jonberger

He doesn’t talk to me today
and I don’t know why.
For me to ask why he isn’t talking to me
is to name it
and if I’m wrong and he is talking to me,
it’s just that he hasn’t spoken to me lately,
then I’ll feel like a fool,
but if he isn’t talking to me, he may still deny
that he isn’t talking to me if I just say, directly,
“Why aren’t you talking to me?”

It’s not like he’s the only one.
I am not without sin
and I have alienated many a former friend.
I have also simply phased out friendships
with cadres of quondam comrades
because they weren’t convenient.
Could this be why I’ve heard nothing?
I’ve heard NOTHING from him.

Pretty sure I won’t be getting any answers
this way
so maybe it’s time
to try something else.

I look at it differently today.
Then, I was disappointed,
maybe hurt, although
I didn’t admit that to myself.

After dark, at the uptown Ninety Sixth Street red line,
I was waiting for the One train
with a lot of other folks.
I thought I recognized one from high school.

She wasn’t someone I knew,
but someone I had seen in school productions,
one of the stars of musical theater,
a year older than me.
I was pretty sure it was her.

I went up to introduce myself.
“Excuse me…” I said, and she moved out of my way,
but her body language was entirely closed off.
She was not going to have any conversation with me.

I don’t know how I was so sure
not to further approach her.
I just slunk away
and waited for the train
at a distance.

From a more modern lens,
it makes all the sense in the world
to give a woman her space
if she shows any sign of not wanting a stranger’s attention.
She had no idea that we might have known each other.
Point of fact, we didn’t know each other.
I thought her name was Seka,
but I wasn’t sure of it then
and I’m not sure of it now.

She explains how she betrayed her friend
by trying to support her friend.
The woman before me described the abuse
her friend received
to her friend’s family
before her friend was ready to out herself
about the experiences.

In telling me the story
she is again betraying her friend,
since I know both of the women involved.
I won’t tell anyone, I swear,
but everything is probably out in the open by now,
anyway.

I hate to think of either of these wonderful
powerful women being hurt.
I’d be terrified to raise a hand
to either one of them,
so sharp are their tongues alone.

It is unimaginable that they could be harmed
by the fleeting fingers of boys
yet I’ve heard their tales
read their works.
They’ve even been damaged by each other.

Such tragedy

Such art.

I am awestruck
to experience it.

"When your hair grew too long," my mother says,
"My father took you to the barber and had it cut off
while I cried and cried."
"How much hair was it?" I ask, but I already know.
"Not a lot," she replies. She’s lying.
I’ve seen the before pictures.

My shiny red hair hadn’t quite been shoulder length,
but my grandfather was worried I’d be mistaken for a girl.
This, clearly, was unacceptable.

"I kept a lock of it," she shows, taking out a baggie of bright auburn
hair.
There’s a piece of paper within the hair. I read the date.

"This says it’s from seventy eight.
That’s way too late to be my first haircut, Mom."
"You’re right," she says, taking the hair back,

"This can’t be from that traumatic cut."
"So there’s no record of my original hair?" I ask.
"I guess not."

For some reason, this bothers me more
than it does my mother.

I have found my path shambolic.
I walk not directly where I seek to go
but rather in creative
circuitous patterns.

Too often, I speak the same way,
but I don’t want to go off on a tangent.

When in tight clubs
– or walking down a crowded aisle –
I find myself stumbling and crashing
where I certainly never mean to.
I do not believe myself clumsy
nor am I a stroke victim
but I seem to travel awkward.

GPS helps.

This relates more to walkabout behavior
than to longer voyages, anyway.

I can get where I’m going
when I’m crossing countries
but striding across a room can occasionally
cause some trouble.

Perhaps it’s best to stay in place.

Don’t tell, but
I suspect I am responsible
for them putting a stop to the office’s
Bagel Wednesdays.

People were all into it
at first
but most eventually slowed down
on their bagel consumption
while I kept plowing away
at eating bagels by the hour
on the Hump Day.

