The way he stood,
schoolteacher
with a sharp agenda
up his ass.
The way he smiled,
broken gray spoke
in an old wagon wheel
on the roadside.
The way he spoke,
a butter-tongued dance
of slick and smooth
couching a dagger.
The words he used:
some benign on their own;
some with their own
long poisonous tails.
The way the air smelled afterward:
gentle, fragrant, warm; ashen
from countless bonfires,
house fires, church fires, and pyres.
You say to me,
“don’t eat those foods,
those chemicals
are nasty and artificial,
your body is not made
for those…” and I eat them anyway
in full knowledge of how true
all of that is, simply because
I’m going to die anyway
and I have grown to like them.
You say to me,
“the bosses, the workers,
the system, the nature of
oppression, the means of
production, how can you
participate…” and I agree, how
I agree from years of being
in that vise of steel, I can see all that
but I’ve still got to get paid
as long as I can because the rent is due
and I’m in need of a doctor,
because the vise
has crushed my willingness
to be afraid for righteous causes.
You say to me,
“the whiteness, the white talk,
the ignorance, the cluelessness,
the easy links between capital
and racism and patriarchy and
how can you still be here…” and
I agree, I agree, I have the arteries
and broken mind to prove it,
the slipped joints of incongruent action
and thought creak constantly under my skin
but I’m simply trying to get all the way
to death and oblivion
with as little pain as possible now.
You say to me,
“how could you? how could you
do this, all of this…” and I agree.
I agree with your condemnation.
I do not avoid it. I do not
defend myself from it, and
part of the reason I’m bowing
and laying my neck on the block today
is because the little I have left
in my power to do and say
is only going to be enough
to hold my own loathing of myself
at arm’s length for as long as it takes
to allow for my own death to be
clean and swift, a relief of burden on those
left behind to do the hard things
that I should have done back when I
was still deluded enough to believe
that working from within the vise
mattered in the slightest, and still able enough
to break free once I knew I was wrong.
When the edge seems close,
step up to it. Take a long view
over the land below. See waters,
trees, deserts, stones. Look hard
at the distance from your feet
to the bottom of the gorge
that you must travel to reach
the paradise you can see.
You can choose to turn away
or choose the leap,
you can choose to climb down,
you can try to fly.
You will not likely get there
but the fact
that it’s still going to be there
whether you abandon
or die in the attempt to reach it
is all you need to know
to understand why this feels like
the only worthwhile moment of choice
in your enfeebled life,
and that thin, crumbling edge
where you stand
suddenly looks like
the Path.
An emergency game
of back and forth
as I try to fix myself.
How much I depend upon
the vanity of thinking
such things.
I still imagine I’m
repairable. I still put it
in writing. I still put it
out there. An emergency
back and forth, a triage
disguised as tug of war.
Everyone who can see
knows the game i’m playing
and how played out it is,
how I have played myself.
There’s no real emergency
in this back and forth.
The tug of war as always ends with both sides
sprawled and defeated yet
I imagine tomorrow will somehow be different.
My smartwatch says I am
at 1492 steps for the day
and because I can’t stand seeing that number on my wrist
a symbolic commemoration
of the year when things went epically bad
I get up at once
and start walking around the house like mad
raising and raising that number as high as I can
past 1523, 1607, 1609, 1620, 1680, on and on to 1890 and beyond
until I slow down when I hit 2018 and drive myself past that
to 2020, 2100, 2200, 3000, all the way to 3712
when I stop myself and ask out loud the dreaded question
will that year when it comes offer enough distance from 1492
and all the rest of bad history
Will that be enough time to repair us back to health
or perhaps to have created
something new to shine upon Earth
in the way that we’re told
in every myth and legend we have
that the Earth once cradled us
Or will 3712 be desolate and messy
A forgotten grave tonsured in sparse grass
like an ancient scalp shedding its last hair
as it crumbles into undifferentiated dust
At the moment all I have to go on
is the memory of how I felt staring down at 1492
while thinking of its symbolism as a placeholder for pain
and of 3712 as a different symbol indeed
of how pain can drive you into hope
and how it all will begin again tomorrow from 0
when I will certainly come upon 1492 again
In fact I’ve got many more steps I could take today
I rise again from my seat and go ahead
It’s OK.
