whatever I know now
is less than I did
as I’ve shed
much of what I had thought
was universal
in favor of the particulars
of my skin and hers
in opposition
to hard things
that have been sold to us all
this was all I had ever needed
to get by
there has been such a sense
of wasted time
that of late
I can hardly bear up
and I do forever fear
it could still cut me down
Simply put:
purify.
Open your dim places
and wash them clean.
Scrub all your worn places,
no matter how lit they are
or are not, and stop only
when the brush-bristles are worn
to nubs.
There may be nothing left
when you’re done, true,
but then you should ask
what it has cost you to carry all this
from place to place, from one year
to the next.
There may be blood
on your knuckles
when you are done,
filth on your knees;
you may be coughing
and your eyes might sting
from the view of what you are now;
and honestly?
Maybe you’ll die.
It’s possible.
The point is
that once purified,
you’ll have room.
Anything else
might also be possible.
Just a reminder that you can become a subscriber to my Patreon and get a new poem exclusively for you every Sunday, access to free eBooks, workshops, and more for as little as $1 a month. More rewards at higher tiers, or course.
You can become a trial member at the $10 month tier — a week to decide if you wanna stay on. Pay for a year, get a discount. Etc.
Onward…here’s the link!
Thanks,
Tony
They have quasi-flamenco shapes to throw…hands flexing like kids talking high-school Spanish in cold snap Arctic air.
Honestly, I think I do them better.
Do you recognize my gestures as being more authentic than theirs? Are mine quasi? Are theirs pseudo? Vice versa?
Ersatz hipster throwbacks, reading Lorcaesque poems to each other and pretending we’re not from Leominster, Massachusetts or Chepachet, RI.
I’ve known exactly one real hipster in all my time. He smelled awful from all those years of walking the walk. I showered him with my fawning admiration. It didn’t make him smell better.
I promise you, my fellow fakers, that this too shall pass. If it doesn’t so be it, but I think you’ll be glad it did.
I know
I think I am glad
that I think
it did.
In my left hand pocket,
a birthday card from 1923
found in a dresser drawer
at an antique store,
addressed to “Freddy”
on his fourteenth birthday:
September 3rd, 1923.
Why did Freddy
leave this card from
“Aunt Sarah” behind?
How did it come to be
in the drawer?
Was it left here
by Freddy, never delivered
by Aunt Sara, put here
by a shopper playing a trick
on unsuspecting me
in particular, or
was it randomly placed?
Is anything
randomly placed?
I think about that
on the way home as I play
an old song in the car.
No, not that one.
I don’t know what this poem
has to say
that hasn’t been said before,
over and over,
by better poets.
I just know
I had to say it
again:
is anything random?
After all it is the third of September
and it’s a day
I will likely not forget
because there’s a song about that, too.
Too much rain today
for the folks
in California.
How are they
supposed to sing
about the sunshine
if it feels like
a lie?
How are we
supposed to wish
for that promised land
when the people who live there
are drowning?
Tell me
how we can be our best old selves
when the planet
is telling us, implacably,
that we must change
or be washed away.
There will be a fire one day;
this will be the hearth,
the circle of ash in a clearing,
the memory of a gathering.
It will be remainder.
It will be circle of care
and heat.
It will be reminder.
It will be central to tradition
and memory.
It will be a fire one day;
this will be the hearth,
this will be the circle of ash in a clearing,
memory of a gathering.
It will be source of shadow.
This is where it will come from.
Out beyond is where light will end
as changes in darkness only come
from a circle of light.
There will be a fire one day;
this will be the hearth,
the circle of ash in a clearing,
the memory of a gathering.
It shall be a tipping point.
It shall be a council.
It will take us to focus
and its center will be
a pact between light and heat.
There will be a fire one day;
this will be the hearth,
the circle of ash in a clearing,
the memory of a gathering.
It will be a country one day,
there will be light in darkness
and darkness in the core of light,
this will be remembered and caricatured;
diorama in museum,
empty blasphemy in a full stadium,
circle of ash, memory of tradition,
mistake multiplied, memory of honor
and bones. There will be
a heap of scorched bones.
To wake up
in the dark and reach for
first phone, then glasses,
suggests that something
out there is worth
more attention
than what is close
at hand. I’ll get to that —
but first, the news of the world.
If I reach first
for glasses, then phone,
it’s from the urge to rise
and go see for myself
what night holds
right here, in my own darkness.
Instead of either
I shut my eyes again,
ignore the phone,
and roll to my right
into the depth of the bed
where I am reminded
that I am unalone,
where she sleeps, my
familiar joy; I choose
to stay here in comfortable
darkness, knowing nothing else
of the world for a while longer.
