Brian Hathcock's photostream  

ten times

one day i'll take a risk with my fucking photos. i'm so bored. fucking bored, even.

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Uploaded on Dec 6, 2009

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There's an orphaned mill stacked beside a fuzzy railroad track.
Up the gray silos rests a skinny barn with windows that always stare, dead.
Below, before the day ends, a family of yellow cats stretches its arms.

A cheap light opens the aborted office. A smoky old fire in a trashcan lid.
This is the home of cats and shit, and a little man, scared.
He runs from people. He is afraid of the dark.

The night is thick. The night might be a rock, black and big.
In a purple coat, the man wears a hornet on his back. He only leaves home at night.
His cats follow but never pass the grass.

From midnight to dawn the man waves his light on the sidewalk,
like a blind man's cane. His trade is finding dollars and coins where others won't dare to drop their fingers.

Tonight he finds a five dollar bill. Relieved, he pats his way back quickly
in a lovely funnel of light. His heart relaxes, finally, under ten thin blankets.

The fire snuffed, the sun sneaks up, and the man stays curled and sleeping.
His mind is stars and stripes and fireworks.
A childhood pet lives again.
He loves his wife, who, like the pet, dies early.
The morning flames through patchwork window panes. But the man in his dark sleep still hurts.

As shadows grow, the smallest cat digs into the man's fat beard. A ritual performed each noon:
And the man falls back into the room a bit easier.

Before night comes, he shops.
More batteries. Socks.

At home on top of a trashed bookcase he hides the batteries, small but heavy.
On the top shelf in a large potato can are six flashlights and two thousand matches.

The lighted sky fades and, again, the cat family scratches.

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Uploaded on Nov 21, 2009

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women

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Uploaded on Oct 17, 2009

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April 1, 2009

i made a thousand beautiful choices
last summer, under little sidewalk trees
in our gray town beside the mountains.

a yellow bird flew into the trees,
your cheeks pushed up by smiles
but today it seems we whiled our lives away.

my arms are numb with hurt, quick!
your face sinks into the future
where i rest under dirt.

ambulance lights are pulsing into the night.
we ate supper, i fed the dogs,
and my heart began to die.

i am shaking uncomfortably between two strangers
in this loud, patriotic automobile.
i'm afraid, alone, alone.

dear loved ones,
they say to fly me to Charlotte in a helicopter.
they say, in weird voices, to fly.

you are here, i love you, i love you,
i love you but you are not here.
the door is open.

my limbs are crazy with adrenaline and other chemicals,
some made by my body, some gifts from the nurse beside me.
my cells are performing a rain dance.




dear loved ones of the dearly departed,
his eyes rolled upward, his head tilted:
an ill pinball machine, gears and lights frozen.
i cannot rid my pickled mind of this image.
he was dead, i knew, and i SCREAMED
iSCREAMEDiSCREAMEDiSCREAMEDiSCREAMEDiSCREAMED
for the doctors to rush, to save
"MAKE HIS FUCKING HEART BEAT!"
Dragged away, door slammed.
wait wait wait
i was a begging ant at the foot of God's mountain.

he was not afraid after we arrived,
i did not cry until after he died,
he told me, "I'm going. I'm going."

calmly, "be calm, dad, you will be
at home again, fine and happy,"
i lied.

i prayed. the first prayer in two years, i prayed:
"God, i pray not for myself. i do not deserve anything, but
i speak to You for my dad, who gave his decades to You. i
cannot ask You to save him; i know nothing of what You want.
i ask You this, sincerely and humbly: please, not for me, but for
my dad and everyone he loves, be with him, take him,
give him what he deserves, which is everything
i do not."

I HATE GOD. during the first thunderstorm of the year, i become dramatic,
not for dramatic purposes, me without an audience,
but because the moment is beautiful in a way
i once loved, and, without my father, i am not the same person,
so i hate the earth in my weakness, and spit and shit towards anywhere
or anyone i can.
i am irrational, irresponsible, hopeless, thankless, selfish, undeserving, sad.
THE MALEVALENT ASSHOLE. LOVE CANNOT BE ANYTHING
BUT BENEVOLENT, BUT gOD BREAKS THIS LAW.
but you do not understand, with your bloody brain,
that we cannot know anything, truly,
so your ideas and conceptions of good and evil
and God
and what may be.

i get drunk, i break bottles in my mouth.
dreams of shotgun sex and hollow point candy.
sandy, salty lungs on the beach days after my death,
washed ashore as trash.

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Uploaded on Oct 10, 2009

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