193

Not everybody wakes up.
Not everybody can redeem themselves.
Not everybody gets a chance to become a better person.
Some are on the right path but die along the way
and their story never gets a happy ending.
Not everybody gets a happy ending.
Nobody’s even entitled to an ending.
Sometimes life just ends.
In the middle of a pop song- you should have been more careful, you should have turned to the right…
Poof.
All of it,
the light in their eyes,
the struggles of the past,
the dreams for the future,
gone, goodbye, sayanora, go fuck yourself.
Like it was nothing, like nothing ever happened, like nobody was even there.
It can be so impersonal,
a big mean surprise.
It can be such a pitiful sight,
seeing the strong wither away into oblivion.
Even those that are considered lucky didn’t even get luxury of dignity
and were deprived the sanctity of their final words-
they forgot them the moment they wanted to share them
and when they remembered the words,
they forgot the meaning of them.
Some, perhaps even most, never got over their personal demons
continued in their darkened path of bad habits and misunderstandings.
The moments of enlightenment too brie
and too painful to linger.

I don’t want it to hurt,
I don’t want to it to be near,
I don’t want to go away
and I’m asking you this,
if you’re listening
though I don’t think you even have that capacity anymore,
to leave me alone for the next 200 hundred years.
I promise I will only waste 193 of them.
The rest will be time well spent.

I promise.

***

Monika

With the awareness of death,
after the last comforting and terrifying word of scripture,
after counting all the stars,
after reading countless peer-reviewed studies
about the lack of human meaning
in
this dark room filled with stars and planets,
and after everything is said and done
after all the warnings ignored
and the future becoming increasingly finite,

love
is
the
only light
that
can
be found
in
the void.

***

He Ran Through The Flames: a Tribute to Harry Dean Stanton

He was like all the others:
a soul trapped into the phantasmagoria of cinema.
Once you enter, you can never escape.
You’re in the collective unconscious,
you pretend to be other people
while the people who watch you pretend to know who you are.
It’s all projection,
we mourn our icons not because of who they are,
but who we think they are.
This world of endless identities,
method acting,
madness,
romances,
sadness
and countless deaths,
belong to the actors alone.
Your face has to be on the screen,
your name alone is not enough.
He was one of the faces, people remember the faces, they wonder about their names,
they look them up.

Wasn’t he the singing convict in Cool Hand Luke?
Wasn’t he the first victim of a grown-up xenomorph?
Isn’t he from that one movie where he snorts speed with Emilio Estevez?
Isn’t he that sad old guy whose afraid of death from that Twin Peaks movie?
Wasn’t he the brother who had a stroke in that movie where Richard Farnsworth travels on a lawnmower to see him?
Wasn’t he the guy on the tractor that got blown away in Arnold Schwarzenegger movie?
Isn’t he the lead of that movie about the ninety year old atheist? It’s called Lucky I think. David Lynch is in it too.

They look at their faces,
sometimes with shock: oh man, he’s got so old!
And sometimes with comfort: oh good, he’s still alive! If he can live so long drinking and smoking, I might still have a chance!
They reflect ourselves,
but they become more human than any of us.
It’s okay if they fuck up,
they can escape in all these different kind of roles,
the face might stay the same,
but the soul can travel in all these different vessels.
And then they die.
You watched them on the screen as a child,
you hear about their deaths when they are an adult.
So you sit still,
meditate.
Then you begin to mourn.

Mr. Stanton,
I was hoping to meet you one day.
I would imagine leaving the meeting,
telling the world that you were so down-to-earth, friendly,
your wise words would never leave me.
I would tell my friends about my meeting with you; this is what he told me, isn’t that great? It gives me hope for the future.
Tell you the truth, your death isn’t a huge surprise.
You were ninety years old,
I recently told my father that you were probably on the list.
But goddammit sir I hoped you would prove old age wrong.
And you already did, your lifestyle was your own, your dignity was never taken away.
The way you inhaled that smoke,
you never quit like I promised myself I never would- but I have, because I’m not as brave as you.
the way you drank,
your crystal clear words in interviews- you were a greater poet than I am sir,
the history of your sad eyes: I can see you were beaten, your heart was broken, but you survived.
You survived the war,
derision,
heartbreak,
betrayal,
sickness,
loss
and at some point in time, you might have wondered if you could survive death.
None of us can, the rules will always stay the same, but I bet you pissed off death when you raised your glass at him.

