Originally posted 8/13/2011.
Once inside,
I become
the bully bull,
somehow having grown
horns for eyes —
I gore what I observe —
my friends
turn aside.
Alone now,
I watch my own
steaming breath.
I did not want
to be inside
the animal’s hide
completely — only
to wear a bit for show.
Now I’m stuck and
all the world’s
an apocryphal red flag,
a cape in a killing hand —
when I see it
I am compelled;
I charge.
I hope
to carry always
an air of
disrepute —
not to sport the stale
bad boy label,
not to dress myself
in an outfit stitched
from assumptions
and bad cultural
hangovers;
not to paint my face
in dark primaries
then go out at night
in good black
and sad spots of silver
shiny enough
that even when I creep
the shadows, I’m sure
to be noticed and noted;
no, what I seek is
just enough
gnarl and twist
in my carriage and form
that from one glance
a stranger might say,
“Well…from the look of him
it’s hard to tell what’s what.
It might be
danger, it might be wisdom,
it might be hard roads or
soft boundaries.
Whatever it is,
I wouldn’t have voluntarily gone
where I suspect he’s gone, but
I’m glad someone did.”
Originally posted 4/29/2013.
Yet-to-be-fully-imagined country
we all want to live in,
miles of plains, mountains,
peace groves full of lemon trees, country
where we let
our own blood
into the garden soil
to feed it,
where we all sing
in our own tongues in front yards,
kneel silently in back yards
under the open sky seeking guidance
or a little rain; country yet-to-be founded,
someday-to-be rich and storied;
abandoned, rediscovered,
abandoned again;
country, not nation, not state;
homeland, not seat of empire;
country yet-to-be ours, country
we’ll have to define, we’ll want to defend
against the poisons of borders,
flags, anthems, suspicions;
on the day we come into that country
we’ll look into each other’s eyes
and know what to name it
without hearing a single campaign speech,
know how to run it
without a single task force,
know how to love it
without a single weapon;
we’ll know we’ve truly settled there
when we can look into each other’s eyes
and see a neighbor, a cousin,
or a self, no matter what else we see.
Sad on behalf of that which is blue
and is not supposed to blue ever;
sad today for blue lips cooling, blue skin
under reddened eyes, weightless blue words
doing little to heal or correct a broken moment.
Angry on behalf of that which is red
which should only be red now and then; angry today
for blood on faces, blood rising in faces, faces soaked
from inside in blood until the dragon stain
of red carries through to words and breath itself.
Scared on behalf of that which is white,
even that which has become so under pain of death;
scared today of ghosts, surrenders, pale knights on pale horses —
all the panoply of what terrifies; most of all, afraid
of white faces; it shouldn’t be so, but it is so.
what you love
you claim
what you despise
claims you
what you know
and remain indifferent to
explains you
what you do not know
and others do
reframes you
thus I
learn like mad
have opinions
avoid hating many
and love few
all in an effort to
surrender little
of myself
stories you tell
of what you see
become what people see
of you
stories you tell
of how you see what
you see become
your angle on what
you are
when pushed to speak
I over-explain
and therefore negate
how little I surrender
of myself so
I am learning
silence and
how to tolerate
the growing lack
of self-delusion
that naturally follows
people who are
indifferent to me
are killing me
by millimeters
I am learning
indifference to them
each lesson a bullet
fired in self-defense
this resultant loneliness
is an expression of
a kind of poverty
much like how after a war
a country
is often in ruins
its people walking dazed
by what was once familiar
having become indifferent
to its former self
they starve eventually
or leave
With acknowledgments and respect to Bob Marley, whose words inspired this piece…
Dictionaries
tell you what authority demands
of words
defined
to do work
on behalf of Authority
Never do they mention
when primary meaning is
in dispute
or when primary meaning
is a cornerstone
of prison or when
that cornerstone
rests firmly on negated
backs and necks
If they do tell you a meaning
came from a definition
written repeatedly in blood
with pens
made from bones
plucked from slain infants
they wink it off with
a bandage label such as
“colloquial” or “obsolete” —
trying to chase
unquiet ghosts of struggle into
forgotten fields of rubble
left over from
construction of
their order
While they own these dictionaries right now
their dictionaries have no words
to sing of those who
having come up from under boulders
having come up free of rejections and crush
having come up from understanding
to overstanding
this ism schism game
sing new words
of how stones refused
by builders become soon enough
cornerstones and
keystones of
aqueducts to carry fresh water
to those who still thirst
and of how they do so
by any definition
necessary
Hard not to hear
that red muttering
underneath too many
breaths:
ancient, violent criminals
breaking out
from inside so many
hard-sealed heads,
first in dribbles
and then in packs,
comfortable again as they
mutter and wreck
as if it is finally the season
for such muttering to grow
in volume, grow
toward becoming the cry
of a banshee army turning out
to storm across all and sweep
all ahead of it.
Make no mistake:
not one word of
that murmur
should be mistaken
for old German,
and thus dismissed.
Admit it, at least
to yourself: you
can understand
every word.
How hard is it to be
this, to be me?
Very easy on days
when there’s enough
lemon sunlight
or clean-scented rain
to keep things fresh
and moving; other days,
it’s a chore moving one lung,
let alone two,
let alone keeping up
with my cardiac rhythm,
and when it is like that
weather has no bearing
on how long I lie in bed
after waking up
only to have my head
convince the rest of me
I have not slept at all.
