when the end comes
and is accepted
it’s almost always with resignation
if there’s relief it’s coupled with
mild surprise
a gently exhaled “oh”
raised shoulders
falling back
eyes softening into peace
and the process in the brain
no longer well-described by the word
“thought”
becomes something better
an unanalyzed awareness
that swirls Sufi
before it quite settles
Eventually,
I’ll get back to the narrative —
I do want to get home —
but for now,
I’m content with this fruit
before me, this peach.
It’s a story too.
Seed within both past and future.
But the flesh is present, so wetly present,
and it is all I want right now.
This moment free of nostalgia
and anticipation. This sweet
ball of interruption.
I reach for it
and let the narrative go.
Improvised
explosive devices, suicide
bombers, kamikaze pilots;
imagine, I say, there was a time
when no one had ever heard
each of those phrases.
We should
try to forget them,
you say.
Try, I say.
Just try, and I will wait here
for your limbs
to rain down upon me
once the detonation
is complete. Once a genie
comes when called,
it’s hard to uncall it.
Once a path’s been cut,
it never completely
grows over, no matter how narrow
and choked it seems.
You say
damn you cynic,
things change. I say
bless you, naive one, I agree —
but not that much, and never
back to the original state of grace.
We just aren’t
built
for unknowing.
Do you recall any of those salty throated
men and women, boys and girls,
each in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Do you recall Maggie Apple lying in the street
with her eggshell nails
and her skinny legs with those calves that looked
as if they’d been attached to her bones
as an afterthought,
or old Ronald Wrong
whose house smelled of wine but
looked like a glove full of bees?
When they banged down his door
and a host of trouble flew out
of its ramshackle fingers
they shot him as if he were
a queen, a danger queen.
As for tonight…
we don’t yet know his name.
We’re hearing the cop thought he saw a gun
in the flash from the CD the boy was holding.
Well, someone will say,
he should never have gone up to the roof
at all. But the kids use the roof
as a short cut to the next building, we’ll respond.
It was never meant to be a final destination.
When we know his name
we’ll add it to the list we carry
behind our teeth,
behind our eyes.
Then we’ll say:
walk on eggshells.
Their ears
are tuned to angry bees
and your missteps
sound like a swarm.
If wherever you are
when that happens
becomes your final destination,
we’ll be sure to remember your name, too,
you cautionary tale, you fallen apple,
you little bit of gone horribly wrong.
i wouldn’t
know joy
if it drowned me.
these are words.
i use to call these
joy,
breathing them was paradise.
no need
for a substitute,
as with these anything
could melt into joy. joy
had no division.
it’s been so long,
i can only describe that,
not recall that —
what was joy?
it was
words creating envelopment
out of the spinning of life.
i wrote that. don’t know
if i felt that ever.
don’t feel it now,
even though
i never shut up.
did you find this tedious?
as much as i did, i bet.
That coat
on the door
isn’t mine, really.
I bought it at
a thrift store,
thought of it
as costume — long,
multi-hued tweedy woven
shapeless bag of a thing,
thought it’d pass for
turn of the century
or hipster, perhaps
artsy in a shambling,
mumbling poet way,
covering a similar and
hated body to that
it had once covered.
Coupled with any of a number
of equally secondhand hats,
I thought it might make me seem
a bit more legit, too odd
to be anything but credible
in the persona I’d chosen.
The coat, not bought new
but used, isn’t mine really:
another owned it once, wore it
all fall and winter most likely,
tried to wrap it tight against
revealing, spinning wind
that lifted his cover
and sealed me into mine.
Pleased with the tightness
and the resultant heat
of my fists, I shone hard
as a youth — could have had
my picture in the dictionary
next to “righteous,” my growl
remixed as a viral
undertone to public events;
deep into middle age now,
I open my hands
but no one’s rushing up
to clasp them. This is,
I suppose, what I get
for dimming the fire within:
I may last longer
but will also feel colder —
I suppose I have to consider
that my life’s always been this cold
and that I never knew that
because of how long and hot
I’ve been burning;
still,
I’ll be damned
if I’ll start fighting again
just to get warm.
don’t you feel a sort of sad awe
for the first light man
who denied that he’d found himself in thrall
to a dark man’s baritone?
can’t you give a half-felt shout-out
for the first woman whose head just about fell off
when she saw how people loved her more
when she just gave in and kneeled?
haven’t you expected this
for most of your time here —
an instant of realization
that nothing’s easy sometimes
except the acceptance
of untenable events?
that sometimes ending up end-up
is the only way to survive,
if not thrive? how hard is it
to put off thriving for an unknown while
and fall in, tow the line,
even if you rot a little bit while it goes on?
will you muster a shamefaced pat on the back
for these hypocrites now? a second of acclaim
for their failures? a startled, stifled gasp of recognition
that they must have felt what you feel now —
you’ll never be completely aligned
with everything you claim to honor.
that’s obvious now. you know too much
about what you’re not capable of —
so now, at last, don’t you sorta envy
that dwarf with the unguessable name
and his ability to (when all else was lost)
tear himself in half and disappear?
