skonen_blades

Peace begins with a scar.
Happiness leaves on the wings of a bird,
Sadness leaves on the back of a turtle.
You can’t lasso something that isn’t there.
Heartbreak loves company.
Time is a relentless wheel,
Breaking in the already broken.
You can only escape to the prison next door
Or the big one outside
Because you are never out there somewhere
You are always in here
Each couple a pair of odd socks
Each of us holding up self-portraits in progress
As disguises
That wouldn’t fool most moviegoers
This cliff dive
A push or a jump, it’s still going to happen
The irony is that
We are united in our loneliness
Common in our isolation
Everyone can identify with solitary confinement
Because we live there
We experience it together
And separately at the same time
Like how light is a photon
And a wave
At the same time
And that’s us
But peace begins with a scar
That you get from bumping into the walls
From trying to dig your way out
From smashing against the bars
Once you find a way to live here
Once you realize you will always live here
You can find a way to tolerate it
Hopefully a healthy way
And that’s life




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In her teens, Paula was a gymnast.

All of that practicing stunted her growth. The protein that should have gone towards her height went to the production of muscle. Her body was compact and sleek. Her sisters were all much taller than her.

Paula didn’t get her first period until she was eighteen.

In her twenties, she competed less, coached more, and drifted from man to man without much fervor or drama. The high points of emotion that washed over her friends eluded her. She couldn’t get worked up over almost anything other than the thrill of competing.

Her father died in fighting the Viet Cong when she was twenty-six. Her mother committed suicide one year later. One sister took up heroin and died not long after her mother. The other sister washed her hands of the family and moved to Akron and never looked back.

The year after that, while aimlessly looking for solace in the sudden drought of the only close emotional contacts she had ever had, one of Paula’s boyfriends tried to kill her, leaving a tidy scar across the front of her neck.

He went to jail. She was never the same after that.

It was around then that the long walks home became harder. Danger seemed prevalent in the world and protection scarce. A lot of the friends that she had from school got married and disappeared. Her students grew up and lost contact.

She became a memory to old friends, she didn’t make new friends, and she became distant from herself.

In her thirties, she became an exotic dancer. Her false mask of ambivalence greased the rails. The nudge into prostitution happened easily. She passed for twenty-one with her athleticism but the hard times were started to show in the brackets around her mouth and the lines around her eyes that had nothing to do with laughing.

A close-call overdose plus the death of a friend caused her to take the money she had saved and put it towards a course in accounting. She moved to Chicago.

Now here she was. Forty-two. Fake boobs hardening, jutting forth like she was nailed to the prow of a ship. Fashionable and still able to take home men half her age with her seething indifference, smiling worldliness and compact frame.

She made enough to support herself in relative comfort if she cut corners and resorted to the occasional trick.

She didn’t want companionship but she felt the pang of loneliness every second that she was alive. There was no end in sight.


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In some ways, a lot of the public assemblies I remember having when I was in high school play back like some sort of freak show.

I remember he came to talk to us about workplace safety in our high school. I was in twelfth year. He’d been a scientist in a solvent factory. He was there to tell us that accidents in the workplace were as commonplace as they were preventable.

We’d had someone come to talk to us about drunk driving earlier in the year. He’d lost his license and his wife and all that. I remember my heart going out to what he’d been through but it didn’t really affect me.

There was a positivity seminar from a woman I wouldn’t have trusted to borrow fifty cents off me. She had bright shining teeth offsetting her golf tan and a tight emerald-green dress. She wore pearls. She told us we could do anything. She closed with a musical number. Rumour has it that she slept with two of the students.

We even had a religious guy come through town to tell us how ‘hip’ G-O-D was. His attempts at banter and our ‘teenage slang’ were more hilarious to us than the clown that came through six months earlier to tell us about sexual abuse using balloon animals and magic tricks.

A clown, I might mention, that was busted for sexual abuse two years later. The cycle continues.

People with broken lives attempting to serve as signposts for us came to talk. They told us of their evil ways in some sort of twisted form of confession that, in all honesty, served no purpose other than amusement for us. Even though a third of us would unintentionally end up on unemployment later on in life, all of us knew at that moment that we’d never sink so low. We were idiots.

The hypocrisy was being shown to us. The education that took place in that auditorium was happening on a second level that was completely unintended. Have fun while you’re young, they were shouting at us, because it just gets worse and worse afterwards. Your morals will smear like chalk drawings on a rain-soaked sidewalk. Behold the ravages of age.

The only man I actually enjoyed was the solvent factory guy. I remember he came to talk to us about workplace safety. I was in twelfth year. He was there to tell us that accidents in the workplace were as commonplace as they were preventable. He’d fallen into a vat of hot glue five years ago and was on his twentieth skin graft/plastic surgery operation now

For one thing, he’d unintentionally huffed so much glue as part of his job that he was permanently high. The other part was that .He made Freddy Kreuger look like a success story. His hands and legs were artificial. His head poked out of his loose-fitting sweatshirt like a turtle’s head in a wrapped in a condom.

It was the laugh, really. He kept losing track of what he was saying and staring at the lights. Then he’d do this high pitched giggle before someone from the audience would have to give him the last sentence he’d said. He’d talk for a little longer before laughing again. He’d tell us stories of the time he’d had sex with a dancer in Vegas before being interrupted and put back on track by the attendant teacher. Apparently his handler had missed the connecting flight so he’d decided to do the show solo.

We got a special opportunity because of that handler's missed flight. For one thing, the guy was having a great time despite his injuries. He wasn’t pious. He had a filthy mouth. He wasn’t bitter. He gleefully told us that he got more pussy now than he ever did before. We laughed our heads off. Every time he got off track was funnier than the last.

After he left, the teachers apologized for the shambles that his talk had become and told us to remember the other people that had talked. They shook their heads in disgust.

Looking back, he was the one guy that actually gave me hope for the future. He was the one person that proved to me that it was still possible to have a good time no matter how bad times got.




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Ah love. Love makes me clumsy. I’m at my most graceful when I’m indifferent. Love totally puts a stick in the spokes. I know that my disregard towards love is a fear of how often it goes wrong.

I want to get to a place where I point to the parts of my heart that aren’t scarred and say “This is where I had fun.” I'm getting there.


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