Author: forgets

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Matchbook

Car crashes, car crashes are like that.
All of a sudden its just, BAM STOPPED.
A glass slams down on the counter
To make it more lifelike,
The water in it, swirls perturbed
Sloshes around like its drunk, fuck it whatever,

I laugh sometimes right after when i see em creak along
Right after, and bump the curb,
The people file out, as if they’re dice thrown outta cup

You know small children and animals, you light a match
And you watch em follow it, thats how you can tell they can see
Funny it always catches their attention
And its like they cant see anything else

People, people are like that
I wonder about that fire you know, in em, or whatever
Its like lightin a match, for no rhyme or reason
Theres a fire and its hangin onto this stick it’s eatin’ for dear life
You can shake it and watch it cling..
And like most everything sooner or later it’ll bite ya 
When its all worn down

So before that you drown it in the water
Car crashes, car crashes are like that.
All of a sudden its just, done, stopped

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writing

Cassette

you know how you can make art out of anything.. but tape decks have a certain nostalgia for people our age, huh? you know the other day i was at a garage sale and this lady had a bunch of em in a box for $5. had they been lp’s and id been 20 years older i might have salivated. My parents, moreso my dad, always swore that you’d find some rare gem in a box with crap someone moving in or out is practically giving away. They say records sound ‘warmer’ than other media, and the sound cant be duplicated, i guess unless its being picked up by a needle, tapes were kind of a mystery, the things that played em gave you a glimpse through a little plastic window, of some motorized heads pressing down on the tape while they spun it. it aint at all as glamourous, and the things hissed and popped when you started or stopped playing music. but still they were ours y’know, all us kids in the 80’s had em, and made ’em whenever some new good song came on the radio. i kinda think like my dad in that sense, maybe i’d find one with no writing but some great songs on it.. i look in the box, a lot of grunge and alternative, though now its all pretty mainstream aint it?

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writing

Mariposas

you should be glad they told him,
as they beat in his fucking face
cut him till the blood ran like rivers
they pummeled him till his teeth
were swimming around in his mouth
like alphabet soup
you should be glad you know
cause it’s like
it’s like, uh
it’s like whatever that thing
a butterfly is that it is
before it’s forced into it’s cocoon
you have no choice but to change from that
you have no choice but to be something completely different
than what you were

kids feverishly putting their hands up in class
after the teacher asks
I know I know I know I know

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Reprografia

I bought a diesel, and andy’s been exponentially more exited about this than me. It’s just another car, i say, knowing full well, we’re both car nuts, and this makes three cars i own, two more than i really need.

He’s had that same personalized tag for years, and this is the first time he’s thought of changing it.. TDIBROS! TDICLUB! Shit like that, though i tell him i’ve been thinking of getting something like FRY COOK

He’d been toying with getting a porsche before this but now hes rethinking it..
He texted me a few hours after i got home with it,
‘You remember when we were young and my favorite color was red and yours was green?? Now we have cars in our favorite colors!’. That hit me right here, i think, and i imagine myself thumping my chest.

He sounds a lot like me for once, thats the type of thing if you knew me. Youd know, i’m known to say. Andy it seemed, for a long while was divorced from the fact that he was born in the same womb as me. We’re older now
And maybe, just maybe when he realizes and fears its a little easier to be strangers than brothers.. A crazy thing to think, since we ourselves
figure our kids’ll automatically want to be best friends

I began ripping the car apart on the way home. At the junkyard they jokingly refer to me as ‘el rastro’ spanish for, the junkyard. I frequented all the lots daily
When i got my first car, it was little things at first, cupholders, electrical relays and such, near the time i sold the thing, i was hauling out transmissions on a
Little red radio flyer wagon, and shoehorning half another car into my trunk

