Kitch & D'oh!

My favorite writing often involves exhaustive biographies. Of food. Or ingredients. Techniques. Pedigrees and heritage, old world and new, traditions and technologies. Broadly, these are classified as cultural histories, and they are my literary joys. Edutainment at its best. In so many mundane objects, items, their interactions, there are fascinating stories. Rather than facts, their truth, like all truth, is a fuzzy continent glimpsed like a foreign shore that peeks out of a fog bank through your telescope as you watch from a rolling deck.

Many mediocre, and a few great, books and pages have been written, words spilled on the battlefield of ideas and attention on the household nexus, that venerable and literal hearthstone, the kitchen. It is the site of most of our activity, where we gather around, cooking and cleaning, preparing, putting away, organizing, and ordering. It is our greatest tool chest, holding more than almost any box, shed, or garage ever could, both literally and metaphorically.  

It is a site of transformation, of rituals and customs and their crossings, of death and renewal, or creativity and artistry just as much as of myth and lore. It has fascinated me since I first remember. It regularly obsesses me now.  Despite what has been said, it’s placement at the intersection of everything opens it up to infinite roads, where anything and everywhere join.

Maybe this will be nothing, another tossed off idea, never followed upon. Maybe it will be gathered up again by some future version of myself. Or maybe, it’s not all half-baked…

Writer's Blocked

It isn’t measured in units;
its cost or removal does not exchange with any currency;
there is no sum to its infinite angles;
it has all the weight and none,
matterlessly it matters;
it frustrates everything by doing nothing;
no map can be shaped or draped or drawn around its edges;
it comes and goes without ever passing,
like the worst parts of a kidney stone;
it blinds with blind intention,
a mute cacophony of monotonicity;
…capricious and fickle and unchanging…
wet nurse Cerberus to the stillborn;

it is the arsonist in the firehouse and the hole in the donut;
the significantly signified screaming silence overtaking all the sound and the fury;
the one way roundabout with closed exits on life’s highway;
it is the undug grave next to the church whose foundation’s first stone was
laid long after we killed and buried with our bare hands the last gods;
it is the optic disk in your vision test;
the vibration in your pocket when you know you forgot your phone;

the “out of order” sign that comes up after you used your last dollar for a Coke.

The only way
out  of nowhere
is through.

Hunger

Longing and lust
and inflamed
senses, ideas, and dreams
dancing expanding visions
floating organic geometries of

inverting and inter-secting
forms that drive and dive
and push and pull and pulse
and plunge and ride;

gasp and grasp and grapple and grab
all hungry hands and mouths
and skin and sheets and nails and teeth,
searching interlocking exploring fingers
tongues and deep
connections lubricated by sweat sheened
lines which lie between
begin to leak and streak and bead
becoming the coming consuming
fire, fueling flares, fanning infatuating fantasies
of fantastic orgasmic quivering shaking
moaning exploding
releasing eternities.

I'm a Little Teapot

I feel like a giant sucking chest wound
ragged bits of flesh, strings of muscle and
twitching sinew are not enough to conceal
the pulsating exposed organ;

I don’t feel numbed by age, just tiered,
but also more sensitive than ever,

as if time has slowly stripped me

of my protective covering and now

I am all live wire, sparking and flashing
as my emotions arc and crackle around me

So often, there are no words;
neither rhyme nor reason.
Just the long slow low scream of existence.

This is my message to the two roads that diverged in a garden of forking paths

This is to you.

As of this writing, to the best of my knowledge, I have somewhere between 30 and 50 children. There is always the chance I was lied to… but that is the only truth I have so far.

If you, in the most general yet specific sense, find this… there is a notebook. My grandmother, Martha Hartman, wrote, with stories from her childhood and youth to pass on to me. I hope you can find a copy, if I’m not around to give one to you.

Maybe that is where this leads. This introduction, into us, into yourself, into this world.

My writing sucks, so it won’t be easy. With any luck and a few more decades of life it might become bearable. But one can only have so many goals at a time.
…
In my own mind, this blog, this thing, represents a sort of transition, it’s me, from the ages of about 14 to at least this entry at the age of 33.5. But it wasn’t until now that it began to become about you.

You… fuck.

I should warn you, I curse a lot. There will be a lot of fucks. The amount of fucks I give is pretty much always >0 .

God, I hope I get to meet you. I hope you’d think I’m cool. I mean, I’m not. At all. Really, I can barely even stand myself. Actually, if you started at the beginning and made it this far, you know there is probably no one in this world I hate more than me.