You don’t have to survive all of it.
You have to fight, yes,
you must resist, yes. But survival is for
those who believe in a future
with them in it. Get free of that
and let your self-importance go;
do what you can and must.
Don’t worry
about the ultimate triumph of your own
ideology when poison needs to be
ameliorated and
removed from the suddenly broken veins
of the dying. Don’t worry if in the effort
you suck more death than you can handle.
Spit out what you can and keep moving
as long as possible.
You’re expendable, always were, old man.
You were part of the problem long enough
to be suspect. If you go, you go.
After all it’s not going to be
your world afterward. Move on with a smile.
You’re ancillary at best, a well-meaning nuisance
at worst. Get out of the way of what must follow
once you’ve done your bit. Individual
survival is unimportant. You are
not worthy of exception. Move on.
This is the moment of truth. Live
in it, not in the one that follows.
Originally, this was three separate poems written over the years 1976-1980. Found in my ancient archives from that period.
I was a kid then, a teenager, and my reach was often far greater than my grasp. I had an essay and a whole theory about what I was trying to do with poetry that when I read it now (of COURSE I kept it!) makes me giggle and blush. But I was aiming at something, something larger than the individual Poem, even back then.
Didn’t have the life experience or the skill back then to make it work. Not sure I do now either, of course, but I am far more clear on my small abilities and my large ambitions than I once was, so…let’s say I think it’s worth a try.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1.
Overheard from a dusk-dimmed driveway:
“Basketball’s simple —
you take the ball,
you dribble it,
then you
shoot…”
Father, uncle or big brother speaking.
There was no second voice.
After that, the flat notes,
rhythm of rubber on asphalt.
2.
Two worn men on the sidewalk ahead of me.
One says, “Every time I get my check
I try to hold on to the money.
They rob me at the bank
so I keep it all at home
but they rob me at home
but now I got them all fooled —
I give all my money
to the man behind the counter
at the liquor store.”
His companion howls
and slaps him
on his age-sloped back.
3.
On the bus
another old man, taller than I
by a head and a half, lighter than I
by a body and a half,
muttering
again and again,
“…had a big
fat fat
fat fat
fat fat
wife, seven kids, forty years,
I’d know her face now I think
but not her name…”
4.
By myself, in bed alone,
diving into sleep, into a prayer
that I never forget
the innumerable ways
to get from one end of the court
to the other;
that I never
scorn a journey
for where it ends.
Late last night I heard someone calling out in the street.
Heard someone come down the stairs from the second floor.
Heard the door open, someone came inside,
and more people went upstairs than had come down.
There was talking and loud stomping for an hour,
then someone left quietly and I went to sleep
imagining backstory, drifting in and out of anger,
picturing someone hungry, someone thirsty,
someone done in by cold and impending snow,
someone done in by a longing to end a longing
by buying or selling themselves or their drug.
I kept myself awake far longer than I needed to
wondering and raging and reproaching myself
for wondering and raging. It was no business
of mine beyond the nuisance of being roused
from two AM to three AM. All the fear
and righteous thought I soaked in
for an hour after that
was a stale old problem I borrowed
from the bank of pain I keep
and owe and curse,
where I cannot seem
to close my account.
To remain asleep in this storm,
waiting it out while the snow piles up,
is a white comfort in a whitening landscape.
You can lie there and think about
what you are going to do
when what’s outside
no longer matches up
to what you think you’ve been seeing.
When you find it’s all been a cover up,
will you die or explode? Or will you
step out and see the green and gold light
on the brown earth? When spring comes
will you allow yourself to be happy?
You think about that now while you’re seeing
the whiteness covering everything.
You think about that and stop pretending
it’s never going to go away.
