I will end up talking.
I always end up talking.
I end up talking when I shouldn’t.
I talk like I’m going to die if I don’t talk.
I’m going to die anyway but not silently.
I’d like a listener but talking to myself is ok.
I don’t listen to myself when I talk.
I don’t expect anyone else to listen.
I’ve never been afraid to slow down and stop when unheard.
I keep talking in my head.
I keep a talk or two in my head like I’d keep extra bullets.
If my mouth were a gun I’d be locked on full rock and roll all the time.
I have a gun as well as a mouth but I don’t know where it is.
I left it in my parents’ house when I moved out.
I should have left my mouth there too.
I should have swapped gun for mouth or both for two more ears.
It’s been said that you have two ears and one mouth to show you should listen more than you speak.
It’s never been proven.
If someone really said that it was someone who never saw or heard my mouth.
I told you I would end up talking.
I always end up talking.
I tell you so much when I talk.
I tell you so much I never intended to tell you.
I tell you again and again it doesn’t matter if you are listening.
I only do this because I’m trying to bail away what’s always rising inside me.
I only talk to keep my lungs from filling.
I only talk to inflate myself.
I only talk to keep afloat.
I only talk so as not to drown.
Category Archives: poetry
I End Up Talking
Tracker
What they thought
was benediction
in solidarity with all
was in fact
valediction, a farewell
to the march as it
moved past.
When it had passed
he stepped into the dust
that still mumbled of all
who’d just been there.
He bent to the carpet
of tracks and looked
and listened and even
touched his finger to it
then put it on his tongue
as he’d seen trackers do
in old Westerns.
He had no idea
what he was supposed to learn
from any of that, except
that there was no trace
of himself there in that relic trail.
He’d known that before
he made that elaborate show
of seeking knowledge there.
So: here it was revealed.
A misinterpreted show,
all of it: the speech, the life,
the effect he’d had. They
were gone, he was left
standing in the dust behind.
Squaring his shoulders.
Wiping his eyes.
Picking a direction
other than theirs.
Asking For A Friend
1.
If you own a switchblade,
that iconic weapon of despair,
are you honor bound
to use it
when you suicide?
2.
Would pills
or other medications
be more sensible
or potentially easier
on the survivors?
3.
How much are you liable
for what arguments for and against
self-harm you inflicted upon
a friend before you acted?
4.
Does any of this feel like more
than a social media art project?
Does anything posted online
move you anymore?
5.
Don’t you wish right now
you’d never breathed at all?
Boss Land Blues
I grew up in Springsteen territory
dreamed early that I was born to do something
somewhere else
but when it came time to leave
the highways were pretty empty
they weren’t
jammed with heroes
either broken or whole
because no one ever left my hometown so
I went on alone to the next town
just like it
and stayed there pretending
I was one of those aforementioned heroes
when in fact
I was
promise
unfulfilled and
in my boots and jacket I knew deep down
I had just posed and then posed and then
posed some more and now
I’m stuck in the pose
the bones ripped out of my back
my tender exterior hardened to a shell
I can’t move
but I look
like I used to
look good
standing still
Sleeping
is better than waking.
This needs no proof
in these parts. When I sleep
the sink doesn’t leak and
the cat is no longer
destructive.
The mice
move to Florida and
the dim universe of the news
is silent. My wallet
holds everything I need
when I sleep — I’m most wealthy
when I’m unconscious.
If I dream at all
it will be only rarely,
only fleetingly, and
it will be in the language
native to those who shrug off
the unreality
one must plow through
when awake. In dreams I become
fluent in that tongue and
it’s easy to live
when that happens
but it happens rarely.
When sleeping I mostly
am nothing at all,
and that is best.
What, Exactly, Are The Bosses Doing?
Contemplating the distance
to their planned shining city on the hill.
Calculating what it would take to build
a broad road to it, broad enough
for all manner of comfortable vehicles
(and a very small amount
of super ambitious and lucky foot traffic
just to make it seem accessible to all);
trying to determine how much gas
will be needed, how much coal
will be required to power it once
all who will fit have arrived;
then,
once the numbers are firm,
putting all their plans into
the passive voice.
Roads will be built, walls will be built,
coal will be mined, oil refined;
order will be established and maintained
and if threatened will be defended and
enforced.
Not bothering to ask the unspoken question
behind those circumlocutions:
who will do all that?