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writing

Aries

My mom had a dodge Aries for a brief stint back before I was a teen, and one day a lady ran a stop sign and just ended the second lease on life my mom had just given that thing. she broke her arm in that accident and they carted her off in an ambulance, and left the kids in the company of my grandpa. i remember him kicking the tires on the old thing, muttering, they don’t make ’em like they used to. they carted the car off soon after, and i remember hearing its belly scraping against the pavement as the tow truck hauled it up against it’s bed.
Years later, now i go to junkyards, and poke through them looking for little parts here and there, where they’re still good. Some days it’s almost surreal, seeing all the metal carcasses posed there, as if to be revered. Each one a god with shattered bones

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heli boys popping their heads over the foliage

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Ninety Four

lately it’s felt like my final days of school.
i’d given up by then, i wrote so on my english final, there’s no point in trying, mrs teacher, tomorrow all we’ll have are memories of each other. We’ll pass each other in grocery aisles, you won’t wonder if my mind still has the capacity to write papers, i won’t wonder if your still handing out the same assignments. She gave me a ‘C’ cause she didn’t want to see me ruin myself.

for a while there it felt like i was four again.
the world shrunk back to what was in eyesight of me. i didn’t travel anywhere or speak to anyone who didn’t live within a phone call to say, boil water for tea. I rethought everything, but chose to only sweeten conversations with simple pleasantries. i wrote everything down this time, i didn’t want to make the same mistake of forgetting it all again, as i had when i’d turned five and started school for the first time, becoming malleable.

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writing

Lemons

today is probably my last day with her,
I hope it isn’t painful.
can’t imagine what its like when your heart is failing.. when your motor is sputtering out.
when pigeons break their wings, they’ve got to be put down.
and its not like old yeller, who gets shot out back..
you can’t just go around discharging firearms in the city
you’re desperate cause the thing is seizing.. and there’s always a rock around.. so you just bash its head in.
the children are away in another room.

you wonder when you became an adult, and the arbitrator between life and death.

some days I get really sick of the shit of other people..
they paste down letters they can’t even ransom for some meaning.
I know you think part of me is cold for not wanting to help others.. sometimes I forget, you know

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Eighty Two

One of the things that’s always irked me about english
is that you have to wait till the end of the sentence to find out it was actually a question
spanish puts the punctuation at the front.

before I had all the answers,
when we went places like to the beach and I asked my mom where the waves came from,
she’d say, ¿Que se yo?
which means, how do I know?
so I made binoculars with my hands and looked out over the sea as far as I could
but I couldn’t see anything making them
I asked my older brother,
who promptly roared and said, ‘I MAKE THE WAVES’ and began splashing around.
his idea, I admit, had some merit
but the waves came from way far away
I concluded, that there must be older brothers everywhere in the world wreaking this sort of havoc
for longer in my life than I care to admit

Categories
writing

Mojave

there is no life here in the Mojave.
save for the cacti which I pity,
stuck to the ground and always kept dehydrating in this damn sun
but kept from death by a cruel god
who gives them the salty sweat off his brow that he worked up
beating the shit out of this place.

even the lizards are trying to get the fuck out,
never having more than two feet on the ground at a time
to keep from singeing.

me, I picked up a pack of smokes from the last shithole of a gas station 100 miles from here.
I lost track as my eyes feverishly shift between the gas and the road,
half a tank and you have to turn back.

I begin rationalizing this to myself and light up a camel,
shit brand, but appropriate.
the only way to feel any sort of relief in this place is to burn yourself.
I take deep breaths and feel the nicotine in my lungs
as they grow hotter and drier than the desert I’m on.
they gasp for air,  and when they feel it,  it’s cool for the first time.

any spot is a good spot.
the winds will take care of any way back my memory could ever give even if they beat me for it.
there’s a dead body in the trunk.
I sing that thought like the song 99 bottles of beer on the wall.

before I’ve noticed it, I’ve gone too far. a quarter tank left.
I tap the gauge to make sure the motherfucker isn’t lying to me.
I light up another smoke.
fuck it I say to myself, i was dead before i left anyway