No, he said,
I’m not responsible
for these wings
torn from so many
that litter the ground
for millions of
square miles.
I was not
the scourge, the
brute who laid
the lush carpet
beneath my feet,
am not to blame
for my soft footing.
This crushing sound
from where I pass?
Merely the past, the
detritus of that unpleasantness
having been stirred, echoing
so loudly that it might
drown out anything
left alive, I admit,
but how am I expected
to know that? How
am I expected to
know what damage
might be happening
underfoot? No, he said,
you can’t blame me
for anything except
walking on what
was there to walk on.
Underfoot
How To Close A Book
after the first page:
lower the cover upon
the opening paragraph
as you might carefully
reset bait in a trap,
in the hope
that another will take it
since you will not…
after the halfway point:
rest the book upon its spine
and clap the halves together
with a clean sound of
finality and rejection, as if
you must let
all around you know
you can stand this tale no more…
upon completion:
lay the volume on its back
and close it
as if something
has changed in you
because of what you are
sealing back into the book
for the next reader,
or for the next time you open it.
Black Rum Funk
I am gray,
I know;
the sky is gray,
I know;
another night
has come,
another dive into
black rum.
I turn my head
toward solid music
to hold me
until I am fully drunk and
looking young again —
not to say I am
young again — not to say
the mirror agrees with me —
when I do
this rum lights shit up
and this funk
holds shit down
and what I see
in that mirror looks like
fun and steam,
best moments
of a black rum life —
this bar lit barely at all,
full of stomp and promise,
brush, rub, tug, groove;
I may soon be
out of black rum
but I’m not yet
out of blacktop;
that band
may be shutting down
but I’m not yet
out the door;
I may be driving
into the dark
but I know where
this road goes
and with any luck
I’m not going down it
all alone
tonight.
Patreon update
I’ve recently made a number of posts, including a short essay on recent poems, over on my Patreon page. For the most part, these are available to those who have pledged at varying levels there.
I want to stress that all of the poems I write will ALWAYS remain available here for free. But in an effort to earn some income from this work, I think that providing more deeply curated and connected selections, along with some expository prose, is a good way to go.
If you’d like to consider being a part of that community, the link above can show you how to do it. in addition, there’s a permanent description and link to that site in the pages seen at the top of the Dark Matter site itself.
Thanks for your time.
T
Preface
There is a floor in a house with a spot in the corner.
There is a story about the spot that no one is willing to share.
There is a loneliness in the house that manifests in the spot.
There is a story about the loneliness that no one is willing to tell.
There is a tree outside a window that casts a shadow on the spot.
There is a story about the tree that no one is able to translate from its original tongue.
There is furniture in the attic that may or may not be stained as the spot is stained.
There is a story of the stains that no one is willing to affirm.
Every building is a metaphor, of course it is;
the floors, the basement, the furniture, of course they are;
the stains on the floors, the whispering creak of the settling joists,
the tight fits of seams loosening with age; of course they are.
Every house isn’t just home but also prison and memory sink,
gallows, refrigerator gallery, slaughterhouse and hideaway,
of course it is, of course;
but it also is a place
where people live. Where people
want to live or at least have to
stay while they get past the metaphor
into simply getting by.
There is a story about how someone does such a thing.
Soft Monster
It was hope
that kept me here
long after
I should have fled.
Hope, soft monster,
makes light work
of final plans
and end games.
Not to suggest
that things were easy
after hope had sunk its teeth
into my skin
but once bitten
I was diseased immediately
and sick with it,
I stayed put.
Now, weary, unable
to move on,
I sleep cuddled in fever
with hope and
long for an end
to symptoms:
obstinate survival,
longing for dawn,
sporadic optimism,
slight joy at odd moments
when I feel like
perhaps all of this
is worth
all this trouble.
Hell Of A Wind
Here we have
an ordinary man
feeling more or less pain
who thinks something
needs saying
about it.
He wraps
a prehensile tongue
around the trigger
of a rifle
and learns
how to pull with it:
a broad rush
of words on the wind
crossing his ear delivers
instructions; it proves to be
not easy,
but not impossible
for a quick student.
There’s a hell
of a wind
blowing out there.
Lots of people
listening,
stretching
their tongues.
Life’s A Beach
In the morning I wake up
dripping and soaked in
politics or what
some of you call
politics when I think
politics is a code word for
the ocean
I live in and I can’t
get out and don’t really
care to try.
I know a lot of people
who drown in it. I know a lot
who tread water
and even some
who thrive and race here.
Some of you think I’m weird for staying here.
You say hey, life’s a beach. Get out of the water
when you can. That ocean
is fun to look at now and then
but all in all you say gimme
sand and land and sun and fun.
Time to turn, you won’t burn.
You call me out for staying
out here. You call me
obsessed or fussy with it.
The only reason you have a beach
to get out onto at all
is because of this ocean that
would just
swallow you in an impersonal
flash or splash
while you lie there.
I stay dripping with politics because
having been on the beach in the past
when a wave broke over me
I prefer to feel
what’s around
as it’s happening
and not be caught
by surprise.
The Sleeping Cure
If those of us
troubled by this life
were told that
a collective nap
could solve everything,
would you be among the ones
to lie down?
If you were convinced
a Grand Dream
could shift the gloom
if only all of us
dozed into it at once,
would you
close your eyes?
If you
thought this was all that was needed —
all of us asleep and dreaming
of better times
while having no consciousness
of the present,
would you
surrender to
the sun burning you,
the snow drifting over you,
the ocean surging over you
as you slept
among the bones
of the ones
who remained awake?
Another Anthem
To be fair, right now I’m mostly
whistling as I pass
this nation-sized graveyard.