But I love you. In all honesty, you are all I’ve been able to think about for some time now.

You are my world.

I’m at a weird place in life, living in Chicago, short on friends, far from family, without a place that feels like home, and with… I don’t know anymore. I don’t know who she is to me, what this is. All I know is at the moment, I’m unhappy. Maybe that’s why I’m writing you. Why I’ve been thinking about you.

The window in life where I can have children I can raise is rapidly closing, and so you represent my lifeline. A realization or dying wish...

It occurred to me last night my greatest regret in life would be if none of you ever contacted me. If I never heard your voice, learned your name, got to touch your face, see your eyes, hold you…

Holy flaming fuckballs, you, this, came out of nowhere. Not literally, I mean. I came in a cup. Someone scienced the shit out of that, and, ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom, here you are.

But I mean this feeling. This desire to know you. To reach out to you. Maybe it’s because I don’t know how much time I have left. A handful of years, money sucks, partners are… well, I don’t know I’d be writing this if I was happy. But that’s for another thought.

I guess that’s all I have; this serves as both a midpoint, a prologue, and, depending on my commute home and how I cope with another day of what feels like a silent sucking endless black well of depression at the moment, a always possible epilogue.

Somehow, in this out-of-nowhere way, I’m not sure anything else has meaning except you. Is this some shade of what having children is like? I feel obsessed by you, with you, with a longing I can and don’t know how to understand, let alone be able to express.

14 years after my first visit to Fertility Center of California, after gaining the moniker donor 29HTS, I thought of you for what feels like the first time. The oldest of you is turning 14 around now. Starting your freshman year of high school. In four more years, you'll be 18, an adult, and if you know of me, able to choose to find me. I'd imagine you'd start with Google.

And now I’m talking to you. So, whether this is the first message you read, the last, or it is just somewhere in the middle…

Hello; my name is Michael Anthony Sherrillo, and if you ever know anything, know that, whether or not I ever know you, I love you, with all my heart. 

Quiet

It’s so easy to write about what makes you scared

or sad

or depressed.

The right words flow so smoothly when expressing

what’s wrong.

And then the imaginative ink

dries up and curdles in its well

when things are going right.

There seem to be infinite ways to show and share sorrow

while joy can only best be savored

in silence.

Cryptozoology

Maybe

this thing chased

called happiness

that is enveloped

in octopus skin

always in the

process of becoming

a dance of shifting

color and texture

in the murky depths

hunting the invisible

Ouroboros

Is it because

of me

or you

that I feel so unhappy?

I can’t tell anymore

who’s at fault
and I’m afraid it

has gone past

the point that

such things even matter-

no matter how much,

or especially because,

it feels so much like
they do;

I am the common link

in all my failed

and dysfunctional

relationships.

"The Nauseating Sound of Emotional Vomit," in D minor

The process

of ceasing to believe

does not end with adulthood

but death.

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The only pity allowed

is self pity.

And only as long as

you keep it

to yourself.

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Whose life am I living?
The shoulders in this town

just don’t fit right

-a little too big for me-

and it doesn’t keep out

the wind and cold

the way I’d like…

It may be a good

deal but I’m not sure

it’s worth buying if

I might never be

comfortable

in it.

----------------------------------

Who is she,
Windy,
gusty hard blowing

hot and cold blasts

down roads lined with

shoulder-to-shoulder brick buildings…

Rising off the water liked a Bond
bombshell double agent, the highs

and lows of imagination seen in her

sway as she lands on the loud streets

creating and parting the gathering

scattering crowds before her;

The hardness of the city rises

to meet, penetrate, push her away

or pull her down;

but onwards, she crawls and scrapes,

rips and glides her way to the vast

open plains beyond

----------------------------------

I wish I didn’t need to write
to feel, to know my own self.

That feeling seen didn’t feel so

revealing, this feeling is revolting

and risking repulsion I internally cower

and cover and close-off myself.

No body wants to be
so seen
while so alone.

----------------------------------

At what

point do

you realize

the problem

is you?

Missed

Old friend.
I think about what you said
about that moment
that you could feel yourself

gripping the rail

staring beyond and below
out and through and past;
your fingers clenching

pulse racing

adrenaline flooding your body

as you knew
in terror and exhilaration

that you would jump

You read those words

and felt yourself possessed by them

and so you jumped-

I’ll never now if

looking back

it was worth it; whether you were freed

by that moment

if you have found what you were looking for

-what any of us are looking for-

But

sometimes I

feel my palms

sweat, my skin tingle

with cascades of goosebumps

and I think

of you.