Finalist: Barbara Brodsky Award for Excellence in Real World Writing, Fall 2006

In September of 1940, the great literary critic Walter Benjamin committed suicide by jumping off a beautiful sordid cliff to escape the Nazis. Another source says he died of a "self-induced overdose of morphine."

Acceleration.

Last week we had a bonfire in the parking lot. I couldn't feel the burn so I lit it up some more, puffing at smoke from sadness so deep it filled the whole night with fog.

Was the "beautiful sordid cliff" poetic license in the first source?

The words I spew bounce off hollow walls of vindication, echoing asunder as if to say I got what I deserve on so many levels.

So many levels: the pier, the land, the water, the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Tell me the heights and depths of each level. Give me numbers where words have failed. I crave the certainty of feet and inches.

Would you prefer your beans hot or cold, your pain real or imagined?

"Anxiety attack," they said so casually. EKG to make sure it wasn't a heart attack, this ghost squeezing my chest into inevitable collapse. The printout scattershot the pain: heartbreak moves up and down in tight jagged lines.

Launch.

I walked by the first red tree of autumn and instinctively said "Hi Mom."

Above the roar of the diesel engine he told me-between spits of tobacco-that the car was found upside-down. Stuck in the-spit-sludge.

Norbert Weiner established cybernetic theory in 1947 in an effort to crack the code of emotions, to devise a black-box mechanism to predict human behavior. He began this quest during World War Two, trying to track and intercept Nazi flight patterns. To calculate the pilot's fear and shoot him out of the sky for it. He found that actions operate on repetition when minds operate on fear.

Were her bones watertight? Shiver up my spine, tingle scarecrow.

The car was covered in barnacles. Details and dates scare me to an infinite degree. The barnacles have suctioned to the smooth sides of my memory, sharp and white and parasitic.

Splash.

In April of 2006 we swam asunder. Dates are irrelevant and dates are all we have.

To tell you to rest in peace would imply that I thought you were resting. Rippling is not resting.

To gauge the pain. Golden hands spinning clockwise skewing us asunder.

High school physics taught me how to calculate the velocity of a moving object. Where x and y intercept, where down meets out. And Dr. Weiner- even with your Harvard Ph.D. in physics and math at the age of eighteen- you failed because emotions operate on a plane so far away from x and y that even you can't pin it down with a representative letter like z. Input cannot get you to one universal output, no matter how many numbers you stick in your mathematical black-box.

Dr. Pathologist, does the word "necropsy" stumble your stride and do dead bodies wake you up at three a.m.? Autopsy-man, what would you say to me?

I ran by an old lady today, frailty rocking gently in a swing. I couldn't look and I couldn't look away. A mile later, another old woman pedaling circles, lipstick a smeared oval. My same looking and un-looking eyes stole glances. Is this pity? Is this what people see when they look at me?

The great literary critic Walter Benjamin committed suicide by jumping off a beautiful sordid cliff to escape the Nazis. Didn't you do the same thing, mom?

A self-portrait of words. A charcoal doggie-paddle, swimming asunder.

Submerge.

I have a twisted sense of superiority in the fucked-up-family category.

Behind the studio I shattered a mirror, exploding shards of sky on pavement. I drew my tired eyes between the jagged edges of what I saw, the shape a knife-blade.

asunder [uh-suhn-der] adverb, adjective

1.into separate parts; in or into pieces: lightning split the old oak tree asunder.

2. apart or widely separated: as wide asunder as the polar regions.

Words are kindling wood and crumpled old newspaper yearning for burning to char me up some more. What happens when I'm too charred to burn anymore?

Before he felt it and after he wrote it, Benjamin said, "Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance."

It will feel good to carve out my eyes, cover myself in black-night ink.

Tonight around the bonfire we told ghost stories. Except mine were true. Reading Rahl Dahl aloud amidst the roar of passing motorcycles and the lick of tall flames, I thought I heard "were you busy riding (writing?) or were you thinking of big ideas?"

What is this holy grail I'm after? Should I follow words or pictures into the fading half-light? Trust is shot to hell and photographs beg to be burned and words warrant the wind.

Wood warps from the inside. A pier. Too many things snapped at once. Can't save you. Appears. Self is burdensome. Dusty old negatives. Peering. Blades too dull to cut. EKG. Disappears. Tight jagged lines. Heartbreak moves in ups and downs.

Sink.

Numbers tempt me to throw my words to the wind. April 19^th, 2006, 8:08 p.m.: the moment I crumpled, writhed, gasped for air because underwater she had no more. A six-week missing-person case, twenty years missed, fifty-four years old, alcohol content 0.4% after an estimated three weeks in the fifty-degree water. Facing windward smacks vowels back in my face, my hair tangled in consonants.

Numbers lie when they promise you a life calculated and ordered into graphs on tidy little printouts. Jellyfish tentacles sting toxic to touch, translucent trails.

A psychologist named Beverly said I shouldn't be trying to move forward right now, but only to establish a "holding pattern" so sharp consequences won't creep up again. I hate that idea, Bev.

What everyone wants is for the future to matter more than the past.

The table I'm lying on says "Caution: Grounding Continually Should Be Checked Periodically." Thick middle-aged fingers are sticking wet circles on my chest. Should I ask them whether they've checked the grounding lately?

Ripple.

My mom drove off a pier, it's true. But don't ever look at me like that. Like you know. Also don't look at me like you don't even want to know. Don't look at me like I'm crazy; like you're glad you're not me; like my family must be really fucked-up for this to have happened; like you don't give a damn because my story will make you late for your appointment. Because I've gotten all these looks and I took photographs of them.

If astronomers detected a pulsar in orbit around a black hole, they'd have found the Holy Grail in the sky beyond the stars. If computer scientists programmed artificial consciousness, they'd have coded the Holy_Grail in cyberspace. Psychiatrists just need to locate the "mechanisms of mental diseases," call it a day, and drink from that most holy of cups.

Asunder.

Benjamin's most-prized possession was a painting by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus. He looked at that angel for twenty years. Then he began thinking about taking his own life, and gave the Angelus Novus to his longtime friend, Gershem Scholum. "If one may speak of Walter Benjamin's genius, then it was concentrated in this angel," Scholum wrote. A connect-the-dots angel, begging to be burned.