Keep an eye on the “Show Schedule” link above for news about where Duende (and on occasion me solo) willl be playing…already adding dates for the new year, and more to come!
Thanks to all for your support reading this blog and coming to our shows this past year…new CD out shortly, and who knows what else is to come?
HE
woke me up
had to slap him around
until he gave up
bugging me for attention
between us
I think he liked it
and I will have a hard time
figuring out how to keep him
from doing it again
because I know he will
and I just can’t sleep
when he’s like that
tried to make him happy
with bedtime stories
and pictures and movies
but it seems
it just makes him want
to bug me
even more
damn him
and his demands
him poking his head up
at the worst moments
making himself known
as if I don’t have enough
to worry about
between work and money
and all this art begging
for release
like a relapse
to our youth
when he drove me
damn near crazy
always pointing out
what HE wanted
those days
I wanted it too
but now I’ve grown up
and I’m supposed to be
more in control
and still
HE wakes me up
in the middle of the night
first thing in the morning
add weird moments of the day to that
and it’s like he’s got
my number on speed dial
and can’t help but push it
press it
any time he sees something
he wants me to see
HE ought to know better
I don’t have time for that
or to make him feel
like I share his enthusiasm
when something catches
his single-focused
eye
this is not
about sex
except in the larger
all-encompassing
grand scale of the fecund universe
sense
the one in which
fire
can be balanced on her head
while she dances
and the audience
stops wondering when the veils will fall
and drops their own
with every gasp
From here I can see
he’s obviously still
the kid I used to hate
with his false arrogance
and secret shame,
always lying about something
he’d done or not done,
always thinking of girls,
of pills stolen from the medicine drawer,
broken open, poured into
a glass full of water and choked down
as he sweated grades,
expectations,
failure. To think of him now, groggy
and ashamed to find himself
waking up the in morning
is to feel no pity
and to have all the regret
heaving inside again…
and it only takes a small turn away from him
to see the young husband I used to scorn,
shuffling off ill-dressed to jobs
he thought beneath him, finding ways
to smile at people he thought neglected
his genius, avoiding the evidence
of his own lazy magical thought
about everything always working out
somehow, watching him insomniac pacing
long nights of neglect and loneliness
as if he was alone in this
as the house piled higher with things,
things, things…
Face on, now,
with the fat old man,
gray and bloated, reeking of smoke
and disappointment, imagining
that what has worked in the past
will work again (even though
it never worked at all),
suspecting that the finding of a late love
is perhaps not enough to save him,
pretending
all his choices were the right ones
because that’s what he still believes
in the still long nights of pacing
and worrying, of staring at small screens
hoping the magic of certainty
will return, light up his fingers,
and illuminate the slowly dimming
remainder he knows is lessening
as he stares frozen ahead,
still stuck in the backstory…
and there,
behind each of them,
the shadow I always called
the Real Me. The slender
man, perfect, fanatic,
holding fast
to a parcel of words clamped together
into solid new worlds
that I imagine will last longer
than these reflections.
That may exist for a long time
after me,
without needing
the others to do so.
Was it worth it
to go this route, I wonder,
to sneer at those three,
turn away from seeing them
and focus on
the blinding light, the vision
of a body of work left behind
that made that shadow seem
so solid and preferable?
I chased that light
all these years, saying it was
what made me, but perhaps all it was
depended upon each of them in turn
and it was wrong of me
to claim, “but really, I’m something else…”
every time I got too dismissive
of those ways of being. Maybe
I should have taken better care of them.
Maybe the shadow I thought was the real me
would have been a better man
if I’d been better to the men I thought
I never was.
I can’t speak ill of
any of them now.
Stroke their heads,
let them go,
think about what I am now
instead of what I was:
poet, artist, failure
at the general business of living;
as always, a shadow
of my self.
After a good time
and a lot of talk —
people on the porch,
food on the table,
friends leaning against
the spatter painted walls
of an artist’s room —
it’s easy to go home
and drift on
into the solo passage
of a song heard in my own living room
and fall into
half-sleep with my eyes open,
recalling other nights like this
that are far in the past,
far enough away to be out of reach
permanently,
and startle myself into realizing
that even the memory of tonight
seems part of that past,
and I realize that I was never part of it
while I was there,
just twenty minutes ago,
that it happened around me
and there wasn’t much to it
that involved me…
If you’re in the Providence RI / Southeastern MA area, you might want to come see Duende performing at one of the two places we’ll be this week:
Blue State Coffee on Thayer Street, Providence, RI on Tuesday;
as part of an evening of poetry, music, and dance on Wednesday night in Middleborough, MA.
Please go check the show listings in the tab above for more info. Hope to see you there!
The hawk
invites the
attention
of three boys
smoking weed
near the old foundation
in the abandoned
pasture
behind the funeral home
but they don’t
look up
as he rounds over them
unnoticed.
Perhaps he considers
the coal-spark of the bowl
from up there,
perhaps not;
more likely
the hawk
is as uninterested
in the boys
and the ruin
they’re using
for camouflage
as they are in
the hawk’s easy grace
as he passes hungrily
over what is
beneath him.
Importance
is relative,
after all: dependent
on where one is,
what one seeks,
what surrounds you
as you search.