Knowing the answer already.
Looking directly at you with a cold dare in their eyes.
Great Again
You thought
it could all be done
without bleeding,
and you were right,
of course; you never bled,
not once. You never once got
your hands red. With
a little effort you missed seeing
every story printed in red ink
and every color photo
of small rivers running
and pooling in the street.
When you did hear
of such dreadful things
you were able to
wring your hands
loudly enough
to drown them out.
Fortunately
it worked out
to your benefit.
Gladly, you turned
to friends and family
and said so
and no one spoke up
to contradict you because
benefits like these
rely on silence for their
existence, and that
was enough reason
not to speak up; that
and the faces outside the door
leaking blood and brain
into the gutters, the faces
that stare mutely into your window,
having forgotten how to scream.
A Gift
Sitting with
a gift-glass of excellent
Scotch, a Glenmorangie
Nectar D’Or aged in
Sauternes casks…yes,
an indulgence, yes, expensive
and rare; that’s the point of it,
it was a sacrifice,
it was given in love
and I drink it with love on
my mind. Lemony
start, honey on the tongue
with dark burn, a finish
built on notes of
regret at its ending and
joy that it was here and I
had this chance to taste it:
I’m not going to be ashamed
at this, you see, not while
so much wrong needs righting,
not while there’s so much need
to assuage pain and trouble;
for a few minutes
I’m going into this glass
to understand it as a golden
taste of an expression of love,
a trace of what a pure future
might be once we get past
this dim moment.
Something You Made From Nothing
Glass bead bracelet
in left hand, bag of
black stones in
right hand, in mouth
spring water lightly salted.
Empty pockets.
Belt of cloth with
no metal.
At appointed time,
spit water into fire.
After it has ceased
sizzling, slip on bracelet;
kneel upon a cut log
to count out ten black
stones from that bag.
Line them up on
a hot stone.
Stand and
remove your clothes;
burn them while marching
counterclockwise around
and around flames
ten times. When done,
put stones back in bag
and walk away naked.
What appears behind you:
ashes:
you call them
ground of being,
source holy of holies.
There is also there
a meaning you didn’t have before,
a god running cover for your passage,
something you made from nothing.
Something as good
as any other ever made.
Then you realize
you are naked and cold
and when it starts to rain you
puzzle yourself into thinking
you missed something,
did something wrong
or backward. But —
a ritual done wrong
or backward that didn’t destroy
the world? Is it possible
that you have so little power?
The rain, as always,
comes straight down,
drenches you into
atheism.
They Are Coming
Maybe what we need is bells
on the front door,
the back door,
the windows.
Maybe
hang them in the trees
along the path leading here,
too.
Maybe a gate or seven
gates and bell them too. Build
rings of gates and bell them all:
signal bells on each, larger and louder
the farther away they are from
us.
Maybe build a beacon fire
on a far hill
and put a standing guard there
ready to set it ablaze
to let us know.
Then, of course, we’ll need
to be very quiet all the time.
Sit silently in the dead center
of the house, equidistant from
all the bells, with vigilance
for the near-certain fire
on the far hill;
have to stare
out the window at that,
constantly, waiting, guns
in our laps, in every corner,
a knife on every hip;
our children
in the soundproofed basement
hidden away,
learning defensive trades
at forges and anvils,
stabbing practice dummies,
shooting practice people;
growing up in the dark
for their own good
as out there offers only
the dangerous chiming of bells
in the rank wind coming
over the borders.
Westerns
The Westerns
always had us calling
the President
“The Great White Father.”
All my dreams tonight
have been Westerns
but nobody called anybody
great, or white, or father.
My early evening Western
was of a snowglobe
being shaken close to my face.
Milky background, inside
brown bits like clods of earth
swirling, irregular sizes;
perhaps these were oil clots,
or the rotted organs of the dead,
but they were just out of focus
and I was too afraid to squint
and make them clear.
My midnight Western:
nothing to see, my ears
filled with chanting:
broken, broken, broken…
Did this mean the snowglobe
had broken,
or did the fact that this was
a different dream
mean the earlier one
had never happened?
The next dream, I think,
will be another Western.
Fear of it is keeping me awake.
I expect a great White father
waits there, shards of glass
in his hands, ready to embrace me,
to open me from groin to throat,
to fill a snowglobe with my grease and guts,
to ride with my pieces into the sunset;
Can’t imagine what could follow that one.
