singing in the rain, but more importantly West Side Story. These movies are all pieces of a puzzle; shards of a broken mirror.

Every admission spoken to me or exposed through the arts was an absolute act of revealing the hypocrisy, the anger, and the taboo he suffocated on. Every bruise I subsequently acquired because of this has been my hard fought salvation, but too, my ultimate reclamation. These old bruises never go away. I know a lot of people would like to hear otherwise and maybe for some they do (?) That's not my truth. My bruises are not on the surface~surface. They have sank but through the strata within, transformed into hidden soul welts I polish up and tend to with gentleness. In my work, I've sculpted my fathers abuse, and the one perpetrated against him by his mother, grandfather, by his culture, government, patriarchy, religion, and by global history itself, into hopefully, something that looks like generational healing. Generational healing takes courage and vigilance. Getting back to Malcolm X--Somewhere in him, he must've known that I would one day read Malcolm X, and that in doing so, my father's life would be completely laid out. Because I was obnoxiously rebellious, I would read Malcolm at the breakfast table each morning, while he ate his cereal. He behaved, unfazed. Almost pleased. As much as he despised me, because I honestly think he did, he had me tag along wherever he went, for a very long time, even as he aged; and because of this, I got to live out vicariously how cheaply this society regarded him; how utterly dangerous it was to be someone like him.

I've logically surmised that my father would attack me as a means to kill his perceived racial hex, his tragedy, his limitations, humiliations, emasculation, the struggle against poverty, the demons that seem to closely pursue those labeled, "other" wherever they go. In my writing this, leaving it as a testament so that it can be its own thing outside my head, I need to also stress that he physically abused me too, to show me, as if it were an act of charity, how and why "they" beat him; and how and why they could beat me. Wherever you go, he would hammer in, you are not safe.

I am not a doll performing in the parroted play.

I’m softer.

I’m trying to pretend I’m not real, but I’m real. I’m gutted. And don’t you find that fascinating. I do. I’ve scraped my body open with the toe of my boot and a scavenged stick, pulling apart the fibres and the entrails of my innermost soul, the deep recesses.

Look!

I found the remnants of a heart!

Once such racing red and pounding! Look now!

How it decomposes all these lullabies in the gleam of the light. How it has this viscous mashed texture, oozing, almost as if it weeps for itself.

Ah! I’ve found more!

The now cold squeeze of kidneys and liver and oh! the once delicate puff of vibrant pink lungs, see how the stick, it punctures their bloated timeless worthless sacks of flesh torn wide.

This little cracked skull—so dull. The grey riddled, with worms and little beetles. So precious. A home for the homeless. Breathing life into the small things that needed this crushed bone to be a home.

This body. This mind. This soul. Had things to say. But I lay lifeless, gutted. Silent. While you gnawed most mindlessly at my bones.

swimming in this flood of pixel-pumped plastic faces. every smile premeditated, every sunset edited with a ring light, and a forced laugh.

some call it content. i call it -nothing.

i can almost feel them out there, polishing their lunch for likes, filtering reality through ten-dollar apps and calling it authentic.

is any of this real? hell, i don’t even know if i’m real anymore, or just some ghost, haunting the leftovers of an analog life.

it’s too easy now no blood, no blisters, just tap, scroll, repeat. and nobody’s keeping score because the scoreboard got bought out by a brand that sells hope in 30-second clips.

i keep scribbling these thoughts on napkins, receipts, backs of envelopes- and they all get swept up into the landfill of a collective shrug.

if i could teach a god to beg, i would start with the mouth. i would start with the teeth, blunt them down, make them round like apologies, make them swallow their own divinity until it burns through the gut like spoiled wine. if i could teach a god to beg, i would tell them: you do not know suffering until you have lived inside a body that does not love you back.

this is how i learned prayer. not from books or temples or the hushed voices of women with good posture and unforgiving hands, but from watching my own body betray itself in real time. from feeling something sacred rot in my throat when i told a man yes when i meant get your hands off me. from swallowing silence and pretending it filled me.

if i could teach a god to beg, i would take them to the house where i grew up. show them where the walls held secrets, where the doors did not lock, where the air carried a weight no one ever spoke of. i would take them to the bedroom where i learned that love can be an accident, but violence is always deliberate.

if i could teach a god to beg, i would take them to the night i sat in a car, hands on the wheel, knowing i would not drive home. i would tell them: do you see? do you see how even the stars don’t watch over me anymore?

if i could teach a god to beg, i would tell them: it is not enough to be worshipped. you must also know what it means to be abandoned.

