Just wanted you all to know that “Dark Matter” just crossed the 150,000 lifetime hits mark. As the Web goes, that’s not a huge number; it’s gratifying to me, though, thinking of 150,000 views of these poems…All a poet wants, I think, deep down, is to be heard and read.
Thank you all very much.
Tony
when asked
“how are you doing”
she realizes
that certain phrases
poke and prod at a tenderness
similar to that found around
any other wound
now
she’s lying in the half-empty bed and
she can’t stop touching it herself
it is hot to the finger tip
feels ready to explode
sobbing seems to soothe it for a few minutes
or hours until
something else — junk mail perhaps
stamped with a once familiar name
or the slant of light on the vacant end
of the old couch
stabs it again
“how are you doing”
“how are you doing”
“how are you doing”
tenderly spoken
apparently taken well
even as they rasp across
what remains unhealed
we say she seems to be
doing as well as can be
expected
but then again
we say a lot of things
we never bother to examine
“he didn’t leave much to ma and me just this old guitar and an empty bottle of booze” s. silverstein
if you thought it was written by Johnny Cash
you are forgiven a little
if you thought he was telling the truth
you are forgiven a little more
if you hate your name too
and all you have to fight it with
is your missing bad ass dad’s old guitar
you are not only forgiven everything
you are blessed and should forgive me
for everything I am about to say
“they’re dead wrong I know they are cause I can play this here guitar” weill, mann, lieber & stoller
can you explain
why it took four people to write one line
about a truth every 16 year old kid
with a death grip on a maple neck
learns by osmosis
from the first chord
“well I got this guitar and I learned how to make it talk” b. springsteen
can you
interrogate your guitar
till it owns up
to things you have never done
“the bitter comes out better on a stolen guitar” d. bowie
if you’ve not
stolen a guitar yet
have we even seen
your bitter yet
“your guitar it sounds so sweet and clear but you’re not really here it’s just the radio” l. russell
ghost superstar by dint
of your broadcast ominpresence
in fact in truth in real life
we end up usually alone
in a small room
with wood and wire
pen paper and bone
this is what
it does for you
does to you
kid
get ready
used to be
I could treat the poems
like puppies — trained them
to sit up and beg
for your favor
pathetic
those little shining eyes
turning over time
rock hard and obvious
in their need
now
I treat them
like search dogs
they track on their own
I follow
they’re lean
if they find you
good
if not
I trust
they’ll find someone else
Human, offer your big dumb love
for all stones:
the ones we climb, the ones we carve,
the ones we throw.
Keep your mouth shut, novice. Don’t speak
if you want to know what to do here.
Listen to the gray whisper of stone
and follow directions.
Maybe you are meant
to climb the largest ones, freestyling up
past ever-present death
without making a mark upon them.
Maybe you’re destined to build
garden walls, fortress walls, paved roads;
prisons, temples, or something
that serves as both?
Maybe you are supposed to cut them
until they represent another thing
in its heaviest incarnation. Maybe
you are fated to release the deities inside.
Or maybe you’re supposed
to hurl the small ones at perceived danger,
perceived food, perceived enemies.
Maybe you will turn them into sharp weapons
with well placed blows, one against another.
Will you recreate all the millions of years
we’ve already spent learning these things?
Human, it’s hard to avoid — the big dumb love
we have for stone carries us there. For now
put your face on the boulder in the path,
cheek to its cool black nubble. Pick up
a piece from the ground and slip it
into your pocket. Carry it around with you,
worry it with your thumb and maybe
after a long time it’ll be smoother
than when you started — and still
it will look not much different
than when you started, and if you lose it
or toss it it will wait, or not, for the next pocket,
the next slingshot, the next place it is needed.
Trust me when I say it will tell the next human
who finds it nothing about you
you would recognize as being your story,
but it will be your story nonetheless.
My face
has been spanked by
a child today,
as gently as
a kitten might do,
simply for suggesting
said child needed
more years on the ground
before contesting certain things;
I took it well, I think,
which is to say
that after allowing said kitten
to bat and paw,
I set the argument aside
and walked away…
believe me, though,
when I say
it left me staring
at a tiger’s big bad claws
retracting into my fingers,
a fantasy of blood on my teeth.
I need not mention
the oil-rainbow sheen
of the rock dove’s
feathers.
I have no obligation
to praise the sea
as it needs no praise
to continue carving the earth
at its margins.
If I were forbidden
to speak of them
the abandoned strawberries
in the broken pot
would thrive or not
anyway.
I say these things
as a way
to keep myself
here. I am
profoundly unnecessary
to all of these
and to so much more:
to almost all, in fact.
