Dark Matter

This wee life
has been triumphant
more often than not
so I will not choose to recall
what is under my nails
or where these bruises came from;

why the squirrels will not
speak my name
or why I know every car
on this street and recognize
their drivers before they emerge
from behind their wheels.

In the small hours
I have watched the day wrestle
to be born. I’ve laid
next to warmth and sometimes
been cold, more often
scalding, always aware
of the pressure on my hip.

There were dark nights
and dark days
but there were also so many hours
that were soaked under a lava sun,
drowning in the company of friends.

I was never too far from the lesson,
though I did forget it now and again:
the time is short and the life is small
in comparison to what surrounds it —
there are miles between moments
you can either fill with hope or despair
and the choice,
if only seen in hindsight,
is no choice at all.
You will live and you will die,
and your life and death are yours
to create or let rot.

If there is a way
to hold this, keep it here
in my pocket or close
to my core, I will hold this:
This wee life can grow or wither.
Choice is all I have,

and so I will forget the names
of drivers and learn them anew,
ask the squirrels to forgive my trespasses
and bake myself brown as often as I can
beneath the volcano that is day.
When I sleep I will not sleep alone
and when I sit up late
it will be for the stars’ sake.
I will be the life I think I am
and take my death as adviser and confidant,
listen to it whisper soon, soon enough,
learn to race it until
we tie at the line
and choosing is finished at last.

Everybody in this bar
wants to be my baby
because I’ve got
the Cigarettes of Love
the Booze of Enchantment

the Ace Face Jeans
the Godzilla Tongue
the Frankenstein Member

Down the bar
some dick is wearing
a T-shirt that says he’s
“10 Feet Tall and Bulletproof”
Shithead, I’m blast-hardened

James Brown
stole my blueprints
I’d have sued him
for patent infringement
if he’d lived
because I’m that machine

Outside
it’s fucking colder
than my eyes
There’s a wind out there but
there’s a fire in here

I spark up another Cigarette
(of Love) and down another drink
Everybody in this bar wants me
Everybody in this bar’s
just biding their time

and I’m not leaving the building
till they come for me

NOTE: I just recorded this and put it up on Myspace, if you’re interested.

You can’t make
everything bad
disappear in
one day,
she tells me,

rubbing my back
as I sit head down
on the bed.
Around us
is all the wreckage

of a holiday: paper,
boxes, gift cards,
small scraps of drama.
All I’ve ever learned
tells me to cry

but then I remember that
the light grows longer after today
and when she kisses my neck
and pulls me closer
I find I can see through the dark.

Day one: I was born
with fists. Empty lungs
atop bowed legs and below
a balled up face. Skin dawn-pink
and eyes bear-brown, but it was still
those fists my parents saw first: knurled
walnuts on pumping, jabbing arms.
They laughed. I stopped swinging.

Day two: today. Speaking
to them at lunch I recognized
the sound of those fists
in my voice.

He shuddered and said,
“I don’t think I could even
look at a dead body, never mind
touch one.”

She jacked up her eyebrow
and said, “Do you never
look in the mirror, then? And how
do you wash yourself?”

After a cigarette
smoked so quickly
on the cold porch
that I can feel the cells
in my lungs dying,
I come back to my room
and shut the door
and think about the hole
in my words.

There’s a place
in my speech
that is void.
I know I must fill it
but the words that will be required
terrify me.
They’re hiding in my room with me.
In the closet, on the bottom
shelf, under the bed —
shards of language waiting
to be pieced together,
and I can’t face them.

I find myself thinking
not that, not that
whenever I open my mouth.
It’s not that I don’t know
what I should be saying —
it’s that what I should be saying
scares the breath out of me.

Picture my daily sentences
swerving around the hole. Words
whir like cars around a traffic circle,
entering pre-designated roads,
leaving the big space in the middle
untouched.

This is not about art
or science. The hole in my language
is thousands of miles deep
and if I fall in I’ll never get out.
No magic applies, no physics,
there’s no masterwork waiting in the pit
for me to climb upon.

Not that, not that. I know
I’ve got to go there but I can’t
face the dark of the familiar places.
This is why I suck down smoke
knowing what it will do to me.
Some fears are so distant
they mask the closer terror.

When I sleep tonight
I’ll not bother to dream. The words
I won’t use steer me every night
to the singularity, and until
I can wrestle with them and make them
into a bridge instead of a ladder, something
I can cross and look down from, until then
every day will be more of the same:

not that, not that;

certainly not now,
surely not tonight
when the mere thought of breathing
steals my breath.

Daphne Martinez,
star of one segment of a TV show,
tonight plays a dead prostitute
with a killer’s letter to God
written on her back
in black Sharpie.

Jeremey Raine, not far away,
practicing his handwriting
with one eye on the news,
leans forward to hide
the pistol in his belt.

On screen the neighbors chime in
just as he wanted: good kid until
she got into drugs, the creeps
on the streets, city’s gone to hell…

it’s a wrap.
Next up, tragic
bus accident.
They’re selling
classical music favorites
by the time Jeremey makes it
out the door.

He leaves
the Sharpie behind.
Bartender picks it up
and uses it to make up
a sign: No Drinks Made
With More Than Two Kinds
Of Liquor. That’ll teach
the damn college kids.
He changes the TV.

Daphne Martinez is not saying anything
about the way she’s twisted around
on the sidewalk. The detective rubs
his eyes: what looked like a ramble
to God is changed now to some message
about liquor. No one here is talking sense,
not even the corpse.

Jeremey’s no fool. He dumped
the murder weapon back at the bar.
The gun’s just for show.
He knows the medium makes the message.
He’s already plotting the next show.