Monthly Archives: March 2018

March 8, 2018

To Fail Again

By Tony Brown

Whenever he thought
he was on the brink of understanding himself
better than before, he would have 
the same vision of being buried deep,
carried by unknown people into a cave
in a procession lit
by a single white torch.  
They’d place him at the back of the cave, 
alone with the torch, laid out on the stone floor
in the dim light until the flame died,
at which point he’d get up and stare 
at the prehistoric walls
and see upon them fantastic pictures
of dancing beings of light and air
trapped incongruously below.
Then he’d shake himself
loose from the vision and come up 
to ground level and try and try 
to bring those beings with him,
or at least to tell their stories,

and he would fail
and fail again
but each time, he’d look forward
to returning to the cave
to try and fail 
and fail again.

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March 7, 2018

The Wave

By Tony Brown

While working on someone else’s work
strictly for my pocket’s improvement

I’ve been thinking all day of
cresting a deep drone tone

played on a dark electric guitar
as if it were a wave far out at sea

racing toward land overnight
across the whole of an ocean

moving toward the shore of a stage
where it will break

and alter everyone in attendance
with a drench of black sound

I don’t know how to create it
and from guilt over things undone

I’ve touched no guitar today to try and learn
But tomorrow — come tomorrow

I’ll put in less time on someone’s job
and bettering my normalcy

Instead will surf the deep ocean
riding the imperceptible wave in my ears

from origin to end to see what comes with it
from abyssal depth or strange port

as if I were a brave sailor and not
a prosaic and mundane slump of a man

worried about bills and chest pains
to the exclusion of making the music I’m here to make

along with words to ride the wave
all the way over the shelves of shore

into the high tide line
so everyone there gasps and says

they were glad to be present when it came
to be present for such a sound

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March 5, 2018

I Wake Up In Despair

By Tony Brown

Revision.  Posted originally in April, 2016.

I wake up in despair most mornings.
Each day slants uphill.
It takes everything I have to climb it.

I wake up in despair most mornings
but find comfort in knowing 
things that no Pharaoh can know;

how, for instance, to pick myself up
without an entourage to help me; how in fact
to get by with no entourage, neither in celebration

nor in sorrow; how to fall down back-broken
and get back up again next day for another round
with nothing but what’s in me to pull me up.

I wake in despair most mornings. Each day
bores me: sometimes with a dull drill, sometimes
with a chisel of same and same and same again.

I wake in despair most mornings 
but find comfort in knowing
things that a boss can’t know, or has forgotten;

how to do the dirtiest bits of a dozen jobs, for example;
how to take the next step when it’s time, how to 
fix the broken piece, how not to fail

from seven AM to lunch, how to stay awake
from lunch to three PM and longer
if three PM becomes 5 PM or later.

I wake in despair most mornings knowing
how little of my life is open to me, based on
how much time I have to spend recovering from the rest of it.

I wake in despair most mornings
but I can almost get to glee in knowing
what a king does not, what they may never know;

how to run riot in the streets to spite all my aches and pains,
how to run riot in the streets with all the others aching and pained,
how to run riot in the streets knowing how little time I likely have.

I wake and run riot knowing that ahead of me, somewhere
cowering, somewhere hiding behind mere walls, 
a king, a boss, and a Pharaoh are themselves in despair,

filled with the knowledge
of their lack of knowledge
about anything that needs to be done,

and in spite of the odds and the guns
and the war any of them could muster,
I no longer share their despair.

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March 5, 2018

Ghost Apples

By Tony Brown

Look at you lamenting
the disappearance of apple pie.

Sitting around all day cussing
the bad apples you have to work with.

Muttering about the past, the crust,
the way it used to be.

No one talks up old-fashioned apple pie 
like someone who thinks

the only good apple
is a ghost apple.

Those good apples, you say,
made great pies.

You can till taste them 
if you try.  We need to bake them

again.  Need better apples.
Need a sturdier crust.

Make apple pies great again,
you say. Get rid of the bad, bad apples.