What surprising joy there is
in admitting it!
yes, he messed up in the checkout line
a little
but that’s no reason
for the woman at the cash
register not to just do what he
wanted.
she was an accented woman
just this side of girl like the manager
who tried to explain the policy
the cashier was enforcing.
and then there was the fat man in line
who tried to intervene
in their argument and calm him down
and all the other
people in the store
who yelled at him for being
an asshole —
lessers. his
lessers, for whatever reason
he can find. how dare they.
how dare they.
he sits in the car
with his core on fire
and his arms twitching
running the ought to have done list
in his head.
congratulates himself:
at least he apologized to the fat man
who seemed not as lesser as the others, somehow.
the others? definitely more
lesser. extreme lessers.
lesser in voice, knowledge,
lesser because they just are,
obviously.
he doesn’t need a reason.
he’s a better.
a better by birth, choice,
obviously.
how dare they.
how dare they.
When whoever it was killed
John Lennon, I got very quiet.
When whoever it was killed
Kurt Cobain, Dimebag Darrell,
Biggie, Tupac, Jam Master Jay,
I got very quiet. Who is killing
everyone? I stay quiet so they don’t
come for me. That’s why I was never
a big star, though I could have been;
it’s not safe, someone kills them. It’s
a conspiracy, of course it is —
shh, though. Stay quiet. Don’t
speak of it. Whoever kills them,
no matter who pulls the trigger,
is listening. The Stones said something
about it, of course someone
tried to kill Mick and he got lucky
but if you think about it, they got real quiet,
mostly making do after that. Mostly.
Mostly I stay quiet. Whoever it is
kills the loud is still out there.
They call me crazy for thinking that —
who’s still loud out there, eh?
I keep my mouth shut. Ever since
John Lennon, more and more shut.
Don’t open your mouth and stop trying.
Stay shut. It’s safe.
It skitters past
quickly enough
to make me wonder
if I saw it.
I have always trusted
my senses.
If I think I saw something,
I probably did.
I tear into the dark corner
to find it.
There’s nothing there —
time to stop trusting my senses?
Or is it my execution
that’s lacking?
Did I miss it?
Was I too slow?
Did I see
something
that can disappear
at will,
and I’m
just behind
the sensory
learning curve?
Did I —
against all odds —
imagine it?
Or perhaps
I possess
newly broken eyes,
and what I saw
crossed my retina
from within.
Anything’s possible, now
that I have come
to this age.
On the floor
I rock on my knees,
thinking about how much
getting up is going to hurt —
it does, always,
lately. Maybe I’ll lie down
right here and see if
I can see that mouse.
If I catch him,
if he comes sniffing around me,
I’ll be here. Waiting.
What I do best, now.
Look at that newspaper —
ha, I meant that
newsfeed —
it does not matter. All that’s left
is to choose the soundtrack
to the future, and it’s
“Meet the new boss…
same as the old boss…”
When I tilt a windmill
at my battered guitar,
when I make a joyful
dissonance of the noise-news,
I change nothing
but I can tolerate the horror
of knowing what is coming
a little better when
my ears join my heart
in bleeding.
God, we need these drinks
just to forget or deaden
how lately this bar’s gotten
loud as war
and nearly as deadly.
Half the patrons
screaming, half sobbing,
no one secure, all drunk
on some substance or idea,
and both are made mostly
of bile licked
by the sour taste
of flop sweat.
This rowdy dive
is where we keep
our dreams,
our nightmare,
our curse.
It’s an abusive little church
with a pulpit
brimful of paranoid sermons.
No one likes it here
but it’s where
we keep finding ourselves;
maybe we’re in thrall to a God
we don’t even recognize.
1.
the gun
the picture of the gun
the movie of the gun
the theater of the gun
the toy gun
the gun as toy
the toying with the gun
the gun toying
the gun’s toy
the toy discarded
the toy weeping
the toy guarding and guarded
the toy erupting
the toy deceased
2.
hair along the arms rising tingling
who brushing who with air and scent
hides coming alive
this thing needs a name
so they call the new life love
love in the hair along the arms
love on their hides
but really
eventually
same old
same old
same old
lives
3.
that weed’s gonna kill ya
when it doesn’t — AH
what roads open
4.
God
or a sandwich
offered at the right moment
and
BANG
zealot
5.
I had to do this, didn’t I?
Didi stutters.
I knew her
when she didn’t.
I know
who made her stutter,
made her shy.
I know what he did.
I didn’t do
what I should have done
when I found out,
so I guess
I helped
to start her stuttering too.
I guess I wasn’t a man then,
or maybe I was.
Maybe I
still am not one, or maybe
I still am. Maybe
“being a man”
means
brooding about
being a man,
instead of just
being a man
differently.
Don’t judge me
by Didi, stuttering
and shy —
it’s hard to be a man.
That’s what i said, it’s hard
to be a man these days
when men are so not good at
being men —
I said it, yeah.
You heard me —
did I stutter?
Dark Matter 