Here’s a video of me doing up one of my recent prose poems.
I hope you enjoy it.
Redemption is a fickle beast; chooses its own schedule. It’s an animal hiding in a hollow log, or behind a 55 gallon drum rusting in the woods behind your home. You know it’s out there somewhere, but you can’t decide on what direction you should go to find it.
You stumble on it by accident. You flush it out from its hiding place. Perhaps it’s just had enough of you being stuck in misdeeds and mistakes for so long? Maybe it’s disgusted with you, fed up with your wallowing.
One way or another, it’s out. From out of nowhere an audience appears and applauds a redemption arc, a wrong colored rainbow that springs up from where you are standing as the animal — a fox, a trendy red panda, a binturong —
bounds away from you.
You are left behind trying to classify your Redemption, give it a place in your personal taxonomy.
Don’t just stand there. Start running, let the nature of the next steps decide what to call it.
It is beyond
my power to control
anything that’s
about to happen.
Beyond my power
to affect the weather.
Beyond any power
I could borrow or buy.
Close to powerless
in a powerful wind
making things happen
without me.
I could stand still
and let it whip past me.
I could find myself
standing strong,
or blown over.
Lying there after,
standing there after,
wondering what voice
I was hearing. I think
it was the rubble left behind
praising me. Either that
or it was the rubble accusing me.
Whatever I’ve heard singing
has nothing to do with me
but it is beyond my power
to convince myself otherwise,
and so I am immobile,
and so I remain exactly
where I have always been,
pretending to agency.
In imagining
my next life
I cannot escape
what came before;
in arguing
on behalf
of deviance from
my prescribed path
I cannot speak of future
without exhaling past;
I drag
my faults forward
into hoped-for
redemption
and am disappointed
that I’m not new
now, that I’m the same
set of regrets and mistakes
I’ve always been,
always will be,
no matter my best intentions,
no matter how hard I try.
“It’s too late, she’s gone.”
I watch an old clip on YouTube. Clapton without Duane on the Johnny Cash Show, country-blues riff on Brownie the legendary Stratocaster that sold for half a million dollars decades ago.
“It’s too late, she’s gone.”
I watch Bobby Whitlock on furious background vocals and piano. I watch killer Jim Gordon on drums. Carl Radle on bass, probably on smack as well — and Clapton on Brownie and blues and Patti Boyd and yes, heroin. Thinking of Johnny Cash offscreen in a ruffled shirt.
“It’s too late, she’s gone.”
I’m digging the song, if not the era. Nostalgia is lost on me. I like living in the moment and half or more of the people I have known are dead and don’t live in that moment or any moment now.
Classic rockers are good, are bad. It takes all kinds to make a moment. This is a moment I am making by myself in the living room before dawn — Jim Gordon is dead, Carl Radle is dead, Johnny Cash too. We do still have Whitlock. I try to pretend we don’t have Clapton.
My guitar hand is gone but my nostalgia for it needs to be kept at bay.
Sunrise coming, this hemisphere’s feeling so cold, feels like the world closing in.
Tell me it’s not too late.
I look outside
on a frigid night
at a jagged landscape
clinging to the running boards
of SUVs and trucks,
my own station wagon,
the old car in front of
the triple decker across the street.
Clods of snow and petrified ice,
inverted Arctic territories
waiting for a thaw to get back
to where they came from
before we smashed through the mess
on the road, splashed them up
and brought them here.
By spring, maybe nothing
on the roadside will be local.
It will be a refugee mess
like all of us who have come here
by chance, ended up here
or displaced from somewhere else.
Well, I’m here — who have expected that I would have made it to Heaven? Here I am, though. And it’s just as it’s been described. Clouds, pink light, music from an unseen source. And yes, angels. All with two eyes, all with two wings, white gowns, plucky but serene demeanor.
Welcome to Heaven, they say without speaking directly. Flashing Morse code off their haloes. Communicating without words, communicating nonetheless clearly and directly. Welcome to Paradise.
As time goes on, I notice I’m not becoming an angel; the angels I’m seeing seem to have changed a bit — still with the wings, still the gown, still the demeanor but less serene, more morose. In fact, they’re often stock still and weeping, or twitching and wailing. The music of Heaven goes on with an undertone of that.
I’m no angel. Heaven’s full of people-shades who thought it would be joyous fun and they’re finding out there’s a death-sameness to it that gets to you after a while.
As it is, I’m holding it off. No desire to succumb to this numbing joy. Holding it off with a Jerry Jeff Walker song. “If I could just get off of this L.A. freeway without gettin’ killed or caught…” The sad wings of sad angels, beating guitar time as I hum along.
Dark Matter 