What passes
among the boys
is irrelevant
to the hawk,
what may be
scurrying nearby
is irrelevant
to the boys,
and no one can ever say
what the ruin, the hayfield,
and the dead
think of all this.
It’s easy to lament.
Praise, instead.
Find a purpose to the day.
Praise, instead.
Lift your eyes. Raise the dead upon your shoulders.
Praise, instead.
If a cut is made, paint the gray trees with your blood.
Praise, instead.
The crow slips into your veins, cackles, and you die a little.
Praise, instead.
Flight into the desert, no water, no sign of shade.
Praise, instead.
You open a moth-haven billfold in the presence of a feast.
Praise, instead.
Love splits and draws away from your hard skin.
Praise, instead
the levers that move you,
the gears of your throbbing head,
the dinky children born from your fears,
the light of fires burning the spars of pirates,
the hats of soldiers riddled with flowers in the long battlefield grasses,
the red charlatan’s grin as he slops his hogs with your fortune,
the skulls of ancestors empty of expectations,
the diversion of hunger,
the urging and prodding of want;
all brought to you by the machine of living,
all slim and taut and combat tested,
all for you to contest and create from.
Praise, instead,
the pain of painful life.
Lamentation is not a wizardry
against the wave that comes for you;
praise, always praise instead
your remaining behind
as it recedes.
Oh, you are
beautiful,
though in no
conventional sense, and
yes the word is overused
but occasionally correct, as in
“full of beauty,” with it spilling
over your edges and into the street,
I can see dictatorships dissolving
in your wake as you pass through
gray and dingy capitals of pain,
the people rising up pastel
behind you, their leaders bowing
to pressure, opening gates
and secret files, domestic spies
throwing up their hands and flinging
headphones to the floor, questioning
the rationale for listening in on
drab conversations when you
are possible,
and you still walking,
oblivious to what’s happening,
serene, humble, not even noting
the turmoil you cause,
drama, even financial panic —
you don’t see the bankers
with their hands full of fraud
running after you to buy a glance,
you don’t see the drug dealers
kneeling and begging their marks
to try an addiction they can satisfy,
the warriors gnashing armor
and wailing missiles at each other
regardless of uniform just to gain ground
where you might pass,
and all the time you think you’re nothing,
you’re ordinary as shattered silk, wasted
as a second chance, all the time
you’re spilling over and the world
slips on what you leave,
and most of all, in all that
roar and tumult, all that steady
chaos, in all the following general disbelief
that you are walking among us,
you don’t ever think of me.
Definition
of a name:
what holds us
in place
while we’re polished
faceted
made shiny
acceptable facsimiles
pulled out of our
rough and ready true shapes
presented
as honest selves
Names
ought to be given up
I’ll be you
You be me
We’ll fuck them up
by not being
what’s expected of us
as we sit in settings
made by others
to show us off
as gems
of the art of
artificial beauty
That makes us lies
Lying world
makes us up as we go along
and we do the shining
from our cut up selves
End this
anonymously
Give up identity
Don’t let them make you
your own alias
we cobble
faith
together
from the odd street-Christian tract
comic books
snatches of poems
random lines from TV
slip it into our thin wallets
as if
it could feed us
and starve while we imagine ourselves
well-fed
The love songs of the ordinary
can be heard in the cattails
that intrude in the ditches
of the roads between the town
and the city. That thin whistle
and shattering rattle
are all you need to know
about how we find each other,
setting up housekeeping
where everyone can see
and no one will notice.
When the exemplary
drive past us, we just stand,
moved a little perhaps in their wake,
but holding fast to the ground
in places they would never think
to build upon. We sing there
the way they think they sing,
but we know better
as we fray and burst and
spread our seed,
and we’ll be here when they’ve gone by us
rushing to the homes built on solid ground
that they’ll abandon in search of a better place,
a place they’ll find and lose again
while we and our ordinary
sit by the road and sing
and watch them pass.
Let us lie
and say we are unhappy
with our lives: the lack of money,
the unrelenting longing for
love/sex/contact, our voices unheard,
thoughts unacknowledged,
et cetera.
Let us lie and say we want
a colorless
world. That we imagine our groups
catapulted over the walls
into erasure, imagine heritage
a myth. Imagine the lies
we could tell ourselves
about no boundaries, total freedom,
and other things: et cetera.
And so, forth
into the breach we make
by rejecting the fact
that most of us struggle
to stay alive,
wishing to preserve
the lives we have or make them
better, not to transform them
int other lives, or lose our current selves
to perfection:
let us lie and say
no part of us is happy
to be what we are now. Let us lie
and say we desire to be
not ourselves, when the truth is
that all we want is to be
is exactly as warty and prejudiced
and venal, etc., as we are now,
that all we want
is an easier way
to be those things. We’re happy enough
to know what we want because we have it already,
just not enough of it,
not all the time,
et cetera.
Click on the “Tracks” link above to get to the site!
I’ll be focusing on some other aspects of my life for a bit. Still doing all my scheduled shows and readings, but probably not a lot of posting of poems.
Good chance to go back and read back pages, for those of you who might be interested.
See you soon.
Dark Matter 