Richard Diebenkorn Untitled, c. 1950-52
August, Princeton
No work again today. I went to my old town and walked around. Sweating through my jeans. Whistlejacket in a soggy brown paper bag tucked under my arm from the used bookstore. Twenty five bucks down the tubes. I shaved my head again and my daughter cried. I think it makes me look tougher. I tried not to think about her red eyes and big salty tears as I kept stealing glances in shop window reflections. The sun cut through right after the rain and brought a wall of August humidity. This is where I usually get nostalgic about slow summer New Jersey afternoons. The stuff of legends. Lost to an endless scroll. Baseball on the front lawn. Stolen beers in the woods. Kissing a girl from another town in the cold darkness of the Regal on Route 130. The cold red vinyl of a booth at the Americana Diner at midnight. Cracked cement pavers and islands of cigarette butts and broken bottles cut dead center of cul de sacs. But not this time. I swam down Nassau Street. I kept telling myself that I was taking control as I spiraled clockwise down the drain. On ripped jean knees wailing into the microphone. Bam bam bam. Verse chorus. Verse chorus. It all ends. You can live an entire life under two minutes. What’s the point of dragging the dead deer up the hill? Everything was still. This moment. Not the beauty of the past, not the creeping black terror future. The impending out of control. The sky, the trees hanging over that gothic architecture, the ivy, the beautiful girls and their beautiful college eyes behind their tiny college sunglasses. Linen wrinkled blonde hair. This town has never changed. It was shot out of a cannon and put in its place. Cemented in times everlasting covenant. Before me. After me. But the hospital I was born in is gone, in its place, hundreds of sleek condos. Sharp corners. Black and white. I entered the double doors of the record exchange to a blast of cool air and a Radiohead song I couldn’t stand. An airbag or an iron lung, Sophie’s choice. I needed Bill Evans to calm my nerves, or to transport me to the unwired past and out of the technofuture. But it was my exit music for a film. I rubbed my head and I wished it were a watermelon then blew out the candles and fell to a billion pieces, right where I began.
Hari Kari
“you’ll read about me in the paper”
we were both laughing
it had been awhile since we cracked up together, my dad and i
“bucks county man impales himself with sword”
we laugh harder
“considering what you have to deal with, it’s probably not the worst idea” I said
we are rolling now
Thin Cigarettes
thunder rolled through around 11:38
quickly followed by the downpour
coloring the black night white
viv fell asleep watching coneheads
she missed the part when they go back to their home planet
she will make me rewatch it with her tomorrow
i thought of a video of a ghost
walking past an open door
that this girl showed me
while we smoked thin cigarettes
at a wedding in cancun
you both twisted and turned
tornados of the sheets
i lay uncovered, exposed to the eventual elements
but you are covered up so I’m happy
i imagined the house being struck
then split in half and opened wide
like it was unzipped all the way down
to the lawn spilling out all of us
the furniture, books, clothes
all getting washed away by the stream
in front of our house
as it whipped itself up into a furious anger
i left the light on in the bathroom
since you’re gone it emits the faintest light to the hallway
between the rooms upstairs
fallen branches dance on the roof
drumming out of time
it’s not like
If you were here
you could save us
but the light is on
just in case
Weapons
When do thoughts become weapons?
Born sharp
Dulled with time.
Driving country roads
With the new pop star record on
I figured I would break the buried silence
“When we are both quiet, we are usually thinking the same thing. That’s weird right?”
You waited.
“It’s sad”
Dan Svizeny was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1987. He lives and works in Pennsylvania. His writing has appeared in Plague Circus Press, Bull, Spectra, and The Despair Quarterly.
