The Sid Chronicles

You look dead, Sid,
standing on a corner,
hands at your sides,
staring and storing your life away,
looking like a poor man
who wants to be left alone.
Sid's light is rapidly fading.
His vapid soul stretches everywhere,
touching nothing.
Nobody's watching as
twilight shades the lidless eye,
and Sid begins to look alive.


*

Sid suddenly swallows
as the back of the bus draws a crowd.
Stripped of his crown in solitude
by one eye peeled and drawn to bear
he feels nude and ugly.
So sad,
he shed a tear to feel this once.

*

Sid peels reflections and shadows.
He is peering into the meanings of things
and looking at open, empty sky.
He is still staring.
He did not choose to lose his grip on the world,
not wholly--
good fortune falls, and fools
always seem to know where to stand.


*

Simon summoned supper
while his brother Sid sat with him
rethinking plans:

He'd wanted to saw the legs off the table
so no one could sit under it.

He'd thought of stashing the plates and the napkins
so everyone could make a mess.

He would carry the chairs to the lawn--
let fortune fall on everyone--
but it was an arid evening.

In the end he simply sat and ate with Simon,
as no one else had come.


*

A shiny shirt appeared in his basement,
glinting in the dusty light from above.
Sid raised his arms,
slipped his wrists through the sleeves,
and it fit just right.
Now bless your bitter heart
for finding Sid's shiny shirt
and fishing in it
for him.


*

Sid became less jaded.
He saw the blood on the razor blade
when a poor girl wrote about cutting.
She followed him,
drawn to the glint of the steeple atop
the mountain of garbage he dragged through life.
He crashed her car into a tree
and walked away,
a little dazed,
and watched her bitter heart blossom
in the distance.
She spread her glass petals everywhere,
shooting out glistening shards.
He stood just close enough to be grazed,
and occasionally pierced through the chest.
He could speak to her now,
repentance, redemption, and peace.
Deeming himself too clumsy for that,
and her to happy without it,
he held out alone with grace.
It was nice enough, keeping the distance
in silence.


*

Sid knows he's unoriginal,
playing Russian Roulette with his skull.
He knows he's unoriginal,
lean and eating up life 'til he's full,
laughing at love,
crying for love after feeling his heart has regrown.
She was his friend.
He let her down.
She'd outgrown him long before they'd met.
So he let her go.
Back to the first course.
So unoriginal, simply breathing.
So he points the lovely revolver into his temple,
smiles at his reflection, and says,
"Let's play."


*

Sid wishes all shadows away, then wishes the loving ones back.
If only loving shadows waltzed and played along his mind,
and monsters didn't fly in through the window,
aside from being social, Sid would have it all.


*

Sid swallows his self within himself
'til he walks amongst people,
and regurgitates in public, and the mess
tells him how to behave.
No one waves.
He doesn't wave back.
One day he met a woman and began this procedure,
spilled himself out at her feet.
Before the mess could lecture him, she scooped it up
and ate it.


*

She spat it back out.

He was lukewarm,

whisps of smoke from a candleflame
clumsily dodging a breeze,
clinging to itself.

Oh well,

guess he felt cold.

Guess

in tragedies,

heroes and villains and fools
never change.

*

He wore a hat once,
when the hat was a rat
that batted its lashes
because it was dusty.

Perpetual silence shattered around him.
Whispers burst through his windows
demanding his mind, then insisting
he be absolutely still.

He'd killed a rat once,
and taken its place.
The whole thing went unobserved for years,
the murder and replacement.

*

In the room full of broken things
nothing quite matters anymore.
Nothing is ever fixed.
Nothing ever goes wrong.
Disaster doesn't exist.
Mementos are discarded and lost
in piles of mementos.
Scars flake off and regenerate
and he bakes with them.


*

Insidious, hideous fiddler,
peddling insipient mysteries
of the minute to be solved at the risk
of wasting time.

Hypocritical riddler,
he wearies of the rain and windy day,
yet flies these kites of paper anyway--
he intended them to be made of glass.

Just another tallish tale of a small idiot
with no redeeming qualities.
A hidden dreamer.
He dreams what you dream.
He should be forbidden.

Or shipped to Siberia.

He's a mystery soon to be solved
if it isn't already.

Would you absolve him,
or dissolve him and let him run with you?


*

And now he bleeds,
standing, staring, stooping to feed
some pigeons on the porch.

Now he sits and swings a glass,
not quite empty, one more swig,
and then he's gone, with all the swagger
of sagging souls that wanted for a time
to be soggy hearts. His brain is swinging.

Toss the glass.
Feed the need.
Spread the seed
across the void.

You're useless,
and in style when you're smiling
for no reason.

Now he's watching the TV,
so he doesn't have to tell.

Better yet, add a hat,
a shiny coat, a fancy cane,
and hobble down the cobbled streets
with a strange sort of grace.

Wincing at the Cheshire Cat,
you've made a choice, and that is that.
Your illusion suits you well.

This clown has been cloned since long ago.

Now let's steal a soul,
feed and clothe it,
sell it down the road.


*

Don't cry, Sid.
You've been dead already.
This way it won't feel so bad.

Alright, Sid.
You'll fail in your mission
if she sees you in Vegas.
For a test,
don't even let me see you in Vegas
while you're there.

