Expectations

The table has an inconvenient
height, creating a scoliosis
and tennis elbow.
The writing desk with the appropriate number of
scars and water rings never emanated.
The right spruce never met the wrong
teeth.

The lacquered top is an onyx abyss entirely created by
myself, from schematic to beam and bolt.
Another wonder of the world
snarling alongside the sphinx,
lines of visitors wending, managed
by nylon straps.

The queue is too long because there are too many empty
tall boys on the counter.
What was once a stream of sights grated into
word dust is now a struggle against
momentum.
The moment is impossible to catch,
like a greased pig,
contriving metaphors out of a struggle for
movement. For forward progress,
gaining stability from the spin
the gyroscope stands on toes like a dancer,
still,
tips of point shoes white as the satin
ages from the tension and retires.
White, it turns the white of strain
and grace.

For the dancer the audition is the terror,
a job offer more petrifying than
crucifixion because it binds the need for accuracy
in thick, iron shackles.
Audiences, expecting.
The tryout is a frying pan, the performance is a
fire.
Between a rock and a hard place.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Catch twenty-two.
Dichotomies, all.
Yes or no.
White or black,
or obsidian,
or raven,
or midnight.
The empty film frames at the end, whipping
the projector in spliced conclusion.
All things in twain. Any third
ignites them.
The middle child
of the step-parent.

That got too serious. Too close.
Sometimes the friction between the words
leaves an ember near the kindling
and the flame's tongue licks the edges off
the dream fog.
No more camel, no tiara,
no hopscotch, no orange, no watermelon.
The Princess' desert dunes
vanish back into heat waves above the asphalt.
The crumbs of the family picnic removed from their corner
with a fingernail.
If you've held on to it for so many years
surely it has a meaning.
When the fibers amass on the ballpoint
the moment becomes poignant.
A palm on the forehead, mouth slightly agape.
The same pensive feeling the dam has
when the water level falls.
The drought exposing the algae stains.
The high water mark drawn like a height chart
in a kitchen door jamb.
The concrete monolith bares its strength
sitting,
waiting,
on floods that will not come.

I Am To Describe

It was written on the back of a case for my old favorite
pen. Funny how things change.
The excitement grays and then friends only keep up through technology.
The mole on her cheek becomes asymmetric
and kills her.
You wait in the waiting room for news
but you already know what the last page says.
Life creates punctuation through pauses
and endings.
I am telling, not showing.
I am to make the character want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
I am not supposed to tell how the dog makes the character feel,
I am to describe how the dog
has a seizure;
violent muscle spasms rippling under her white fur and bright pink skin.
Heaving, uneven breaths.
Eyes jerking senselessly, hijacked by an internal lightning storm.
And I am supposed to describe the pause he feels.
The locked gaze and lungs.
The ignored television, laughing in the background, changing volume periodically.
He fixes his sight on the convulsing body not realizing that he's holding
his breath.
That fourteen pounds of effeminate canine represent a tether to reality;
that the ropes tying the boat to the dock can snap
in the right wind.

It Sort Of Stuck

When I was in middle school I shared a carpool with my best friend Alex.  His dad was the Chief of the Volunteer Firefighter unit in Kearney and would take us to school in the mornings.  My mom would pick us up in the afternoons and bring us home.  This arrangement worked like clockwork.  Every morning I was late because both my mom and I hated mornings, and in the afternoons she was always on time because she and my dad owned their own business.  Both Alex and I had older sisters that were around the same age, so nothing was really secret between our families.  When my mom told me that I was adopted when I was eighteen, she also told me that my sister and Alex's older sister both knew, since it would have been hard to explain the presence of a baby without the presence of a pregnancy.  There were no secrets, tendency for tardiness or otherwise.  Our families just knew each other inside and out, because that's the way it was.

One slushy winter morning I piled in to the maroon minivan that had synthetic wood paneling on the sides.  A Chrysler, if my soaked memory serves me.  I was fourteen?  Thirteen?  Somewhere in there.  My birthday is in April so I have always been on the young side for my grade.  Starter jackets were the fashion trend.  Specifically, NFL football teams.  I was a New York Jets fan, predominantly because my tee-ball team had been the Mets, and at that age I had thought professional athletes played all sports.  Jets, Mets, they're close enough to confuse an athletically ignorant six year old, and it sort of stuck.  So I piled into the van in my Jets Starter jacket as I had for so many days prior when Alex's dad Ken turned around and said "You smell like marijuana."  Reminder: I'm a middle school student in Nebraska.  I know that booze, drugs, and sex were a problem for early teenagers in other states and cities in the 90s but Kearney, Nebraska was not one of these cities.  At that age I understood pot in theory, but had zero first-hand knowledge of the stuff.  And now I'm sitting in the middle row of a maroon Chrysler minivan with synthetic wood paneling, at 7:30am, being accused of spending enough time around dank smoke to smell like it.  Because of my older sister I was a foul-mouthed little child, but even so "What the fuck?" is the only thought that persists even through to today.

The foreshadowing involved here is breath-taking.  Around the age of sixteen, after Alex had gone the way of the high school theater crowd and we mostly stopped talking, I discovered what marijuana actually was and fell head over heels in love.  Sixteen through eighteen were just smoky hazes as I didn't have much to do beside smoke pot and, well, that's pretty much all I had to do. But we're not talking about older, high school Bret, we're talking about fourteen year old Bret sitting in that minivan, thinking "What the fuck?!?"   I didn't answer Ken.  He had turned and looked back from his driver's seat when he said it, and he just stared at me.  I sat there, look of shock and surprise, words stuck in my throat at the colossal What-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about-ness of the whole situation.  After a few eternal seconds he simply turned around, put the van in drive, and took us to school.

The whole experience sticks in my mind with no particular punctuation added.  There are some things in my history, in everybody's history, that you can point to and say "Yeah, that's why I don't like spiders, because my uncle got bit that one time and almost died."  This was not that.  I didn't start smoking pot because I forever wondered after that day "What is it like to be high?"  But it happened, and I remember it, and now I've told all of you about it.