I’m beyond the depths now,
at least beyond the ones
I’d always thought were my home.
I’m a skimmer now. I never dive.
I can’t imagine the pressure there
and know I would not survive it.
I watch the younger ones go there.
I do not always love how they go,
do not always honor what they return with,
but that they can go at all, fearless and
sometimes wrong and dumb but still
willing, is enough sometimes almost
to kill me when it does not make me
swell with envy and pride for the work itself.
Now and then I stare back across
the surface I skimmed to get here
and tell myself that someday
I will go back for one attempt
to go deeper than before,
and then I look down at my feet
and realize I’m too often terrified
just to stand here
and hold myself upright
on the solid earth, and I know
that descent is no longer mine
to make, so I turn and watch
the younger ones taking my place
and see them coming back up
holding what was never meant to be mine.
I sit up in bed and stare at the ceiling
as if it is going to sink down upon me
like a car compactor at any moment
and push me into two dimensions from three,
and at the side walls as if they would slide over
to meet each other and take me
from two dimensions into one,
and then toward the foot of the bed
to see if that wall will come up
and crush my newly linear self into a single point.
A vanishing point, maybe.
A pixel on a screen, perhaps.
I have faith that none of this
will hurt, no blood will flow from me,
my bones will simply telescope shut
and compress into memory.
A single point seems indestructible enough.
A single point can slide through any catastrophe.
Infinite lines can pass through a single point
and it will remain indelibly itself.
I can do that. I can be myself,
reduced to holding infinity stretching
in all directions.
It seems far better to do that,
to enable that which remains,
to be a mere point
allowing others to intersect
and extend themselves,
than to wring these temporary hands
over the loss of my identity
to the weight of looming darkness.
oh, fuck it. you
are not a mistake
or a problem, not at all.
no matter what you’ve been told.
fuck it. you live in a society
that was built by shifting blame.
do not believe in it or accept it
as the way things should be.
delight instead in how resistance
can be framed as a dance.
delight instead in how you have survived
such things. delight in your own being.
you were not made to work this hard.
Manatees (AKA “sea cows”)
are favored for their cuddly bulk. Orcas
get a viral reputation for gang
action. Big whales are everybody’s
best mystical gymnasts, dolphins
sexy slick bobbers. Seals reek up
beaches and docks but damn,
they’re cute as hell. Sea otters
rock and carry rocks, lie around
floating handsomely. We want them
all working hard to make us feel
connected to something larger
than ourselves, our puny little
destroyer selves, and if they don’t
we’ll flutter our left hands in dismay
as our right hands snuff them out.
The mercy of a calm cold morning
keeps me snug in my home,
safe from chaos.
I get to pretend I can’t hear
the roaring outside over the sound
of my comfortable furnace.
There’s not even a storm
to fret over. The sun’s bright,
the wind chill is rough
but I’ve seen and felt worse.
I can deal with that.
It’s not the wind making the noise
that I’m hiding from. The roar I fear
is human, full of words
I can’t or won’t understand
that drilled through my sleep
and opened me
as screwworms might
but without leaving a visible trace.
The mercy of the cold morning
is that it keeps me
from stepping to the sound
and joining in. I can choose
to stay here and pretend
I hear nothing, can pretend
I won’t soon need
to become harmful as well.
From where I stand mercy
is a cold illusion I can indulge
as long as I stay inside,
so here I will stay
for as long as I can, knowing
it cannot last and I am needed out there.
To be aghast
at our ghosts
without admitting that
they remain among us
is to be willfully
American.
To be comfortable
in this haunted home,
oblivious to what
some feel
in its most sunlit rooms,
is to be carelessly
American.
To laugh off every
chill as merely historic
or imaginary,
to turn away from
the ancestral familiarity
of those faces of
menace past and present,
is to be blindly
American.
Not to see
any of the ghosts,
not to see them
in every corridor, closet,
basement, school,
prison, or mirror,
is to be resolutely
American, is practically
to define
“American”, is the
quintessential practice
of being
American.
Dark Matter 