To Benzodiazepines

I’m sorry I cried so much when you told me to calm down.
I really didn’t want to. 
You held me together. But where are the doctor bills?
I’ve paid my dues, not that I remember what they were. 
They mess with your memories.

But here’s one I still have:
It was night out and the sky was dark and far away,
the lights were on in the baseball field so I could see the ball clearly
as it was lofted towards me – some high cheese, reminiscent of the chin music I’d been played at my last at bat, my punishment for kissing the pitcher’s girlfriend on the mouth. 

As I was saying, the ball here was a fastball that I cracked, and I mean cracked, deep, deep into left field, an indication I met it a bit too early, but nonetheless with great power and constancy. The two outfielders looked upwards into star-ridden sky, trying to decipher which one of them was about to fall to Earth into their outstretched mitts. 

If this wasn’t mysticism I do not know what is.
Two people, their hearts and minds fully immersed in the task at hand (the catching of the ball), framed against the long shadows of glaring stadium lights, an oasis of light and sound in an otherwise silent half-night where the two outfielders had lost the ball into the void, which is where the rest of my memory sits waiting for the day for the benzos to go away.

I rounded the bases, the two outfielders both enthralled by the ball chased backwards, hats flying off in pursuit, both diving like the finality of brightness while the ball bounced far to the right of them and I rounded third and slid home before anyone could find the ball in the tall unlit grass. 

The benches cleared for a fight because it was night and that’s what you do when you are eleven and don’t know where the kidney is yet. The pitcher punched me in the gut and I vomited.

It was bright yellow and sanctified, risen up on the pitcher’s mound while the high-grade optical polycarbonate focused beams made it shimmer against the backdrop of an extended outfield that went on, and on, and on and then rose up to meet the shining trail of suburban homes. 

Is that life? We can say “I have been moved?” As in my soul has been stirred. Or the ball has been put in motion from an exhalation whose origins I cannot locate. In my memory it surprises me that life fills me up so, and manages to carry along the rest of the people, too, who to me are just ghosts.

But damn, am I sorry.
I really shouldn’t have cried. 
I was so swept away that I forgot my manners.
That it’s impolite to yell at strangers.
And to kiss other people’s girlfriends.
And to try to hold onto whatever life in the past tense I have left.
Like the time I got punched in the stomach in a dusk drawn homerun.
And spat out my innards beautifully on the dirt while the drama of the night sky paused to look down and say
“That’s a healthy diet, kid. I’ve never seen such beautiful colors before”
Neither had I. 

To Going Fishing

Worms and starlight,
sit amongst the brick-hued
red of the iron rowboat we
labored out to the buoy. Bobbing
in the darkness, afloat amongst
galaxies, unbothered.

Ah, to life! The quicksilver water
underneath, ferrying us towards
a meeting underneath a shadowless
mystery.

We start with the bait and I cut myself
on the ribbed hook. So we sank
our bait into the dark sea.
Far away there are lights in windows.
I am adamant the spell can’t be
broken. The water is gentle and clean.
You are famously lazy. We are
here for trout in dark blue currents
whites of fins fighting a battle
they can’t win once I got them hooked.
Their backs are speckled maps
of a place I can’t ever find my
way back to. A world still being
made, a torsional maze that
smells like weeds and aromatic greens
and fights in my hands.

We caught enough. My fingers are
slippery with blood. There is no
moon tonight. Silently we paddle
back ashore. It is 3am and I’m
9-years-old. Though I now suspect
the world may be much older than that.
Before anything can disappoint me
again, I look at the fish.
I’m 30 now and I look again
and they are gone, as if it were
all a dream. My life resembling something
yet to occur.

To Avoidance 

He is not home right now,
may I take a message?
Make it as short as you
can, and put the information
in the right order. And, while
you’re at it, write the following

“From this day forward, I, in
front of God and men will stop
lying in my poems. I will do
justice to the wheeling galaxy and
all that’s in it by no longer
describing it falsely. That the
poor, innocent dusks and dawns — the
Fabulous over and undertones and the gallant deeds
which did not ask to be transcribed
will find their peace in my
renunciation of my
cacoethes scribendi.
In my quest for a full world
of horizons of color,
I have forgot the greenness of ours.”

The message thus relayed —
I am bored to death.
And I’m tempted to call back
and leave another message about mourning,
kung-fu, and a red catastrophe. A message
about freedom, or about knowing when to
stop, sit on the park lawn and take
tearful leave of each other.
No reunion is promised.
And so I keep talking.

---

Andy Reischling is a writer and designer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and PBS, among other venues. He became a writer to make lots of money.