There are small breathing sounds coming from the bedroom. I wake each day at 5am, like some kind of magic trick, but my wife sleeps well into the morning. She covers her face with the blanket to ward off the light. Sleep, for her, is a last refuge from her daily struggles with life these days. I leave her be, and let her dream as long as possible, quietly pecking away at my thoughts in a vain attempt to make sense of things, or at least to console myself with the knowledge, that i've tried.

We built our forts and foxholes out of pine needles, armed ourselves with sticks as guns and bayonets, pinecone grenades, and the unlimited ammo of our imaginations.

We would all die that day and every day after, but we were all victors by sunset; a war we called summer. When it ended, and school began, the only true casualty was our childhood.

Lost are those days of innocence to the violence of time. The fruit of knowledge is bittersweet because its flesh is made from memory. Sheltered are the children of now, products of parents' fear of planting a bad seed.

Swords and dragons, son, instead of guns and war. Perhaps I do you no good by treating you more softly than I was treated, denying you the impenetrable density required for an outer shell. Or perhaps I just want to see your summers last longer than mine.

God sent an angel. One of his least qualified, though. Fluent only in

Lemme get back to you. The angel sounded like me, early twenties,

unpaid interning. Proficient in fetching coffee, sending super

vague emails. It got so bad God personally had to speak to me.

This was annoying because I’m not a religious person. I thought

I’d made this clear to God by reading Harry Potter & not attending

church except for gay weddings. God did not listen to me. God is

not a good listener. I said Stop it please, I’ll give you wedding cake,

money, candy, marijuana. Go talk to married people, politicians,

children, reality TV stars. I’ll even set up a booth for you,

then everyone who wants to talk to you can do so

without the stuffy house of worship, the stuffier middlemen,

& the football blimps that accidentally intercept prayers

on their way to heaven. I’ll keep the booth decorations simple

but attractive: stickers of angels & cats, because I’m not religious

but didn’t people worship cats? Thing is, God couldn’t take a hint.

My doctor said to eat an apple every day. My best friend said to stop

sleeping with guys with messiah complexes. My mother said she is

pretty sure she had sex with my father so I can’t be some new

Asian Jesus. I tried to enrage God by saying things like When I asked 

my mother about you, she was in the middle of making dinner

so she just said Too busy. I tried to confuse God by saying I am 

a made-up dinosaur & a real dinosaur & who knows maybe 

I love you, but then God ended up relating to me. God said I am

a good dinosaur but also sort of evil & sometimes loving no one.

It rained & we stayed inside. Played a few rounds of backgammon.

We used our indoor voices. It got so quiet I asked God

about the afterlife. Its existence, human continued existence.

He said Oh. That. Then sent his angel again. Who said Ummmmmmm.

I never heard from God or his rookie angel after that. I miss them.

Like creatures I made up or found in a book, then got to know a bit.

The sky was bruised like a kitchen sink, and an unsolicited mist clung to the windshield, like when the guy at the gas station asks for spare change after offering to wipe it off with a dirty rag.

I was surprised when Dad just drove us past the school. He said we were going to skip it and do something special that day; just the two of us. We drove to his favorite diner downtown, across the street from the bookshop. We ate pancakes with bacon and drank freshly-squeezed orange juice.

He had yelled at me that morning, told me to finish the egg burrito he made me for breakfast, that I was lucky to have any breakfast at all with all the starving children in the world. He later apologized for yelling. I figured he was feeling bad about it and wanted to make up for it. My dad made pancakes, but only on weekends. I told him I preferred his pancakes, that these tasted like glue. He smiled with a mouthful, and we bumped fists.

We then drove to a beach in Half Moon Bay and spent the rest of the time racing the crashing waves. I noticed him once or twice just staring into the horizon. The Pacific was his favorite ocean. I would run up to him and try to tackle him into the sand. He would just pick me up and swing me around, pretending to throw me into the water. We ate chicharrón tacos topped with slices of avocado from a taco truck before heading back.

