Free Peanut Butter

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Cold May.

Bold mouse. Carefully cleaning every lick of peanut butter bait off a hair trigger trap. All night. No snap. Ashley says at this point I’m just feeding them. We’re all trapped by the same house. If we don’t hold the keys, we can’t call it heaven.

Can’t keep up with grass. Mixed greens waving frilly fists at white supremacy.
Can’t keep up with news. Or weather. Or the neighbors.

These have been the brightest days with a cloud looming over them I have ever known.

This is the fastest my garden has ever grown. Boss said we’re done licking peanut butter off the trap today boys when it snapped. And now we’re stuck. Home. Forever.
And they don’t know how to tell us yet.

If hindsight is twenty-twenty, why do we use any other kind? Whatever sight isn’t hindsight is bullshit, and we’re such convoluted, temperamental emotional cocktails we can’t trust what’s plain and played out in front of our faces. Whatever you are is not actually your brain and your brain unarguably twists details and contorts facts to appease you, like a grandma who gets you a happy meal every day, your brain looks at you wearing a little smirk and presses a finger to her ruby red lips and shushes you and you both know exactly what your brain means. We’re eating things we shouldn’t and not telling mom about it.

Buddha chartered a hindsight cruise line and Jesus ruined an otherwise nice dinner
once with hindsight.

I always get the word prescient wrong.

I don’t know why my gut wants to define it as something immediately pressing, important, mostly because of proximity. That’s not what it means. Through research, I’ve learned that prescient means eating a salad every now and again, doing physical activity on a daily basis even though no one is making you, and it can be loosely defined by the act of becoming or getting to know some food producers near you because grocery stores are still stores and their business model might not include feeding you and your family no matter what happens regarding your income and vocational viability or industry fluctuations or now, very prescient, when society has been enforcibly shut down and your ability to generate income is severely constricted or morally irreconcilable.

I think hindsight employed as regular sight is prescience.

I think in the middle of the night one night I’ll hear that wooden slap. I used pliers and bent the trigger on the trap so that I could barely set it it was so sensitive, and mixed cotton fuzz from a Q-tip in with the peanut butter. Once I snag a couple the rest learn, not much else could bring them back in the house. Cold may. But hindsight isn’t just for humans. Mice have their own definition for prescient.

For them, it’s no such thing as free peanut butter.

YCDB

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

I can imagine thunder.
Batting my eyes makes lightning.
Yawning earthquakes into existence.
Clearing clouds from my throat.

Raining germs. Puddled teeth.
I don’t read. The fossils that I found.
The washout from the ground.
Where it all got given away.

But I can imagine gravity.
I can still feel kisses on my scars.
Storming out. Desert Inn.
There it is. The wilderness.

Anything I have done.
You can do better.

Yes. Today.

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

I’ve chased down a thousand things I called time to get where I am right now.
The front room of my grandma’s house wearing a winter parka over my pajamas.
I’ve chased a little boy I call baby because I am afraid for what I love to grow beyond me.
I wake up at four in the morning with no alarm set like an old man, like a grandfather
feeling chill crept in from corners and up from the window sills because the fire is low.
Coals grown cold compared to what they were when I first laid down and closed my eyes
like a young man, tired, forget that, exhausted, like a young father, indebted to the castle
he funded by the credit of his youth.

In a few years knees won’t work and back will refuse.
There had better be a roof over gray hair and a stout hearth propping up bloodless heels.

I’ve chased a thousand things I called after by tomorrow and promise and please.
I used my ideals like a carrot on a string to avoid being caught up to by so many things:
today, acceptance, settling.

There is a woman across the hall doing her damnedest to put up with me.
Whatever I have ever picked up, I have also let down.
Apology has become like a second language to me.
I have learned the differences between sorrow and sorry
are more difficult than ow or why. One is seated, settled, done, erasing.
And the other is chasing, searching, anything to keep from facing.

Truth.

I have learned, the hard way, the least productive use of the word yes
is yesterday.

I remember

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

How do you know when it is time again?
Oh yes, I remember.
Take out your phone that people call you on
and set an alarm. Well, maybe you forgot.

Because Jeremiah. It is:
the secret exchange of rings inside trees,
french kissing continents with ridiculous tomato red tongues,
the beaten buried heart of sediment,
the stores looted by river shores,
and stars, like ants, innumerable, fastidious,
curiously fast and curiouser strong.

Time, a bow, meant to bend but not to break.
Like an oak. Like an ocean. Like the beach.
We can see.
We are maybe the only creatures who can see
the sapling in the giant, the monster, someone’s Roan,
someone’s baby.

