give them up

take them out of your bag
and hang them up to dry
and die

we need the dance of good and bad
with all its twists and feints
to be shown to us as a chart
of small and long steps
that march back and forth
to a beat that drags and then speeds up
for that is the one way
we will learn it
and then we can work
to try and make it smooth
and straight

we need the arc of love
to be drawn in dots and lines
that curve and halt
roll and drop back
so that we can take hold
of the long view
and not be slaves
to the past wreck of any one time
when it did not come out as we
had planned

give up
your rotted
flowered and sickly fragrant
overextended vocabulary
your
adoration of complication
in pursuit of explication
of creation’s obfuscation

phew!

it is all just so much spit on the tongue

this world you claim to know
so well you can write of it
is not the world
we were asked to show
for all to see and hang
upon

the rules that say
it must be so are
too glib to be true

you have lost the thread
of how we were meant to run
this race
have made a choice
to paint your names
in truth’s place
and made them
ten times the size
of what is in fact there

a word to the wise
is all we need
wise words are small words
keys
for locks
not made for codes and
traps

so
give the huge words up
and be brief when you sit
with pen to page

live for the short road
and for praise
of what is found
when the Big Words
are cut down
to size

NOTE: Rough recording of this up on Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/poetrybytonybrown

A certain part of a man’s body
walks the street looking for the blue pills.
There’s a storefront on Water Street
that’s supposed to have them
but he’s not sure of the address
so he goes into several before he finds
the one he wants and buys a pack
from the certain part of a woman’s body
behind the counter.

Certain parts of men’s and women’s bodies
crowd the night streets around the club district
where the exchange has taken place.
It’s party night, party hour.
The parties of the first part
merge with their counterparts on the sidewalks, in the bars
and parking lots. It’s all so exciting,
with the undercurrent
of deception, the blue pills everywhere,
the gels,
the creams
and implants.

Meanwhile, all over the city,
men and women
whose parts have strayed
stir uneasily
in front of the blue fire
of their televisions.
Smiling, whole bodies
keep telling them
something is missing.
Even when they know better,
they cannot sleep.
If it’s not too late,
they may head
to Water Street
themselves, having
a long look around
for themselves.

All that any of us truly know
of death

is that in the face of it, we can rely
on the sight of a peach tree

split black and rotten from top to bottom with
almost every one of the branches dry and cracked,

and on how upon the few remaining green arms
are handfuls of fruits waiting to ripen.

I’m a tiny animal,
just one of trillions
(but who’s counting?)
who really own the world.
We’ve been here
just shy of forever
and the one thing I can tell you
about people is this:
they are good real estate.
You have to love them
with their migrations and
their filth. I know
they’re sure
that when we move in
we’re some kind of God thing,
but honestly? They
don’t get it: we aren’t trying
to do anything but get by, reproduce,
suck up what we need to live. God
has had very little to say to us
ever since he gave up on the
real estate market. His money
is in commodity futures. He leaves
the hard wet work to us: the homesteading,
the improvements, the clear cutting.
God doesn’t send us, he just
depends on us. We build where we want
and he banks on the results.

I’d say
it’s like one hand
washing the other,
but somehow,
that doesn’t seem right.

Dennis has got a picture
to show us:
ears he cut from dead VC
in the Mekong Delta.
Like dried apricots,
they’re lined up neatly
in the shoebox
he keeps them in.

One ear from each kill,
Dennis, or
did you take two?

He laughs and winks.
I had a lot of fun over there,
he says.

We sit next to each other in
Urban Studies. He and the professor
get along well and he has a grasp
of some of the nuances of the evolution
of cities that is admirable.

Right now, we’re stoned
out of our gourds
after a lunchtime drive.

No one will sit near us when we’re like this,
when I’m sitting looking at Dennis’ picture
of the apricots in the box, when I
an trying to imagine
how it must have been, amazed at the fact
that this was permitted,
that men who were permitted
to do these things walk among us
with their children and their insights
into the way civilization grows.

Wow, I say.
I want to hear more,
I say, and y’know,
I’m hungry, I say.

Let’s get a burger,
says Dennis.
And we do.

I may have no choice
but to lie to my skin
and try to convince it that
the million flinches and itches
it is feeling are not reflective
of a restlessness within,

but are the marks of small assaults
from outside the perimeter. I will say,

we are under attack
by everything.

This will work,
I think, if I can keep my skin
from looking into my eyes.
My eyes won’t ever back me up.

I refuse to be daunted by this.
Lying to my skin, closing my eyes,
I’m going to beat this —

allowing the forces colliding among my organs
to roam and smash me awake again and again,
all the while pretending peace reigns there

while the black night closes in and seeks weakness,
breaches, the stray mutinous hair that will fall from me
leaving one follicle open to a manufactured danger
on which I can blame everything.