The smell of the ocean lingered on our clothes as we drove home, the radio blaring '80s and '90s music on the classics station, 103.7. He teared up when they played that song by the band with the music video where a girl reads a comic book, becomes a drawing, and they run together and everything. I told him that was the best day ever. He said, “Be good to your mom.” It was something he said often, but at that time, it felt out of place. He dropped me off at home and said he was going to pick up something for dinner; noodles from the Chinese restaurant by Trader Joe's, my favorite. He got out of the car and came around to give me a big hug. If I think about it long enough, I swear I can recall feeling his heart breaking with his arms around me as he said he loved me. I told him I loved him, too.

I couldn’t wait to tell Mom about the day.

I remember how frantic she was when he didn’t answer his phone or come home that evening.

A couple of days later, two police officers were speaking with my mom by the front door. Mom hasn’t been the same since. I swear I could smell the ocean that day.

There was a funeral and everything, but those days, and years, just blended together into a fog.

Part of me is still waiting for him to walk through the door with noodles from that restaurant. I haven’t eaten there since he left.

I just want to talk to him, you know. Tell him that I miss him and that he’s the reason why I still have the hardest time telling the difference between I love you and goodbye.

I don’t know why she thought she had the right to tell me all of this. Some people think they need to tell you everything they feel right when they’re feeling it. It wasn’t unkind, but unexpected—out of place and time with what we both are. She needed me to know that she had been somebody once—had demanded respect and had been a person of means. Only a part of me cared even a little about that. But I understood why she felt like she needed for me to know that. In her eyes, I am somebody. She needed me to know that she had once been more than she is now. That gave her the authority to tell me what she saw in me: that regardless of how tough my parents made me and how high the expectations were, I could never have accomplished it all unless it was in me already. She said something about me being an iron rod. She spoke so rapidly that I could tell she was nervous, but she was determined to speak her mind. Afterwards, there was nothing more to say.

Weight: you wake up with the elephant on your chest again; you pull yourself out from the warm mass of sheets; your shower works most of the time; your coffee could be better; you go and do all of the things that you should do; you’ve forgotten what it was you wanted to do; the elephant keeps trumpeting and you think a glass of wine sounds like a good thing; the elephant lives everywhere you go; the elephant is on the phone; the elephant is asking you to pick up some things at the store for her; the elephant is telling you what a good person you are; the elephant hunts in your woods when you’re not around; the elephant secretly resents you for putting yourself out there like that;

Breadth: time is an illusion. no. time is a robin’s egg. still. between the times lie grammatical errors waiting to blossom into truth. you can hold up an entire globe of robins’ eggs. a globe is the size of the earth. a robin’s egg is the size of a moon. a moon is as wide as your arms can open to infinity. everything collapses into everything else. mirror images appear inside of mirror images. inside a robin’s egg is a world where you run through the woods covered only in your own beads of sweat.

Height: about 172.72 cm; about 5,000 feet; about from here to the moon and back 12 times; about 1 mm; about 40 cubits; about a stone’s throw; about a mile as the crow flies; about as tall as every tale you ever told; about volleyball net; about Arenal; about Matterhorn; about having to change altitude to avoid turbulence;

I was four years old and I remember this, yes the memory is mine, not a conglomeration strung together from other's words or descriptions. My mother remembers it very clearly as well, but her memory is almost entirely separate from my own in perspective.

i’ve seen more than i wanted to hands fumbling for coins like prayers eyes staring through me like i owe them something they think i’m a machine

i’m a fuckin’ confession booth full of cheap sins and cheaper salvation

the night shift janitor buys a candy bar…it’s 2 am same one every night same defeated sigh like he’s trading a dollar for a little bit of sweetness before the mop water pulls him under again

kids come with sticky fingers and loud laughter their joy presses all the wrong buttons but i give them what they want anyway because joy doesn’t last long here

a woman in a red coat once stood in front of me didn’t press a single button just stared like i had answers like i could spit out a map…or a reason she left with nothing but her reflection in my glass

i’ve been kicked, slapped, cursed at like it was my fault their dollar didn’t matter but i don’t break because breaking is a luxury i can’t afford so i stand here swallowing pain…spitting out snacks

the coins come the coins go the faces change the faces stay the same i’m full, i’m empty, i’m forgotten but every now and then someone looks at me like i’m more than metal and plastic

and for that moment