Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Guest Writer: Michael J. Solender

Never to Call Your Name

Your words are the sparks that I use to immolate myself in a defiant and purposeful act. You use them like Spackle to cement meaning into the tiniest cracks of our relationship, unburdening yourself of their bile and ensuring I will carry their weight.

Like knotted nylon cord, the not so bon mots from your pouty lips circle my ankles and climb skyward to my ears before settling in my brain to rattle in a dissonance of your creation.

You can't help yourself, your mother was born before you and the trappings and placement of that birth laid forth your destiny. You needed me only to complete the second curtain of your three act theater.

Go. To yourself, run and embrace all that is you. You'll find no more of yourself in me as I burn it away. Each tiny bit of you vaporizing from matter to gaseous smoke as the temperatures soar to incalculable heights. It is not my pain you will feel and those receptors of yours are long since dulled of any agony other than your own.

You'll wonder and turn to those that find advantage in their twisted friendship with you, yet to discover what screams and emanates from your soul. Comfort not though will you find, rather the heat will begin to build and tear at your flesh as it has mine, though your blood runs cooler, icily coursing in vascular precision around and around the beating mass where your heart should be.

Come. Come back to where you might be able to save yourself. It is too late for me but shed not the first tear crocodile or other as that acid will etch on what remains of my emptiness. Hollow and void, burned out and charred, though at least absent of anything you have touched.

Run. Run like the breeze created by ten thousand butterflies as they flutter towards the impermanence that awaits them. They are my accompanists in the flaming symphony I have created with your vitriol.

Wait. Wait on eternity’s doorstep and then wait some more and then more still. Your dawn rises. It is there for your succor.

© Michael J. Solender 2010

Michael J. Solender is editor of On The Wing, the non-fiction online magazine from Full of Crow. He writes a weekly Neighborhoods column for The Charlotte Observer and contributes frequently to Charlotte ViewPoint and Like The Dew, Journal of Southern Culture & Politics. Solender’s micro-fiction and poetry have been featured online at: Bull Men’s Fiction, Calliope Nerve, Danse Macabre, Dogzplot, Gloom Cupboard, Right Hand Pointing, Shoots & Vines, The Legendary, Metazen, Writers’ Bloc and over a dozen other venues. His essay, Unaffiliated, will be featured in the upcoming print anthology TOPOGRAPH, New Writing From the Carolinas and the Landscape Beyond, published by Novello Festival Press in the fall of 2010. Follow his blog at your own peril here: http://notfromhereareyou.blogspot.com/.

8 comments:

  1. MJS, you did it again. You really know how to bring me home and walk me through the emotions.

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  2. As I read your words, I felt as though I stood in your shoes. Brilliant, MJS, truly brilliant.

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  3. I love the ambivalence in this. Go. Come. Run. Wait.
    That's how breakups are -- a roller coaster of ambivalent commands and feelings. Well captured.
    (By the way, good riddance to her, whoever she is. with her flaming symphony of vitriol.)

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  4. Thanx all and thanx to Michael for the fine platform.

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  5. I agree with the others, but my favorite line is
    Run. Run like the breeze created by ten thousand butterflies as they flutter towards the impermanence that awaits them. That is one of the best visuals that come to mind.

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  6. You always manage to zero into the heart of the matter, sharp as a knife, always with the precise words. You are good, my friend!

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  7. Michael, that sounded like a very special hell. I felt like your burden was so heavy that only emotional arson would relieve you ("Each tiny bit of you vaporizing from matter to gaseous smoke as the temperatures soar to incalculable heights."). The intensity of your rejection of the situation was expressed very well. Enjoyed it.

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  8. Relationships. They're killing, and at the core of everything we do. Reading your excellent blog which explores many avenues of thought, but mostly ones that bring cheer, I didn't know you had this kind of thing in you. So much animosity and disappointment is expressed in your piece here, and yet there's a witty edge to everything you say. One type of reader might take a dislike to your protagonist and claim we don't see enough of the other's point of view, while a more experienced one might say, "Yeah, that's an exactly appropriate reaction he's having." It's just that, well, relationships are killing. Thanks, Mike, for your insight and the good writing.

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