Matthew Donovan, when he sings a certain song on the stage
of a pizza restaurant, expresses a pain I have since I was very young. I have
not been able to express the pain myself in any scratching way. I have not been able to
write the pain or read the pain away. The pain was not under the covers of any
Beethoven symphony. The pain was not Tupac Shakur with his shirt off and
abdominal muscles flexed. The pain was not any of the shoes I bought with my
best friend in high school. Also, I should not be speaking about the pain in
the past tense, that is, I should not be saying the pain “was.” Because the
pain surely “is” at least as much as it ever “was.” So, to be clear, when
Matthew Donovan sings the second to last song of his set last night at a pizza
restaurant, he expresses a pain that is and was in a way I have not yet.
He is the
long and far away from the microphone shriek, and in that is the very pain. He
doubles over to vomit out the high pitch. He vomits up the water from the
disturbed bigot man before the song and wipes it up with his canvas shoes. There
is a long white cord draping in loops towards a sound amplifier and a clamp at
the end of a guitar that bites on wood and metal. All of this is in the creases
of Matthew’s mouth when he shrieks, and I am not the help to him. He is the
deep and heart-arrowed help to me on his t-shirt. Later, I will carry the sound amplifier to
the back of a long car. I will touch Matthew on the shoulders and spine and
distressed neck curl across a forehead. There will be a twinge burning in my
bicep and right hip that Matthew predicted near a curb and a small public
shrub.
Back to the
deep and more meaningful pain. It involves the amnesia of my mother’s ovaries
and how they forgot and forgot. Also, the gonads of several other important relatives
that forgot along the way (namely, my father and the significant parts of him.)
Their combined memories, all of them, fit on the recipe cards my mother used to
document her famous summer salad. There are ramen noodles, slivered almonds,
vinegar, chopped cabbage, and a handful of black pepper on the index cards with
lines. The cards fit into a box covered in strawberry stems. The entire box was
over the old microwave and once told me to take a liquid of ulcer medication
before I was allowed to play in the backyard. I took the cherry medicine and the
box touched my back in the way to tell me to go outside and run. My stomach and
the lining of my stomach could be forgotten about for that afternoon, along
with the parts of my brain that miscalculated the release of stomach acid and
that regulated stomach lining depth. These parts of my brain were never
considered in the first place or typed into the small bank calculator my mother
used to balance her checkbook in the first place.
All of the
gonads’ forgetfulness led to the worse and worse. Also, there was a
forgetfulness especially in its cold quiet near the basement door. Near the
special installed desk with cheap bleeding porous wood. Not one of us, to this day,
knows who installed the desk or how it was paid for. It was not there one day
on the white and specked carpet. And it was there one day on the white and
specked carpet to where my father kept a manuscript of a book he wrote about me
drinking Kool-Aid and there being fresh cut grass in the background. Above the
desk lamp was a window that led to the backyard where the dachshund used to shit
in the rocks. The window opened up to the level of the rocks and the small
pebbles of shit. On evenings, my mother and father sat on the desk with their
shoes off and swung their legs and feet above the carpet to forget little
things about how we felt. Sometimes their feet scratched the carpet in a sound
that meant it was all happening and could not be completely forgotten in the
way sounds are permanent things to point at. I heard that sound from my room
where I was a crying witness to it. I remember the sound and I keep it in my
fists.
Matthew
Donovan shrieks the sounds out of my fists. Out of my fists and into a tile
floor and the pain pinched across my face. In a way I twisted the pain into the
strands of my beard. My beard was long at the base of my neck because of him
and people noticed my beard after the police left. I talked about my beard into
the windshield of the long car. I mentioned Matthew in the front seat of the
long car and everyone of her understood and said the word “gentle.” We didn’t
argue about the meaning of the word gentle and agreed it was not the pain so
much. It was about the pain so much. I held the gentle instead in my fists and
noticed the missing long car mirrors.
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