Take this morning,
for example — I haven’t looked
out the window to see
what is going on and
I likely won’t — so take this morning
and run. Take the whole day —
I won’t miss it.
Originally posted 12/30/2014.
Pretend there’s a fable
about a flamingo born
with one and only one leg.
Pretend this bird somehow survives
the vagaries of indifferent
and unrelenting nature
and becomes an adult.
Pretend few ever get close enough
to offer solace or support —
after all, from a distance
no one would be able to tell
the bird was born missing a leg.
Pretend a one-legged flamingo,
unable by definition to switch
to its other leg when
it grows tired of standing still,
must fly more often
than its counterparts.
Pretend it’s not at all farfetched
that such a bird could truly survive.
Pretend the fable has a moral:
to those from whom much is taken
much is also given,
or
unending fatigue in living may draw out
an urge and capacity to soar,
or
perspective and vision may come to one
as compensation for grievous wounds.
Pretend that it matters which words are used.
Pretend like mad
that the chosen moral
is strong enough to keep
the flamingo from drowning
when one night it finally
is so exhausted from the cycle
of unsteady standing
and desperate flight
that it descends
though there are no
shallows in which to land.
The hottest places? No.
Even Dante knew better —
he never said this.
The cold places — the ones
where a candle
in the crisis wind freezes
into a red icicle of pointless pose —
that’s where they belong. Can’t you
hear them sniffling about,
wriggling on the fence?
Those of us
who cannot cease raging
and roaring —
we may be wrong,
may ultimately burn in the fiery levels
for what we believe or rise
toward the glorious sun — in fact
we may not believe
in heaven or hell but
we believe in heat; maybe
because we were born to it,
maybe because we were
schooled in it, maybe because
it found us and we survived —
however it happened,
burning
is all we know.
was grown in an oven
they named me
residue
ash for short
once swept out of their hearth
was tossed
left traces on everything
was born again in a dustbin
emptied into
a heap on the curb
blew around a lot
they called me mistake and
stain
though I answered to neither saying
ash, ash I am
holding a little heat but not to
smolder
like a resentment
would prefer
to warm a garden
blend into fertile soil
unhated
It’s not my problem, I scream,
not my sad planet to save anymore.
Let others do the work of salvation;
I’m not going to be here long enough
to bask in any light
from a saved world, and in truth
I don’t believe in its salvation:
at best that’s a dim light
everyone’s scrambling toward.
Again: this isn’t my job —
I’m over halfway
to my own last days.
I’m mostly racing the darkness
to see which of us falls first; still,
the bedraggled world
keeps coming
and begging for me
to ease its suffering,
even if just a little.
Did I stutter, I wonder,
when I asked the world
to let me off its hook?
Maybe that was not a stutter.
Maybe that was my voice
pushed through a shiver; perhaps
I have to consider other possibilities —
cold as the wind is,
perhaps I am colder;
if I am not the peace,
perhaps I am the war.
Flowers and trees and love and such
are ours to freely discuss,
are what is
allocated to us.
When we add a note
of concern or rage
at how each
is polluted or policed
or killed, they call us
out of line. Sometimes
they call us onto
a firing line of our very own —
enough, the Powers say,
enough, troublemakers;
you should have stuck to
writing of flowers and trees
and love and such
as they are and no more,
should never have sought or
assumed then proclaimed
connections to wider agonies
and grander ecstasies —
damn all you poets. Stick to
pretty wordcraft; leave
the statecraft to the State.
For us to be of
soothing voice and
half-sound mind
is all they ever ask
of us; anything we choose
to carry or inhabit or disrupt
beyond that,
any words for the choices
we fight for or against, anything
we choose the words to nurture,
is ours alone, and we are
too frequently alone
with language — the machine
that makes truth happen.
We can’t turn it off, even if we die
by its churning. We can’t do otherwise;
seasons, rain, flowers and trees
and love and such ask us to speak for them.
We can’t do other than we are asked.
Even if we die. Even if it kills us.
I bend back to this work
after days of fire, my feet
gray with ash; swear that
these tracks, these
proofs of memory, will be more
than grief’s dust, more than tracings
of what was, instead
will become maps, urgings,
soil in which to grow — what?
Sustenance? Tinder
for new fire? Not my place
to know; I bend back
to work, always
to Work — mindful
of Fire, pushing off
my own need to Burn.
This face, exemplar
of no remorse — its
pale nerve-laced skin
twitching, its stare,
its thin, sharp nose;
that fear
in those hollow eyes
brimming over,
spilling onto those lips,
flavoring each word they spill
with hate
because
fear becomes hate
when exposed
to open air,
and once fear
flowers into hate
it cannot easily unbloom
and furl back toward
innocence
from that urgent, ugly
canker-state:
fear
turned to hate dares
not regret anything
as doing so may expose
how little it ever had to fear
from the beginning — hence
this face, exemplar
of no remorse with unrelenting
stare, almost as if a mirror
were before you unblinking,
but that isn’t your face
in the news —
it’s something
at once more unsettled
and unsettling:
a face that could be
any face, a face grown
so commonplace
you almost don’t give it
a second glance.
Dark Matter 