Seeing is sympathy.
Feelings are empathy.
And submission is equality.

So.
How do you know when it is time again?
Oh yes. Jeremiah. Now I remember.

What you wish you were

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

Jeremy, what’s your secret weapon?

Well, after college, with nothing better to do, I went through my soul with a fine tooth comb. I named and grew well acquainted with all my least desirable traits. The real problem children. Narcissism. Misplaced ego. Enabler of my own appetite. Down to the bad knee. Up to the shimmer of ideals like distant stars, that I will never be smart enough to obtain.

Instead of sequestering them to my childhood, denying their constant, steady presence, even to this day within my adult character, I listened to their demands, we talked through their needs, walked for days and worked down on our knees pulling weeds. I remember these late summer night walks I would take with my two dogs, both stark black animals, I am back, I’m there, hearing the metal scrape and wind-chime clink of their leashes coming off, the quick thud almost hoof beaten rhythm of them chomping out into darkness. Disappeared. I’m standing there licking my lips as they are eaten by an evening. Not a single shred of doubt in my mind that the moment I take a step forward, they are at my side.

I coupled my narcissism by seeking in my friends, my dogs, my animals, the same beauty I beheld in myself. Responsibility doesn’t care how pretty or how good you are. Just consistency. And ego, ego makes a fine hammer, but a hammer makes a shit screwdriver. Ego is only as good to you as the particular job you apply it to. It’s a tool. You also need a box to keep it in. We need you to set it down a time or two and use a different problem-solver. And my hunger. Well. I do a lot of things by hand, work labor and activity and exercise into my daily plans, and always attempt to couple the movement with some function. Firewood. Gardening. Landscaping.
And I walk. A lot. All the time. Pairs exceptionally with someone who talks. A lot. All the time. Foot stomping around a piece of land is its own form of diatribe.
Walking helps settle me.
Ironic as that might seem.

So there’s my secret weapon. I interjected ideas, activities, pursuits into my life that may have not seemed so attractive to me on the surface, because of how they paired well against, or countered altogether, my most dangerous traits. Not eliminated, mind you, certainly not destroyed or even lessened. I’m still a narcissistic, ego-driven, over-eating, over-drinking, over living life and throwing it in your face, asshole. When I’m alone. On a walk through the woods. Or late into an afternoon huffing and puffing somewhere along a hike. I get it out, I say it, or write it, but I don’t fight it, I let what is in me come forward, and allow myself to take a good long look at it.

We all have this little ‘but what about me’ butthole inside of us.
We just don’t all let it speak for us out loud in public.

That’s the purpose of writing. Maybe no other purpose, than letting steam out of a kettle.
You’re not going to skip over who you really are and land on being the better person.
Can’t go around it. Can’t go under it. Can’t go through it. And you can not turn around.

We’ve got to climb.
Who you actually are.

Not what you wish you were.

You’re Home

Posted on by J.T. Homesley

So. What can I call you now. Jeremiah? Jeremy?
I hope hey you will do. Hey. You.

Aren’t you ready to wake the fuck up just yet?

Take a breath. If you can exhale it away, don’t waste any more of our time writing it.
Settle. I know the coffee isn’t helpful. Wake up, little brother. Arise, newborn father.
Come back to earth planetary lover. And be where you are. Here. In the now.
How is it we can be so sole defined by what comes out of our mouths
and disregard what we feed into them? Do not trust that definition.
Or any that tells you the one that wins is the only side of the coin.

Yes. We all know you write, Jeremiah. We recognize your loud voice and broody
demeanor make you want to be an actor. We see you farm a little on the side.
How nice. But you eat like shit. You drink too much, and not the good stuff.
Your money goes into piss. You lack discipline of any kind, let alone your lonely mind.
And you can be quite a dick, especially to those you love. Who have known you.
Shared in what you call home. You treat them like they found your favorite hiding place.
And now you’re it. My turn to go out looking for people who do not want to be found.

What a game. This life. And Jeremiah. You are too often in your head.
Too dependent on your voice, when your choices should speak for you instead.
But that is hard, isn’t it. To outperform and outshine before there is an audience.
No one around to cheer and look out proud and clap their hands.

But absence of a sound is not the same as silence.
Being alone is not synonymous with loneliness.
And Jeremy, my friend, you are neither.
You are not. And will never be. Alone.

So. Stop hiding place to place.
Hey. You.

You’re home.