In the Aeroplane over the Sea

I've been listening to this a lot.

What a beautiful face

I have found in this place

That is circling all round the sun

What a beautiful dream

That could flash on the screen

In a blink of an eye and be gone from me

Soft and sweet

Let me hold it close and keep it here with me

It popped up as we landed in Taipei, which was unsurprising because I've always managed to assign grave meaning to the music I hear at certain painful moments in life. This one was strangely fitting, I thought as I stared drearily out the window at the dreary Taiwanese sky.

And one day we will die

And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea

But for now we are young

Let us lay in the sun

And count every beautiful thing we can see

Love to be

In the arms of all I'm keeping here with me

Three days on the ground, enough to remember, revisit, and lose. Enough to say hello and goodbye, goodbye. Goodbye.

What a curious life

We have found here tonight

There is music that sounds from the street

There are lights in the clouds

Anna's ghost all around

Hear her voice as it's rolling and ringing through me

Soft and sweet

How the notes all bend and reach above the trees

It is a dry, hard thing, this sort of grief. The leaving hasn't happened yet, and still, it has.

I could feel it then, and I can feel it now. I will never see them again. Not in their little apartment, where portraits, enshrined, hang proudly from the walls, stand on tables, covering every dusty surface not consumed by books and dust and the detritus of nearly a century of life. Not in my old home, here for the summer, pulling magic out of bursting suitcases, stringing together beads, stealing dustpans, cracking walnuts.

Just in photographs, the glossy ones from the infinite number of Kodak rolls developed at Wal-Mart, with the date stamped in pale pink dots across the backs, a neat stack of them in the blue-green-white resealable envelopes, thickly padded. Just in video tapes, from his giant camcorder I'd always needed two hands to lift, grainy but steady, that we used to just leave running on the television while my dad transferred them from their 8mm cassettes to VHS.

Just in memories, which so quickly have faded.

Now, how I remember you

How I would push my fingers through

Your mouth to make those muscles move

That made your voice so smooth and sweet

But now we keep where we don't know

All secrets sleep in winter clothes

With one you loved so long ago

Now he don't even know his name

When I first heard it, I thought it was just another lo-fi love song. It is, sort of. But I've come to hear it as a sort of eulogy.

What a beautiful face

I have found in this place

That is circling all round the sun

And when we meet on a cloud

I'll be laughing out loud

I'll be laughing with everyone I see

Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all

I stood behind my mother when we said goodbye.

"Don't cry," she said, but not to me.

I stood behind my mother and cried so she couldn't see.

But her mother saw, and, ashamed, we shed the same tears.

Devil Like Me

I never understood why he was so angry all the time. 

There was nothing to be angry about. 

We had a good house with stairs, no one hit us, and we had Funyuns waiting on the kitchen table when we got back from school.

There was nothing to be angry about.

My heart and soul were never mine to own,

What you care to die for?

What you care to die for?

But now I understand. I can't explain it. It's an itch under the skin, a bubbling--the well of expectation, never filled, growing deeper, deeper, and every action becomes failure. A righteous entitlement.

I am angry.

We die alone, we'll all die young,

What you care to die for?

What you care to die for?

We have long conversations on the phone in the dead of night after too much alcohol where we cry inside and our voices break and nothing seems to make sense, so we cling to each other because we know we, the two of us, at least, understand what it's like, even if we don't understand why.

Snow, snow glistens on the ledge, whiskey on the bed,

shake it out and light a cigarette

Miss me when you, you wish you weren't right.

Obsession runs in the family, it appears.

I can't stop this anger, I can't sit on it, can't bear the detonations in my chest every night, can't, can't, can't.

So I leave regret for the next day and numb, numb numb, numb the violence.

Shake me all out if I'm wrong, for you, for you.

Shake it all out when I'm gone, I, for you.

In the past month, I've written over 70,000 words about a man and a father that could have been. It took me about 30,000 words to realize I was writing about myself and what I wished so very badly I had, in some dark, embarrassed corner of my mind.

I write about people who have lost everything, who struggle and find a way through, surviving on the love of a family that's been found, never had.

Is the devil so bad if he cries in his sleep, while the earth turns,

and his kids learn to say, "fuck you,"

they don't, love you.

Hypocrisy, my mind cries.

Love, my heart whispers.

I want to leave. I want to leave. I want to wave goodbye and never return, but I'm still here, drowning, willingly.

I don't understand what's happening, but it's happening regardless, and I find myself reduced to an unwilling passenger, neglecting life and responsibility to dive deep into a world of imagination where my sense of loss is justified, where I have a father, a mother, people who've taken me in of their own accord.

Where I'm not a burden so much as a blessing.

Does the devil get scared if she dies in her dreams,

where the earth burns,

she cries 'cause she's nothing like you, is she like you?

Blessings are bullshit.

What'ch you want from a devil like me, devil like me?

You see the devil don't mean to be evil,

he just regrettably forgets to exceed expectation.

I'm on the verge of explosion. I listen to loud music and don't know why. I almost cried when Lou Reed arrived in the mail, and I placed that vinyl on my turntable, and, soulfully, I felt sweet nuthin'.

The last time I'd felt sweet nuthin', I was in a large bathroom in a hotel in Killarney, and I'd decided that throwing myself off a cliff would be the greatest "fuck you" in the history of my existence.

Holes riddled in your head, little bit of lead,

shake it out and line a silhouette

Sometimes, I think I might do something purely out of spite. I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I live from bottle to bottle. I only drink stout. It's strong, but not sharp. Rich, but not overbearing.

It's something old, familiar, and it reminds me of river banks and bare feet skirting cow pats, bare feet on gravel, pinching, gingerly.

It is memory.

Miss me when you, you wish weren't kind of glad.

Shake me all out when you're done, for you, for you

Shake it all out when I'm gone, I, you.

Of course, missing everything is only a part of it. 

I am Plato's man in the cave, dragged to the light and thrust back into the darkness, where shadows mock--No one believes you.

Well, I don't believe you either.

Is the devil so bad if he cries in his sleep,

while the earth turns

And his kids learn to say, "fuck you"

they don't love you.

I am so old. 

I am so tired.

I write all day, pounding, cursing, dreaming of distant worlds, a life away.

I run when I can't write anymore.

Today, the rain was like bullets against my skin, raw and red, furious.

Does the devil get scared if she dies in her dreams,

where the earth burns, she cries

'cause she's nothing like you, is she like you?

I like to think that I've reached the point where I can say I don't care anymore.

I think I did, years ago, and then I burst out the other side and found that, no, I've always cared. I always will. I will always care for him, bound as we are by blood and shared confusion, even as he carts around little black boxes of numbness, hard things, only a little grand.

It feels like my responsibility, the only one I have left in the world, and the only one I cannot bear to fail.

We're all we have left, and we cling, distantly.

What do you want from a devil like me?

am I like you?