No More A Source of Warmth.

She thought she was a lover but she's not one.  Just the pinprick empty, her body all numb.  When the neighbor turns off the lights she slowly dresses.  Argyle and stripes with a licorice whiplash for protection.  She has nimble moves that make no sense.  The sock hat stifles her ghost writing when she scales the sides of suburbia.  A nuclear beauty of a sunset closes in on the tepid landscape of drawn shades, muesli affluence, and branded monotony.  Her head full up with a cloud, lost in there without a sun.  She wants something she's not capable of.  Hopeless romantic...something something frantic.  And without a purpose she cat burgles and drinks from the bird bathes of unknown magnificently middle class pleasure areas.  In the side yard her body manipulates the darkness.  When she gets into the home she wanders around with her mind taking footage like a blank tape.  None of it is recorded.  She doesn't take anything from the break in.  She doesn't mind leaving behind a feeling of unrepentant idleness.  When the occupants of the house awake in the night it is not to a bump in the night.  It is to a nameless grief that streaks in through the windows out there where the mercury vapor decay dreams up more and more roads that lead to work.  The husband gets out of the vague design he sleeps in and stumbles to the bathroom to stare at himself in the mirror with eyes like slate;  she lurks below.  She gets out of there long before the husband points at himself.  She gets away and smirks.  For her's is a life of unseemly cantor in unfamiliar pajamas.  Their bed clothes symbolically wrapping her cold abdomen up in a familial congeniality she can't fathom.  She is of the Grief Family: forever getting typecast as the waste that she is.  She strips off the woolen sweater in the steam of a sultry summer night upon return from another redundancy.  The air thickens around her.  Forgive the lucky end to every moon, she muses as she rides herself into another nightly rut.  She lets go of the crimson cane and it clatters to the floor:  she does not hear a thing.  She pulls the stripes down over her nose:  it doesn't change a thing.  She can't seem to make up her mind on whether she is deaf or blind.

Begin, Third Generation.

The grievous procession waves their hands and they seem to be holding their previous relations at bay while the murk gives them another opportunity to get up and fall down.  They are the third generation of the Grief Family.  No more qualms about it.  The matriarch has fallen.  They tie her up in gaudy pink ribbons and close the lid on her gilded rose coffin with sadness and triumph.  Hats off for the hearse, yet curse each remembrance with a statement whittled thin and terse.  They've got the ideas but not the execution.  Their notions just tease them when they should line them up and shoot them.  And with the smell of death on their shoulders they freshen their breath.  They're a decade older and done up in each others eyes with lies.  Throw everything away so as to doll up this romantic fray.  These days of indecision and insecurity steadily overarching, they are overly conscious of who should get them.  Their words are nothing but gravestones lined up, stone icons of suggestions past.  And present:  They stand.  Done down and damned.  When they set the stone in the muddy ground it will sit and wait.  Over the years the birds will drop their condolences upon the marker and make it look as if it were splattered with marzipan.  Sweet shit, mutters the ugly grandson.  In the haze of the funeral party, each drink is a reminder of the essential inability to express oneself.  They swim out in a consensual circle; the human buoys a chart of single points on a black and white grid.  Unconnected they moan within all this stupid swaying, dim noises out there in the crescent moon refracted upon the surface of something.

Click here for further Grief Family lineage.

The Grief Family.

They remember like it was yesterday, The family Grief. The tired moments waking up in the dim twilight wishing it was morning, getting the coffee ready so no one collapses in a waste leaving skid marks on the pavement of the kitchen floor. The grandmother keeps time with a cane across the swept tiles and pretends that these people were what she had hoped of her loins. The mother awakens with a gasp and stares into the depth of the ceiling without remorse. The father gives a sideways glance to his faithful wife and knows that today will bring nothing. The young boy rolls restless in the sheets keeping time with his ever present heart. The toddler writhes in his onesie feeling an absence unknown like the coming of an entire life without premonition. Something like the inescapable has descended upon this family; a net across a dog frothing and tongue lolling with eyes all keen with understanding of what won't happen anymore. And the matriarch that is this grandmother sits, statuesque and stony, in the sparkle of the immaculate sideyard with a psyche prone to control and tight grasps. They all get up in sync, a sort of marionette show with strings and cogs and tears that never come out but lay within the bearer to stay where they are. I can't seem to figure out what is making me feel so frightened, thinks the young boy as he lifts his hand to his face. I've felt something like a phantom across my mind for years, thinks the mother as her Clinton suit coat wraps her shoulders like a shroud. I know that this is the one track I'll be on for decades, thinks the father as his cup dangles from his finger shaking. These pajamas make me what I am, thinks the toddler as his toes wriggle and dance in their impersonation of a cantor. This. Is. For. You. Grandmother we've gotten you something to make amends. You don't know what I've felt this last century, you've no way to atone for what I feel is missing, thinks the grandmother as a collection gift passes into being from the only people that will ever love her tired heart. They've been trudging ever so presently into being what they are: something that is buried up in personal tragedy and pawns that moved without their masters. A game like a pinball machine and the family Grief looks into the silver balls coming towards them like glistening eyes in the tunnel. This life just bounces them about and they rattle. They drip their insides out when the other isn't looking. Just tip the bottle to the dregs and you'll see a bit of their sentiments roll out like daggers. There is a well of feeling underneath the foundation of this house that roils and trashes. These tired souls just walk unsteady and unlikely upon the trembling skin of their past and wish for the best with entrusting eyes. It keeps them upset and waking up and lost and feeling unkempt. The barn burning of the past is gone and they're left with clinical ambience to miscalculate their passive aggressive gambits. The poker game just goes on and on. The grandmother knows she'll never go all in while the rest just keep their faces sewn up tight.