Blue-green three-hole punched
notebook; black notebook,
pocket-sized; big, bound
sketchbook; all unruled,
solid, ready.
All mostly empty.
More fetishes than tools.
Own the paper, be the artist.
I’m an actor.
This is criminal.
I should steal a pen,
something richy-rich,
plated; something
that doesn’t write well,
doesn’t float across the page;
some small part
of this should be difficult.
Require me to put in work;
clean myself up; act right;
pick up a notebook; plunge in.
I am abandoned:
no one reads
my poems anymore.
In a frantic bid
to have them read again
I have sworn on the grave of
all my past poems
that every poem I write
from this moment on
will conform and be about
injustice,
fucking,
or both — except for this one
about last Friday when
far off
the New Hampshire coast,
cold under bright sky
and on top
of joint rattling seas,
I saw a humpback whale
as I had never seen one before:
by itself, apparently
not a part of any group.
It paralleled our small boat
for a few minutes
then raised its flukes one last time
and surged down
into diamond tipped
dark waves.
No way to say if that whale
was hungry, horny, lonely, lost, ostracized,
or none of the above.
Surely it seemed at peace,
but there’s no way
to be sure of anything about it
other than its sine-wave course
beside us.
I’m changed now:
I swear to spend more time
humbly observing and pondering
the quests of solo whales,
and thus the world shall be improved:
perhaps less injustice;
perhaps more fucking;
surely, fewer poems.
What he thinks about often
is a scene from a movie
he hasn’t seen that is not yet in
release, but is nonetheless familiar:
the stone in his chest,
no larger than a heart,
holds him on his back
on the floor.
There was time once
to deal with the stone,
to unflutter the heart,
to clear the paths.
Time’s still a factor
but not a friend. Now,
he’s feeling the stone
grow immense.
It has grown large enough
to compress the lungs,
shade the brain, and finally
to cover the light.
He has to confess
it’s a pretty good flick.
It has a certain sense
of justice. A certain sense
of preordainment
he recalls whenever
the pain cuts
into his left arm
for a second or two
late after dinner, or while
he’s doing something
no one would call strenuous.
In the movie
his character never goes
to the doctor
and neither does he —
that would be too much like
fast forwarding to within
fifteen minutes of the end
and claiming to have watched it all.
Dark Matter 