I’m a good apple, I promise, one
fallen far from your tree,

and I don’t want to be
part of any pie although

I’m as American
as you know what.

Keep longing, keep
imagining old-fashioned flavor.

Those ghost apples will leave you
hungry, famished, starving,

strangling on dry crust.
Meanwhile, I’m doing fine

on a diet
of what’s in front of me,

not on what’s long gone
and left behind, 

and there’s not a bad apple
in sight.

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March 4, 2018

Taking Down The Ruins

By Tony Brown

a spider
in a corner
cocooning
a beetle holding 
remains of joy
in its jaws.

mice nibbling
final hopes
spilled across
a dusty 
kitchen floor.

masses of wind
fling themselves against
windows that are
slowly but surely
giving in
to the battering.

on and on,
house by house,
block by block, 
city after town
after farm after town 
after city. 

almost all of The People
have disappeared.
anyone left
expecting to hear
other voices
hears nothing
but the sounds of

earth scavenging
what’s left and 
taking down the ruins.

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March 2, 2018

23

By Tony Brown

Somebody give me one of two things:
a top hat full of noble blood

or a statue of me wearing the hat.
You can call me lord of a lovely 

principality. Isn’t it the same thing?
Isn’t a statue of the imaginary me

the same as the red juice of privilege?
I hereby declare that they are the same.  

If you give me the blood
and the statue as well, won’t I be

regal and in charge?  Go get me
the title as well, something on parchment.

I want to choose who I am
and discard what I was raised to be.  It matters less,

it seems, than what I decide a scrap of me
has to report.  All that history to wrestle

that once could exalt or drown a person
and now all we have to do is check a box

or stuff one and we are what we claim.
Easy enough for everyone.

I’m enjoying the stony hat on my head now.
I’m enjoying the hell out of my pale marble face.

I’m dreaming of what it all means,
when all it means is that I’m dreaming. 

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March 2, 2018

Take A Little Trip With Me

By Tony Brown

I don’t mind your drug full eyes
any more than I mind how cloudy
the steel of my own brain becomes
under the threat of smoke. I am 
no hypocrite. I prize the undue mix
of clarity and deep confusion one needs
to get by in this climate of insult and 
anger. You have to get ripped up like
a wrecked paper crane, unfold your awareness
in pieces on a desk, try to reassemble it;
if you need a chemical to make the glue stick,
use it.  You need an herb or a pill, burn it
or swallow it.  A clear head can mean different things
to sane people now and then, and now
it might mean survival to let it go. I do not mind
your sweet muddle, your gentle fog,
for the same reason I do not mind my own. 
I cannot embrace the world today
without acknowledging how illogical
one must be to do so.

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March 2, 2018

Monologue: The Nature Of God

By Tony Brown

Now and then I am challenged
to define my spirit and my beliefs,
usually by someone deep in the binary.
I see dichotomies coming a mile away:

are you a good Christian or an evil Satanist?
Are you a stupid believer or a brilliant atheist?
Do you hajj? Do you kneel? Would you
have lit the pyre or been one of the burned?

I do not speak of these things precisely
to avoid the silliness of such talk, but since
you did not ask and yet seem curious
I will say this: whenever I come to a place

where my road ends in a choice of right turn
or left turn and everyone around me urges
their preference upon me, I turn around
and go back the way I came, or I sit down

on a spot in the middle of the road
and observe the land and sky all around,
see if perhaps there is a pond or ocean
nearby, or a river or stream. 

If you do not understand this
you could never understand what I might say
about how I apprehend the nature of God.
You would not learn enough of who I am.

If you decide that I must therefore be
among the ones to be marked for burning,
go ahead: burn me.  Burn me
for what kind of fuel I am to you. 

It seems that in your world there must be
a name for everything, whether or not
you understand it. Decide later,
after I’m gone. Name my ashes instead.

I’ll shrug off your name for me
as the wind carries me off
in small eddies and tornadoes,
in all directions at once.

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