My father once owned
an Ithaca shotgun
he got from a kid at his job
who was going to Vietnam
and couldn’t take it with him
12 gauge with a monster kick
that knocked my six year old ass
right down the one time I shot it
Weird looking gun with a lever
that broke it open
at the barrel for loading
Good for birds and pests
and not much else
No idea when or where he sold it
or gave it away or turned it in
but now and then
I think about its oaken stock
and wonder about
how the kick would feel to me
now that I’m grown
Last night I dreamed I was living
in a condo somewhere not here
and a boy with bright eyes
knocked on my door
and asked for his gun back
I said didn’t have it
and told him the name
of the town where I grew up
and if was looking for his gun
he should knock on their doors
He nodded and turned away
to walk there in his combat boots
to go ask people he’d never seen
for a gun long ago lost
I saw him join
all the rest of the ghost boys
from all the rest of history
thronging the streets
asking strangers for their guns
because they knew that if only
they could fire them one more time
they’d remain standing up after the kick
this time they wouldn’t fall down
My shoulder aches for them
Aches for the gun my father got rid of
Aches for wanting to handle correctly
what I could not when I was young
Just another ghost boy
citizen of a dead nation
a whole nation of us
imagining a gun
that we could master this time
to feel masterful
and grown
Author Archives: Tony Brown
About Tony Brown
The Tale Of The Ithaca Shotgun
Nothing To Pour
I can see the shape
of what I must say,
what I long to say,
but not how to fill it in.
The container is perfectly
made, seamless and clear;
there’s nothing inside.
In my conception, once I fill it
anyone reading it will understand it
at once, regardless of
their literacy, their language.
The moment they lift it
from the page and take it in,
they’ll be so moved…
yet somehow for too long
I have had
nothing to pour.
These Are My People
I came back
to my house
before dark
after a day of being on fire and taking fire
from the people I’ve been told
I descend from.
Told by a lit match
to watch my
short fuse,
I think about
the long trail of sparks
stretching behind me.
Dark or light
I suppose
they are my family,
enraged or at peace although
they are more light when enraged,
more dark when at peace.
Meet the Reversal Family, the
inside-out clan. No one
can be happy unless all
are circling the drain
or the bonfire. Straight-up
equilibrium — everyone
minding themselves,
their business, helping
the others as needed? No need.
No one in the Reversal Family
needs anything except
the misery of the others.
and if you don’t share that you must be adopted,
alien, crazy, or free,
but you don’t get to choose.
Once home I try to forget
my allegedly short fuse and
that actual long trail of burning behind me
but I can smell it
in my sleep.
Everyone can.
Mad And Lost
The difference between
what I look like
from the outside and
what I am like within
is three thousand
miles or so give or take based upon
the precise starting points
and exact destinations
or so I’d like to think
The distance to the village
where I thought I might look right
for the part
but didn’t
is four thousand miles
The distance to the rez
where by rights no one could trust me
to be who I said I was
is two thousand miles
in the other direction
I’ve been to both
Neither fit me well
or at all
You hear this and choose to question
why geography and history
should matter so much to me
when I live right here and
I’m the only one bringing this up
on a routine basis
an obsessive basis
If I’d forgotten all that
gotten over it
I’d have been happier
you say
You remind me that
I’m old poor and sick now
It would seem that should
matter most of all
not race and ancestry
Not missing any sense of home
Make a home here you say
It’s all that matters
I’ve lived among people like you
my whole life
and talked about this
the whole time
and somehow you still wonder
why I have been and will continue to be
mad and lost
all the time
Something Something
I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.”― David Ignatow
Outside something something
nature. Creature, plant,
rock, shadow on ground.
Inside something something
human emotion, insight. Illumination.
Metaphor as deep as depth.
Between something something
and something something a wall
unbreachable. Out there we call
“the world.” In here we call “soul” or
something. We call poems “keys.”
We try to make world into soul
with a key to a door we think we see
in the wall. Something, something;
something about the lock being broken
and something about trying to make things
work for us that are not our concern
while something laughs behind our backs.
That’s not door. That’s still wall.
That’s not a soul and maybe there’s no
world. This is a poem, or something, it seems;
a key that unlocks Nothing.
