Collapse is made of time-stitching and nostalgia.
The way the curtains rise with the breeze, in every goddamn century,
In every corner of the sea.
It starts with the Vincent Thomas Bridge. You can’t cross that thing
Without feeling some kind of deep-seated regret. And it always
Makes you turn back around. Nobody crosses that bridge on
purpose.
First, you put your laptop down and you open the classroom
windows.
Then, you begin by looking at your lesson plan book, blank.
You brought your loneliness to work again, you asshole.
It’s that chapter in the Outsiders when the boys burn the church
down.
The church is the Pacific Palisades where I ran x-country as a kid
For no reason I can recall. I did things back then just to do them.
My unhappy home was my sanctuary.
When father returned in his pickup, he would race into our
driveway
And from my room, I’d hear him slam his door closed.
He’d talk with my mother.
Mother would defend me as best she could.
He would open my door and say something to shame me,
Then I’d go back to my toys.
Sometime in the early 90’s, Los Angeles turned into a warzone.
I watched a truck driver get pulled out of his semi.
Someone threw a can at his head, and with both hands he held his
bloody head.
There were grainy images of a black man being beaten.
I don’t know why, but I loved cardboard and pieces of wood.
I’d make machine guns out of the wood.
Color them with markers, add walkie talkies, add scopes that were
toilet roll tubes.
One remembers—the unbreathing—of the hells.
At age fifty-one, I think of hell as not being able to think straight,
Or having a continued lack of foresight.
Maybe that’s all it is, hell. Just a room on the edge of a million other
rooms,
And what one needs most is further inside the octagonal building,
An atrium with a view of the open sky, filled with birds and
butterflies,
And a little waterway, and a bridge there, small enough for gnomes
To cross it, and to make it to the other side.