I’m certain it will make sense to someone.
All Westerns run together into one long story,
after all; I don’t expect I’ll be in the next chapter,
or that any of us will, in fact — not as we are,
not as we ever were.
He was never our real father, you see.
Chase
That’s what it is now.
A chase.
Every day
begins with questions:
how soon before
they catch us,
how soon before
we break away
and get to safety
on the high ground?
They don’t understand
that in fact, we’re ahead.
That we’re far enough ahead
that their old dodges
to snare us into loss —
their dogs
and dog whistles,
their chains
and the chains of etiquette,
their ropes
and their bad rope-a-dope,
their bullets
and
those miles of policy strung out on
hollow point PowerPoints,
aren’t cutting it
any more.
They
can’t catch up so
they
keep running like
we’ll get tired
before we win. Like
we’re behind them and
we’re not.
We will win. We
haven’t got a choice,
really. Safety’s
ahead, not behind.
How soon before they catch us?
That’s not the right question: try,
instead:
how soon before we turn
to meet them? How soon before
we catch them with these
very hands? What then?
The One About Calling On God
MY GOD
there are things
I care about
that seem far beyond the reach
any breath of mine might have
once I’ve pushed it out into
our great global sea of air
No word of mine
will ever go far enough
to pierce into every ear
and carry my concern with it
to every person
I love or could potentially love
if only I knew them
(if only I knew them
for I can’t know every person
and MY GOD that seems
tragic on this planet that seems
more and more tuned to
a lonely note
a hateful note of discord)
so let it be known
when I call out
MY GOD
as I am now
let it be known
all I am doing
is saying that
if there is some Amplification
to be had by saying that
let me have it
for the words that I speak
are never enough
the actions I take
are never enough
and my concern seems
at once so huge and so small
that even if there is no God
I cannot refuse
to add whatever charge
that may carry
to the effort to make any small thing I might do count
A Few Things
In memory
are a few things
worth preserving:
deep sunshine taste
of a particular Key West mango;
scent of eucalyptus trees
through the windows
of a hotel
in Rancho Santa Fe;
one sharp pang of disappointment
at gray night skies
on the hills above Albuquerque
on the night of
the Perseid shower;
voices of friends, lovers, and
random phrases
overheard from strangers;
cannon hum
of an old Gibson
against my chest;
a slip of the tongue
that eventually made
for one magnificent line
in a mediocre bit of poetry;
a song in my head
that I never learned to play
or sing, but which gave me hope
every day I picked
at my strings
or my paper and pen.
In memory are things
worth preserving,
and none of them
will be found
in my bones
when I pass;
so on that day
or soon after
when they set me
on fire
may my ashes
signal no sadness
at the release of
my spirit
from my matter
but instead
flag its flight
as it is dragged
and lifted
on the kindness
of wind;
let it settle
wherever it wants,
in one or in many,
in new life
or aged lungs,
upon stone
or soft ground;
let it be true
that I didn’t matter
in life as much
as I do in what
I carried within,
what little
I leave behind:
song, flavor,
sense, breath.
Country Of Sick Men
Originally posted 8/28/2013.
The men of that country are sick.
We don’t know why they are sick
or how long they’ve been sick.
Call it a country of sick men
erupting everywhere
there’s a crack to spurt from,
burning their surroundings
when they open their mouths.
The sick men appear mostly mindless
from their sickness. How else to explain
comb-overs,
wars,
long nosed cars,
long reach guns,
filibusters,
weaponized God,
hangings,
unfortunate colognes,
blood feasts,
the casual seizing of women and children,
of other men,
willed ignorance
of lack of consent,
leveraged buyouts,
wolf pelts,
blessing of radioactive oceans,
balls of old oil
in the bellies of seals,
blank-eyed drooling over vintage guitars and game balls,
blackout drunks,
hard-engine bikes:
all their exquisite arts of suicide and genocide?
The men of that country are sick.
I was born there, live there mostly,
certainly will die there.
There are women in that country too.
Some of them are sick
but mostly, I think,
they are sick of the sick men.
They have stories to tell.
If you want to hear those don’t ask me to tell them.
My tongue’s a man’s tongue and I’ve got a touch
of the sickness myself.
Get away from me,
go to them,
and listen.
It will seem
like a different country.
Dark Matter 