Shithead
I’m up at four-thirty
cracked like dawn
trying to write
but there are cats here
and they want food and
a clean shitter and above all
for me to stop using them
as a source of excuses
for not writing
I have to go bathe my father
which is no excuse
I have to go feed my mother
which is no excuse
My feet on fire and
my left hand frozen numb
with neuropathy
Pain that goes from
nagging to screaming
that it’s not an excuse
The drugs that ease the pain
slow me and dull me at the same time
but that is no excuse
My broke timid ass overwhelmed
with all the doom within and around me
to the point of disgust and saturation
with my lack of excuses
The siren songs of bullshit self-care
are no excuse to step away
from the cliff
I need to fall over to land on
an enemy below
and even as I burn out
and fall dead while crushing them
snuffing them out
they look up saying
You are killing me and killing yourself
and those are not excuses
for not writing a poem today
Feed the cats shithead
Take the drugs shithead
Kill the billionaires shithead
Whether you live miserably or die happy
you truly have just one real job
Write that goddamn poem
shithead
or all this will be worth
exactly as much
as you are
which is
vessel
conduit
gutter
that’s all
Chastened thus
I suffer and bend to
the task
Eldercare
Your parents are going away,
diminished ghosts drifting off.
Whatever shall you do?
They are feeble, spiteful clouds
now, raining perpetually on everything.
You dry and fold their clothes
and fret to yourself about how
you will ever empty the house
while they thunder, cast bolts, start fires.
In other words, you keep living as you always have,
doing all the hard work you think is necessary
to hold them, like smoke, in your hands.
Nothing has changed. Look down at those palms,
those naked palms. All that’s there is a scent
you can’t follow to learn where they are going.
Call Out
Check yourself. There appears to be
a thin coating of slime
on your affirmation of purity,
a subtly gleeful aggression
in the way your principles allow you
such arrogance, perhaps indicative
of a willed inability to compare and contrast
your own righteousness on one subject
to your complicity on another.
If I were looking into a mirror
while doing and saying these same things
I hope I’d shut up and tear my face off.
If I found your face underneath mine
I do not know what I could do
except wall myself in with mirrors
so I would always remember
where I came from and never be able
to go back into the world.
If I later tore that face off to find beneath it
only the bones that history gave us both,
I would do the only thing left to do:
go back out there and let the people I’d hurt
judge me, then shun me or embrace me as they choose
while I bled and tried to grow something new.
A Career In Poetry
My last great literary act
is to admit out loud that
I’ve always been repeating myself
and it’s no longer enough.
It used to be enough.
I would tell myself
in response to writing a bad poem
I was at least being original.
Then came the moment when
I saw I was not, but kept trying.
Today I can see
the whole point of me: there’s been
just one, there’s been
only one poem I’ve ever written, I’ve been
endlessly rocking the same poem
with different words; I have repeated it
only out of desperation, then walked up to you
and shook you
over and over with the same motion
and glazed sensibility,
wanting to be
owed something
I fooled myself into thinking
I deserve from you.
Anyway,
here’s a new book for your consideration
called “I Repeat Myself: The Villanelles.”
I know it’s the same as my last book,
“Once Again: The Sonnets.”
I see you already looking away.
Bear with me, give it a read, give it a listen,
give it the old college try. Give it
your full attention, even if only briefly.
You won’t have to read it more than once.
Kinder, Gentler
Enraged at unknown others’
words and actions
read or heard about or seen
through a screen, I say
so often to myself,
“May Death take you…”
as a curse upon them.
I walk away muttering, change
the channel muttering,
drive past muttering; I throw
the middle finger, sometimes
I even shout out loud in the car.
Then I grow ashamed of myself:
who am I to lay this magic
like a bludgeon upon these people?
I try and try to change, to say:
may Death take you
as a taxi would, to your
desired destination.
May your ride
be white-knuckled and filled
with obscene commentary from
a wild-eyed driver,
but may you end up
where you need to be.
May Death take you
in a horse cart to
a field of long grasses
and small blue flowers
on long stems that scratch you
as you walk to the center of
the centering meadow,
where you shall lie in the sun,
itchy from the passage,
but where you wanted to be.
May Death take you
in Death’s time
as Death wills it,
being what you are.
May Death take me
when my work is done,
as soon as it is done;
may Death take you
before you can finish yours.
May Death take us both
as we would like to be taken
whether or not our work is done:
gently, with a pat on the back
or the head as we are guided past
the Veil and through the Gate,
and may I not see you there.
