June 26th, 2009 / 5:48 pm
Excerpts

I Hurt My Neck Lifting Weights Today

I was working out with a new trainer today, name of Nick, a favorite name of mine. Fifteen years younger than me, really cute, covered in tats. I was trying to impress him. At one point he said, “OK, Rocky, let’s go”, as we went on to do some other tortuous exersize. Toward the end of our beautiful, special hour together (that I will remember for years to come), he had me do side planks and he said, “Is there an earthquake?” That was because I was shaking so hard. I said, “Don’t tease me!” Anyway, I think I love him. I love a lot of people. My neck is fucking killing me. Vodka is the cure.

At one point, he did some pull ups- oh, man, it was so hot. (I was getting water.) So then I wanted to try to do some pull-ups. He stood behind me and put his hands on my waist. “I’ll help you,” he said. Oh man, It was love, it was love, love love love.

After great pain, a formal feeling comes
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs
The stiff Heart questions was it He, that bore,
And Yesterday, or Centuries before?

The Feet, mechanical, go round
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought
A Wooden way
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone

(That was Emily Dickinson)
 

The Big Boots Of Pain
by Anne Sexton

There can be certain potions
needled in the clock
for the body’s fall from grace,
to untorture and to plead for.
These I have known
and would sell all my furniture
and books and assorted goods
to avoid, and more, more.
But the other pain
I would sell my life to avoid
the pain that begins in the crib
with its bars or perhaps
with your first breath
when the planets drill
your future into you
for better of worse
as you marry life
and the love that gets doled out
or doesn’t.

I find now, swallowing one teaspoon
of pain, that it drops downward
to the past where it mixes
with last year’s cupful
and downward into a decade’s quart
and downward into a lifetime’s ocean.
I alternate treading water
and deadman’s float.

The teaspoon ought to be hearable
if it didn’t mix into the reruns
and thus enlarge into what it is not,
a sea pest’s sting turning promptly
into the shark’s neat biting off
of a leg because the soul
wears a magnifying glass.
Kicking the heart
with pain’s big boots running up and down
the intestines like a motorcycle racer.

Yet one does get out of bed
and start over, plunge into the day
and put on a hopeful look
and does not allow fear to build a wall
between you and an old friend
or a new friend and reach out your hand,
shutting down the thought that
an axe may cut it off unexpectedly.
One learns not to blab about all this
except to yourself or the typewriter keys
who tell no one until they get brave
and crawl off onto the printed page.

I’m getting bored with it,
I tell the typewriter,
this constantly walking around
in wet shoes and then, surprise!
Somehow DECEASED keeps getting
stamped in red over the word HOPE.
And I who keep falling thankfully
into each new pillow of belief,
finding my Mercy Street,
kissing it and tenderly gift-wrapping my love,
am beginning to wonder just what
the planets had in mind on November 9th, 1928.
The pillows are ripped away,
the hand guillotined,
dog shit thrown into the middle of a laugh,
a hornets’ nest building into the hi-fi speaker
and leaving me in silence,
where, without music,
I become a cracked orphan.

Well,
one gets out of bed
and the planets don’t always hiss
or muck up the day, each day.
As for the pain and its multiplying teaspoon,
perhaps it is a medicine
that will cure the soul
of its greed for love
next Thursday.

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16 Comments

  1. Nathan Tyree

      Lovely

  2. Nathan Tyree

      Lovely

  3. pr

      I’m using my pain as an excuse for vodka. It works better than advil, for sure.

  4. Janey Smith

      Perhaps you could use your pain as an excuse for Nick.

      Telephone: Ring ring.

      Nick: Hello.

      pr: Nick, it’s me. I was wondering . . .

      Nick: Meet me at my place . . .

  5. Janey Smith

      Perhaps you could use your pain as an excuse for Nick.

      Telephone: Ring ring.

      Nick: Hello.

      pr: Nick, it’s me. I was wondering . . .

      Nick: Meet me at my place . . .

  6. pr

      Oh Janey, when you are in your 40s, maybe you’ll have better luck than me. But I just have to be grateful that I had him for that hour and that he grabbed my waist from behind, while I was wet with sweat. Fuck. And then, at the end of the hour, I laid down on a mat and he stretched me out….”oh, you have good mobility in your hips, I wouldn’t have thought that” …me, “yeah, my hamstrings are tight, but my hips are so open…..” fuck, fuck ,fuck.

      These are the sad joys of middle aged women. But I’ll take it.

  7. pr

      Oh Janey, when you are in your 40s, maybe you’ll have better luck than me. But I just have to be grateful that I had him for that hour and that he grabbed my waist from behind, while I was wet with sweat. Fuck. And then, at the end of the hour, I laid down on a mat and he stretched me out….”oh, you have good mobility in your hips, I wouldn’t have thought that” …me, “yeah, my hamstrings are tight, but my hips are so open…..” fuck, fuck ,fuck.

      These are the sad joys of middle aged women. But I’ll take it.

  8. gena

      haha oh pr. such a hornball (in the nicest meaning of the obsolete word).

  9. gena

      haha oh pr. such a hornball (in the nicest meaning of the obsolete word).

  10. clark blue

      PJ Harvey. Yes!

  11. clark blue

      PJ Harvey. Yes!

  12. pr

      I love that video.

  13. pr

      that would be me.

  14. pr

      I love that video.

  15. pr

      that would be me.

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