Dark Matter

Today I shall begin anew.
I will tell myself
I was born
to play this role.

Even before I get up I will lie here and pretend
I have changed overnight
into someone who gets the right things done
at the right time. I will lie in bed and tell myself

that if I do it right I will get to do this again tomorrow,
and again on the day after that. I will erase
previous days from my track record —
all of them, if possible. I will lie there and decide

that even if I wipe the record antiseptic-clean
I will keep my name the same so those
who have disapproved of me can change their minds
and praise me for the transformation.

All this joy to come from just lying in bed
and running new lines. I swear won’t think today
about yesterday and how I blew it. How I have
blown it over and over

by lying in bed too long and thinking about
yesterdays, the permanent record
of yesterdays strung into a necklace of lead.
I will lie here and think of anything other than dead weight.

To maintain isolation in this crowd
of friends, good people
gathered in a deep backyard
around food and smoke and
hours of catching up
after a plague year, seems
such a ridiculous pose.

To imagine that
a tragic face and story
should be your sole currency
among such friends would be a sin
if sin is real; instead
call it a willed stance, a facade —

which is not to say that
your story is not tragic and
your face does not bear the marks
of it, but to say that every face here
bears marks and yet somehow
there are still loud birds unseen
in the trees and lazy dogs and cats
and laughter all around.
You can be gloomy anytime.

Let go for one afternoon
and see a promise here that
after hard seasons
there will be softer days, and
even if you never attend
another, someone in the future
will recall this night
and your presence here
and be comforted by it.

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.”― David Ignatow

Outside something something
nature. Creature, plant,
rock, shadow on ground.

Inside something something
human emotion, insight. Illumination.
Metaphor as deep as depth.

Between something something
and something something a wall
unbreachable. Out there we call

“the world.” In here we call “soul” or
something. We call poems “keys.”
We try to make world into soul

with a key to a door we think we see
in the wall. Something, something;
something about the lock being broken

and something about trying to make things
work for us that are not our concern
while something laughs behind our backs.

That’s not door. That’s still wall.
That’s not a soul and maybe there’s no
world. This is a poem, or something, it seems;

a key that unlocks Nothing.

Your parents are going away,
diminished ghosts drifting off.
Whatever shall you do?

They are feeble, spiteful clouds
now, raining perpetually on everything.
You dry and fold their clothes

and fret to yourself about how
you will ever empty the house
while they thunder, cast bolts, start fires.

In other words, you keep living as you always have,
doing all the hard work you think is necessary
to hold them, like smoke, in your hands.

Nothing has changed. Look down at those palms,
those naked palms. All that’s there is a scent
you can’t follow to learn where they are going.

Check yourself. There appears to be
a thin coating of slime
on your affirmation of purity,

a subtly gleeful aggression
in the way your principles allow you
such arrogance, perhaps indicative

of a willed inability to compare and contrast
your own righteousness on one subject
to your complicity on another.

If I were looking into a mirror
while doing and saying these same things
I hope I’d shut up and tear my face off.

If I found your face underneath mine
I do not know what I could do
except wall myself in with mirrors

so I would always remember
where I came from and never be able
to go back into the world.

If I later tore that face off to find beneath it
only the bones that history gave us both,
I would do the only thing left to do:

go back out there and let the people I’d hurt
judge me, then shun me or embrace me as they choose
while I bled and tried to grow something new.

I knew a broken shell
with a name and a shape,
a solid being somehow
more or less invisible
to people on the street
where they lived.

Some said they had
terrible history,
some said they cracked
in the recent past,
some said nothing. Most

said nothing, just crossed
themselves or looked
away from the thing
rummaging through
the recycle bins once a week.
It was the eyes or the clothes
or the nonsense they spouted
that kept people looking away

and one day they did not
come around anymore, some said
they were the dead found behind
the convenience store but there was
disagreement about that but not about

how much my dog missed them,
how they loved to pat my dog
whenever they passed my own
precariously inhabited building,
long out of code, the unregistered cars
in the driveway, the weary yard
full of feeders and birds; whoever
that cracked shell was, I didn’t know,
but I trusted my dog
for missing them when they were gone.