A Broken Shell
I knew a broken shell
with a name and a shape,
a solid being somehow
more or less invisible
to people on the street
where they lived.
Some said they had
terrible history,
some said they cracked
in the recent past,
some said nothing. Most
said nothing, just crossed
themselves or looked
away from the thing
rummaging through
the recycle bins once a week.
It was the eyes or the clothes
or the nonsense they spouted
that kept people looking away
and one day they did not
come around anymore, some said
they were the dead found behind
the convenience store but there was
disagreement about that but not about
how much my dog missed them,
how they loved to pat my dog
whenever they passed my own
precariously inhabited building,
long out of code, the unregistered cars
in the driveway, the weary yard
full of feeders and birds; whoever
that cracked shell was, I didn’t know,
but I trusted my dog
for missing them when they were gone.
Consent
To see yourself. To see another.
To reach out to touch when invited.
To be touched in return at your own invitation.
To strip another, then play.
To be stripped by another, then played with.
To strip mutually and play together.
To take on full nakedness and take on all else that way.
To wear the playclothes, to take on all the toys.
To be yourself. To be another. To be each other.
To play with another at being selves or others.
To arch and stretch and turn and moan together or alone.
To do nothing like anything already spoken of.
To find another way to see the Fire and chase it.
To come to the edge of the Fire and run with it as it gallops along.
To run alone or with others parallel to the edge of the Fire.
To leap across into the char behind the Fire’s edge.
To leap back again. To do the great back and forth across the Fire.
To be flame resistant. To be Fireproof. To be unscathed.
To be singed. To be the Fire. To be burned.
To find yourself or another in the burn.
To never cease burning. To live on Fire.
Angry
Advice so frequently given
it’s almost an instinct:
Don’t go to bed angry.
But what if we’ve been hearing it wrong,
forgetting a comma and a capital letter:
Don’t go to bed, Angry? What if
Angry is a being? A trollish
essential worker. Angry’s job is
a work-through-the-night position.
Angry doesn’t and shouldn’t sleep, runs
on maintenance shop coffee and off-brand corn chips.
Chows down on liverwurst on white with mustard
at 2:37 AM. Fuels up to poke your fires
all damn night. Burns off the reluctance
and the civilization you cherish
to keep you warm and alive. Angry
gets a bad reputation only because
they’re working class efficient, proletarian
strong in the face of the Big Bad.
Get up and see Angry at the foot
of your bed holding your armor.
Go to bed, Angry. Thank you for keeping watch.
We should count on you more than we do.
We ought to take a note, stay up, see
what the Big Bad’s been up to
while we sleep. You can whet a blade better
in the dark, at any rate — see the sparks,
smell the burned metal. Angry
keeps us honest, ready. Don’t go to bed,
Angry, as long as there are billionaires to scare.
Pandemic Blues
The clinic at my old university
is a parking lot full of hope and fear.
One odd man in a boonie hat
pacing, obviously talking to himself
or to someone on an unseen phone;
from here it seems like he needs convincing.
Pairs of college kids laughing
and walking masked toward their gym.
The older couple complaining
as they return, unvaccinated,
to the car, that now they’ll have to
get all geared up for it again.
I’m sitting in my car
already double shot and thinking
about whether it will ever seem
like forever ago that we were here —
not wishing to go back to all the chaos
that got us here; more precisely,
that someday we will be in a place
where past as prologue means
that we shall find ourselves wiser,
steeped in a new understanding.
Agony And Equilibrium
The secret to not feeling pain
is to swim in a world of hurt
so thick and profound
you cannot tell the difference between
agony and getting by.
I’m sorry if this
suggests that personal heartbreak
is my job to such a point
that I appear to have tattooed it
on my eyes, shading everything.
Believe me, I wish that were true
for it would suggest that I believed
in redemption, that I believed that
erasure was possible with
work that allows for art’s divine intervention.
I might believe that, if
the right god had ever appeared to offer
a hand. If the art had ever taken me closer
to that throne — bah. There’s no
one throne, no matter what the books say.
I’ve read them all, even written a few.
The secret to not feeling agony
is to make a place to put its overflow.
Art can do that. It can’t erase it completely,
but out there, somewhere: equilibrium.
Dark Matter 