I have been dissatisfied
with every option
that’s ever been presented to me.
Yes, I could have claimed
the easiest identity
and tightened my grip
on a White illusion of
safety; could have
raised a banner
on behalf of the Native
that lay hidden in me and
fought a valiant, visible
losing war; could have straddled
that weathered fence and swung
a leg on either side of it until
it broke under me
and I died as stupidly as I would have
if I’d chosen anything else.
I have America to thank for
these choices, I know:
a choice of skewers, a plethora
of demises. In the long run
we’re all as dead as flagpoles,
no matter what flags we fly.
Is it worth the fight at all?
I’m comfortable saying no,
for the moment at least. Right now
I’m sitting in smoke and mirror land,
thinking about writing new music
in case songs survive what’s coming.
They’ll need lullabies, dirges,
everything from ditties to pretties
to small hymns to whatever is left
of the nature we’ve grown to know.
The only song I hope
they will not need again is
an anthem.
As I wait and fret
about the end, I pray:
whatever choices I have left to make,
let me never have to raise my voice with others
in such a song as that.
Sometimes
I wanted to give up
on poetry
but I kept falling
into it and sometimes
I was wet with it
when I got up
and sometimes
I drew my finger
through the wetness
and sometimes it was
dew and sometimes it
was blood and
sometimes you could see it
after I was done and
sometimes it said something
or looked reasonably
presentable and sometimes
I presented it and
people sometimes said
it meant something to them
and sometimes it meant
to them what it meant to me
and so sometimes I still
call myself a poet and say
I haven’t given
up quite yet.
The Hometown
The town has always felt
darker and meaner to me
than any city ever has.
Although I loved its woods and
how many of its dirt roads remained
unpaved well into my twenties,
it still felt too often like an evil
had slipped out of the settler past
and come to rest on the hilltops,
in the quarries, along its rivers
still slimy with the residue
of woolen dyes drained
from its long gone mills. An antique
dimness to the sunrise, a blood tone
to the sunset, a prehistoric
scent in the dark. We all knew
there’d been murders, rapes,
and more; every town has its share
of course, but somehow we nodded
ours away as almost quaint.
We’d heard the Klan had met
in the Town Hall once, or maybe more;
people didn’t like to speak of it,
New England being as self-deluding then
as it still is. Somewhere among the rocks
on the northern edge was a spot
where English killed Native,
or Native killed English; stories differed
but it’s clear: those deaths remained
in our definition; the land still howls it;
forever it has keened beneath
the politesse, the etiquette, the reticence
of old timers. When I drive here now
on infrequent visits, I see it in
flags and bumper stickers, I hear it
in casual slander in diners, I taste it
in the perfect water drawn up from wells
that everyone praises, that were sunk through
rocks like those still faintly stained with blood
up on the northern edge of town. I lived here once,
I tell myself on the way back out of town.
I don’t have to live here still, but somehow
I still do. I can only forget
when I’m back in the city,
far from the dead
no one will speak of,
and all the sounds
of their disquieting ghosts:
But we love it here, it’s so pretty,
they say. We love it here,
who would ever want to leave?
As It Is
As ever, I am blessed
by this country. As I
damn this moment, I
resurrect one that never
existed. As a wheel,
a cog, I am integral.
As a misshapen wheel,
a crooked cog, I
have been forced to
work. As
I am crushing, as I crush it,
as I am crushed I am
able to rationalize
my fault. As I live,
I can breathe. As I am made
safe, I breathe with lungs
not my own. As I dangle
over pits and fires, I am
daredeviltry of a prescribed
movie. As I stunt, I
fall short. As a wound,
I mostly just bleed. As a man,
I am thus drained. As ever,
I am blessed and healed simply
by dint of all I was born to
and no more than that as long
as I let that be. As it is, I let it be.
As it is I am ashamed unto death
but survive by
whispering, wait
for your moment. As it is,
that is all I have ever done:
wait.
Little Swamp
This little swamp
I’m standing in
is called the Belief.
That rock sticking up
above the dark, rooty water
is, I think, called the Truth.
I’m afraid of stepping onto it
as I might slip
and drown.
But I’m a man,
or so I’ve been told, and
should be utterly unafraid
to get dirty and wet when crossing
from Belief to Truth. So
what’s my story:
I’m happy in Belief
and threatened by Truth?
Or maybe
I’ve got the labels
crossed, and I’m sinking
in Truth and am reasonably avoiding
putting my trust in Belief?
Or do I not Believe
there is such a thing as Truth
and that’s not
a good foothold I’m seeing
but instead is
a Lie? Or is it that
the little swamp
is a little swamp,
and the rock is a rock,
and all the dirty water
I am standing in is filth
and stink, all the names
I give them are the script
for how I pretend to thrive,
and this dithering on and on
about changing where I stand
is the national anthem
of my country of birth?
The Sun I Used To Envision
The sun I used to envision
when I thought about
happiness (that word
that has to be attached
to something to be
real, that must be embodied
for it to mean anything)
has set over there, behind
my last memory of peace,
partially obscured by
an unstable cliff that might slide
into my path any minute now
and remind me of coming out
from a tunnel high up on the caldera
outside Alamogordo, New Mexico
as rain poured a pure red waterfall
laden with stone and mud
into the road
and I stopped
to look at it, afraid to drive ahead
into the city of atoms, unable to
turn around and return to
the reservation behind me
with its answers I could not learn,
watching this stream
tear across the asphalt
as if sent then by my happiness
to say you shall not pass,
you may not approach, this
is the limit and the sun you’ve envisioned
when you think of happiness
has set and this memory
of torrent and darkness and
blocking will define
your road from here.