Sid, take a ride to New York.
You'll make it work
with a million and change.
No one wants to see you here anymore.
Well, I do, but I'm the only one.

And I've got to tell you, Sid,
if we see one more pink sunset together,
sliding down a wall, I'm going to
sprout wings and fly.


*

Such a privelage, to see a spider
drawing lines across the sky,
weaving a web more beautiful
than any tale I could tell,
more intricate than any fib
that Sid could sell. He says,
"It's November. Time to hibernate,
my friend." Anyway,
the poor dear slips and tries again
and slips again,
and goes to sit on the banister,
finally giving up.


*

Of course he stood around alone at the party.
Nothing at all to say to anyone.
He'd done odd jobs, dead,
gone through college, dead,
high school, dead,
life-long dead.
His cousin wanted to catch up
on the last few dead years,
and he tried his best to answer,
but he couldn't stop focusing on
the blank wall next to his cousin.
So he stood around, as a ghost.
He helped the host.
He guarded the coffee.
"It's strong, French Roast," she'd said.
He wanted some coffee. He wanted to be careful
how much he took from the living here,
so he only allowed himself half a cup.
And another half a cup. And as he drank he realized
he liked the cheapest instant coffee better.


*

He'd always said he had no pride.
But deep down inside some part of him
considered himself a genius.
He played the part in dreams he claimed
he never had yet clung to like glue.
They held his shattered mind together.
He did admit it was shattered as the days flowed
into years and he faded.

He was a person, not a poet,
afraid of romantic connotations.
Writing was his toy.
He tossed syllable salads
from ashes of flames that had died.
He rhymed awhile,
in that insanity that mimicks conceit,
spitting out cheap rappy phrases
that popped out and bounced off of dead ears
they had killed.

He changed his style and was jaded.
There was nothing new to say.
There was never anything new to say.
But it mattered how you said it,
so he said what he could,
and thought he would share it.
He didn't quite know the face of the art
he threw stones at, and he always said,
and never showed,
and he grew a few sizes, just a few,
the day he finally sighed and decided
to toss a few salads
into the trash.


*

In high school he
"could've had any girl he wanted,"
voted "el mas guapo," and "el mas amable"
in a funny Spanish class vote.
He said hello to a girl cold twice in high school.
The first time a prize was involved.
Sid was a whimp.
He never even destroyed a poem,
though he let some litter the floor.
His computer had crashed once,
trashing about thirty saved nowhere else
save in his brain.
He quickly rewrote 28 of them from memory.
Sid was a whimp.
He caved and faded and phased from a world
he never really knew.
Sid had a beard.
But when he shaved his neck with his old fashioned razor,
he wiped the blade clean with his thumb.
And when he baked potatoes, he poked the holes quickly
with an eight-inch blade.
He really needed more silverwear.


*

They met in orcherstra class his junior year.
After a brief exchange, she told him, "You Suck!"
and he fell in love.
She seemed a free spirit in some way he couldn't quite place.
Two years they barely spoke.
She'd come by to admire his pretty cello. "So shiny!"
A concert/field trip to Chicago a month before his graduation,
she noticed his loneliness, and they spoke.
He was getting a job at Speedway.
She drove a truck.
He didn't drive.
He was trying to get a book of poems published.
He-he--"Thoughts," he was calling it.
"That's cool."
(The publisher never replied.)
He felt a dream realized.
And he went home, with a collection of Billy Collins:
"Sailing Alone Around the Room,"
and a collection of Poe, which he'd just bought.
He felt alive, and extremely nervous.
It took a few days to gather the courage but he did manage
to say hello.
She smiled and hugged him.
He gave her his phone number on his graduation night,
along with a letter. A few days later
he found a bent wedding ring in the road
in front of a rummage sale. It went unclaimed.
She never called.


*

Sid as a kid sought worldwide distribution
for his philosophical scrawl and his young love,
like many a young poet would do--
in hard copy.
But there was some confusion.
The deed showed on his account,
but sowed no seed--
he was not granted an ISBN.
Sid considered the book a dead venture.
He kept at the writing, which twisted in strange ways,
and in a year he was ready to go busing around,
selling the first silly scribblings of his next little book.
Those who would have cared
would not have cared.

Sadie had bought the book.
As a download.
Sid was shocked,
having thought the book dead for two years.
She wanted to print more copies,
show it to faculty at her university.
But Sid was adamant:
"No! You must never distribute it.
When I wrote that book I was young,
and stupid."
Sid was now nearing 21.
Mostly he worried she'd learn that the love poems
were not about her.
And he was shocked that the book lived.
Weather she heeded him or not he would never know,
but he had learned something in this moment,
and he kept the book in worldwide online distribution,
and went on to publish more.


*

Catharsis has never been Sid.
(It may have looked like it was.)
Victims never dulled his fury.
When he told a story,
it was for the story's sake.
He's never gone digging
for the beginnings of emotional pain.
He knows his roots well, as he digs himself up
to find a friend.

His mind works overtime to be "out of the box"
in the wrong places.
Common sense is foreign to Sid on occasion.
So he had a common sense epiphany pondering
the girl who never called,
an odd sleepless morning several years later.