Have opened a door
to where the boiling of sea water
is continuous. Can see on the brims of pots
the dead grime of left-behind.
May tempt myself for a second
with the thought of scraping off a little
to sample, though I know
there’s a strong chance of poisoning
if I do this. Will instead breathe deeply
the sharp atmosphere, all the while pondering
the people who are responsible for this
dangerous kitchen. Have been seeking
their faces and names and finding nothing.
Am not sure how safe it is
to continue the search. Will instead
hold my breath, run home, shower,
praying that no glow or iodized tang
has lodged itself fatally into my body
where it will work itself into a froth
at some later, half-expected time.
we will all wash together
down a gully soon enough
and all the particulars of our lives
will come with us
so we won’t be known afterward
by our dreams
but by our dreck
the piling on
of dirt and crust
as we roll in the thick flood
toward the lowest point
in the stream
thinking of us all at once
in that moment
undifferentiated
at last
hidden under
gum wrappers and twigs
adhering to our broken bodies
through the cleansing power
of mud and water
makes me long for the storm to come
soon
Never seen anything like it:
it wasn’t a puppy, not a kitten,
not a frog. Some kinda baby
tentacled thing, or maybe it wasn’t
a baby at all. Six inches tall or so,
black I think or dark mud-green —
hard to tell. But it was PISSED,
snarling and ravening under the table
till I booted it out into the yard…ravening?
Oh, that’s what the next door neighbor
called that noise it was making…yeah, of course,
Howard,
the weird one. He seemed
fascinated with it; happened to be outside
and watched me brain the thing with a shovel.
“Can you imagine,” he said, “if that thing
was huge, perhaps even larger than the largest
of skyscrapers?” Yeah, he’s a weird one.
I hear he writes.
now,
with a quick second to look
back,
he takes the book
from the shelf,
leafs through to the
page she signed,
and re-reads the first paragraph
on the page
which
seems now to be
meaningless (not that
the words have lost
coherence, but that context
having changed their charge
has lessened to being
no more than a tingle) and
he closes the book
quickly,
replaces it
so that only
a drag-trail through
the months-old dust
is there to testify
to this second of
suddenly soured nostalgia.
The storm freed you.
It left the house and car destroyed;
soon enough, you had to leave the job as well.
Then, unexpected as a late love
when you’d abandoned the thought
of such a thing,
came two fat insurance checks
to replace the wreckage,
and a wild idea: sell the lot,
get a decent but cheaper replacement car
and clear out to live on what was left
for as far along the road as you could go,
running over everything wrong
in your life,
pressing the gas pedal
down on its head.
People dream of lottery tickets
and inhertances. People dream
of lawsuits and windfalls. You
never bothered to dream,
yet there you were — modestly rich,
clean and clear with nothing
to hold you. Every bill paid, every string
cut, all as unexpected as a late love —
and like a late love, unlikely to be anything
but a last chance.
The last postcard came six months ago,
from Omaha. “Thinking of you all
back there,” is all it said. Back here,
all we think about
is you.
Tags: poems, poetry, meditations
Watching
“New Jack City”
for the first time
since the first time
I watched it, I’m compelled
to ask why
I felt the need to watch it
again —
then again,
I am watching it again.
Some stories
just feel like
a pistol in your hand
or a knife in your pocket.
You carry them
convinced of their utility
even though it was bad dialogue
that talked you into
picking them up
in the first place.
Tags: poems, poetry, meditations
Since I’ve run out of stories to tell,
I go at last to the cupboard
and pull out the bag of walnuts
and a hammer.
Laid out before me on the floor,
lined up on butcher paper,
points facing away so there will be no
projectile damage from the blows,
they await my creativity. I raise the tool
and bring it down on the one to the far left,
choosing the order in which I would read
a book if a book required violence of me.
Inside is the whole meat, which predictably
looks to me like a brain. I see the walnut
as a brain, meaning that my brain
sees itself in the walnut, as we are creatures
of comparison. Yet I did not think at once
of the whole nuts as skulls, curiously. Despite
the all-encompassing violence of the process,
there’s a break in the perception. Perhaps
I can find a source in literature which will illuminate
the source of the dissonance. I go at once to the bookcase
to seek examples in literature of walnuts being compared
to skulls, and find (of course) many with a brain metaphor
and none with a skull metaphor. I go back to the nuts
and stare at the next one, trying to see a face, a reflection
of humanity, something to hang a meaning on…nothing.
Nothing at all comes to mind. Now, I’ve got a dilemma:
should I continue cracking these walnuts
if I have no social, existential, philosophical,
grounds to work from when I observe them?
I’m just a man, after all; how will I know anything
about the walnuts if I can’t see myself in them?
Dark Matter 