Your wrinkled face wasn’t the convention of beauty,
but you were beautiful to me sir.
You were a real man,
and you left this world,
leaving your mark,
your performance in Paris,Texas- if that would be your last role you said, you would be satisfied-,
seeing your enjoying your cigarette and looking into the sky in Twin Peaks: The return- only for that peace to be shattered by the brutal death of a small boy-
and
I’m sure your final performance, the leading role in Lucky, will be incredible.
You’ll play a defiant atheist pondering his mortality,
in a town full of weirdo’s played by incredible character-actors (I know you hated that term, I’m sorry, but it just fits this poem).
It’s a role that seems to fit you perfectly.
In a trailer you sing,
your
you perform yoga,
you look so damn old and so cool.

You are gone now,
left this world for another.
You’ve gone to meet Sam Shepard,
who gave you your favorite part.
You’ll smoke and have drinks with him,
in the place where barflies never need to drown their sorrows.
He’ll write you a transcendent sequel of Paris, Texas; where Travis finally finds happiness, where love comes back to save us all.
Or perhaps his tragedy is where we should end.
It’s such a good story
and that story will never go away.
Just like your days as a Repo man,
sharing the prison confines with Paul Newman and George Kennedy (both there with you),
in Missouri playing an outlaw alongside Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando (he’s there with you too),
in a dystopian New York with Ernest Borgnine (gone as well),
walking the green mile just like angelic Michael Clark Duncan (they all go, even the young).
The stories will never go away,
but we’ll miss seeing you in new ones.
But it’s like you said:
eventually you’ll accept all of it,
suffering, horror, love, loss, hate.
”It’s all a movie anyway.”

It will take some time for me to accept your departure,
but I know I will,
we have no choice in this life.
We know how this movie ends,
we move on or we let life destroy us.
We die inside and live another day.
I think I’ll take a page from your life,
and try to survive this movie as long as possible.
I don’t think my movie will end as gracefully as yours,
I don’t think I’ll be as beautiful as you were at the end of your life,
but that’s because I’m Chris van Dijk
and you were the great Harry Dean Stanton.

***

That Small Part

”I used to consider myself a writer, but then I couldn’t find the words anymore. I hated every word I put down. They seemed disingenuous, hackneyed, soulless. When I looked back at my earlier work, I was horrified. It wasn’t that it was filled with clichés- even though it was- it’s that I couldn’t get the clichés right. It all fucking sucked. To even call myself an amateur would be insulting to amateurs. Amateurs can have careers in their particular craft, they can become professionals. I don’t know how to walk this path. I find it, then I turn into the forest. I keep getting lost along the way. I remembered them to have promise, I would read the works of others and feel that I grasped something they didn’t. But it was all just a dream. We get lost in our dreams, some never come back. After many pitiful attempts, I decided that the best thing for me was to give it up. I just didn’t have it. There’s talent, a lot of luck. Some say it’s nothing but hard work. Perhaps but the right ones get better. The right ones learn of their mistakes and figure out how to make things work. I couldn’t do this. It’s okay, I will be just like most people. No more stories, no more poems, no more imagined novels. You’re not a creator, you’re the one that appreciates the creation. Nothing wrong with that. Artists are dicks anyway… But then the words came back! It came flooding back, every word seemed right, the sentences kept coming, the poems seemed meaningful, the stories seemed to be about real people. I was a writer again.
And then it happened again. Another painful break-up. I lost my mind again, there was the edge and it seemed so right to jump. You will go there anyway, might as well jump. Nobody will pick you up from down there. There’s nobody there. It’s a place where everybody goes but nobody’s there.
But I decided to save myself. I stopped writing again. I promised myself once more: don’t write another word. You don’t have the right kind of insanity to be a writer.
I haven’t written in quite a while but I feel the urge coming back. Sentences assemble, ruminations that turn into reflections, stories, limericks. There are these moments between people, or by ourselves; a human experience, sometimes tragic, hilarious or even wonderfully mundane, that deserved telling. But I know I can’t do them justice. I’d only screw them up. Nobody would understand why they are valuable.
But the words are there… I just need to write them down…
I know I shouldn’t, I know how it will end. But I keep thinking about death, the void, the nothingness. It seemed the only way to combat is by writing. The thought of not leaving any words around scares me. I could die at any moment and all the words, stories, poems, novels in my head, would die along with them. They are so dear to me, even if I never seem to find them.
If I don’t write, the void will take everything. If I leave some words behind, the void can only take parts of me. Even if it takes most of me, that small part will still be out there. That little part will never go away, that small part will make me immortal…”

Picture taken in Wisla, Poland
***