By the end of the week
if there were still bagels around
I felt it was my responsibility
to clean the office kitchen
by taking the leftovers home with me
and consuming them over the weekend.

They rarely lasted until Friday, though.

I suspect that when they saw the bagel spread
was proving to be Jon’s personal carbohydrate display
the caterers-that-be grew tired of the expense,
and put a stop to it.

Perhaps if I’d been less flagrant in my consumption,
less voluble in my chomping,
I could have made the whole experience last longer.

It hardly matters.

I was later canned for unbagelled reasons,
and the company is now nonexistent.

Mother tells me how wonderful I was as a child.
“When I would have panic attacks,” she says,
“You would hold my hand and tell me everything would be all right.
You were incredibly calm,
non-judgmental, you said all the right things.”

“I’d run a bath for you,” I recall,
gazing into the hazy mists of long ago.
“Yes! When I was shivering, you knew warmth would help.
Your father was of no use.”
“He was already gone,” I add, “out of the house for years.”
“But you were so helpful,” she continues,
“You would make hot-water/milk/tea,
and just talk me through it.”

She looks at me carefully.
“You were my savior, then.”
“Yeah,” I go on, “Like unto a god, right?”
She laughs. “Always gotta spoil it, Berger Child, don’t you?”
I grin a little, “Maybe.”

I have more pants than I need.
Among them are the three pair of corduroy slacks
that I never wear
for fear of chafing.

For fear of chafing
and because of the coloration of one of the pairs:
it’s white
and I’m afraid of collecting dirt
on white clothes
so I rarely wear them.

For fear of chafing,
wearing white
and the size of the wale on my black pair.
The cords on that are so wide,
I feel kind of silly in ‘em.
They come out when my laundry pile is pretty high
and there’s little left to wear.

So for fear of chafing,
wearing white,
the size of the cords on the pants…
and the general clown design.
My last pair have flares
and a couple of flowers on the calves.
I bought the pants for a costume
that I wore once.
It didn’t have the effect I was hoping.
I ain’t wearing them again,
but I can’t just throw them out.
What am I, a Rothschild?

So I’ve got three cords and they’re not being seen.
Three cords, and I wash my hands clean of them.
Three cords, please don’t think it selcouth.
I’ve got three cords, that’s the truth.

A thousand years ago,

we were having this conversation,
my friend and our mothers.
Out of nowhere his mom says,
"I’m ready to change the subject.
Let’s move on."

And my polite mother
and the woman’s polite son
were dutifully ready to comply.
I do not comply.

"It doesn’t seem like the conversation has organically ended,"
I reply, "We all seem to have more to say.
I don’t think I’m ready to veer off course."

And, of course, instead of talking about
the old subject
or a new subject
we instead began talking about the subject
of conversations and how they should be altered:
naturally or by one member’s will.

I did not like her bullying.
She did not like my rudeness.
This incident, remember,
was a thousand years ago

and only today did it occur to me
that I might have been too young
to recognize there may have been minefields
in the original conversation
that I could not see

or understand
and she had been too raw
to elegantly navigate changing the subject.

I left no room for elegance
or subtlety.
I rarely do.

I should have addressed this
in my head, at least,
decades ago.

I am sorry for this ancient fight,
my friend’s mom,
if you were hurting
and needed a way out.

If, on the other hand,
you were just being controlling,
I hope you learned something.

I was watching a dumbass movie I regretted watching
when the bed started shaking
and I wondered if my massage feature had turned on.
I didn’t remember at the time
that I hadn’t actually purchased the massage feature
because it seemed like a lot of hype
not that it mattered, since the battery
for the bed was dead.

In any case, the bed wasn’t the cause of the tremors,
but I didn’t know that then.

At lunch, Hogan asked,
“Did you feel the earthquake?”
“…I guess I did,” I said, understanding washing over me,
like a natural cataclysm experienced
only after the effect.

It wasn’t much of a thing, this city-shaking event.
It was barely noticed.
I hope writing it down
will help me remember it next week.
I hope later on I remember to read
about the motherfucking earthquake.