Tag Archives: meditations

August 1, 2016

Song For A Snake To Hum

Originally posted 6/5/2005. From comments on the original post, I’m pretty sure I was in Orlando FL at the time I wrote this. Probably a business trip back in those days. Not that it matters.

there are places like this
there have always been places
just like this
where snakes
hold their tails in their mouths

you’d think that people seeing them
would stop pretending that
there is no proof
that every beginning
contains its end

but people keep saying
if it happened
where’s the proof
that it happened

a snake eating
its own tail?
seems that would be
enough proof

but what happens
is that people
not trusting that what happens
happens and happens
again and again
not trusting those who tell them
that what happens happens
and happens again
and again
demand plural immediate unshakeable proofs
and though such things are common
any wait at all
allows them to forget and deny
that it ever happened

now we are here and
here’s another snake
reaching around himself
his tail wet from
poison mouth

this is how things end and begin

how it happens
and happens and happens
again and again

this is a song for a snake to hum
as it waits patiently
for lessons to be learned
and things to stop happening
again and again and again

so it can stop biting its own tail
so it can stop dying

Leave a comment | tags: meditations, poems, poetry, revisions | posted in poetry

August 1, 2016

Bucket List

By Tony Brown

I find a small notebook
at a yard sale table.

A sheet falls out, words
at the top: “Bucket List.”

I note check marks in front of
“visit Europe,” “go deep sea fishing,”

“climb Twin Mountain.” Left unchecked:
“learn to dance the tarantelle,” “complete

master’s degree,” “reconcile
with Marie.” There are others

as well but I note only the last item,
and the check before it:

“go back and kill
the rest of those bastards.”

I ask the seller
where she got the notebook and

she says it was her father’s,
was in his effects when he died. She’s

come North to handle his estate
and these items today

are the last things to be sold
before she goes home.

I do not ask if she’d looked through
that book before selling.

I do not ask her name.
I do not ask how her father died.

I tuck the sheet back into
the notebook and offer her

a price for it as a lot with
a pair of worn leather belts

and a box of shot glasses
from various tourist spots.

She agrees
and I take it all home.

I lay that book in my firepit
and turn it into ash.

Then
I call my father.

We talk for a long time
and make peace between us.

I cannot sleep tonight.
I pour shots into

Niagara Falls and
Carlsbad Cavern glasses,

wondering who
the bastards were and if

they still walk the earth,
if their children understand

and love them, or are they
childless, or alone now,

writing fearful words
in small notebooks

no one else
is ever supposed to see.

1 Comment | tags: meditations, poems, poetry | posted in poetry

July 31, 2016

Bouquet

By Tony Brown

Originally posted 3/22/2007, though written well before that.

The brain
knows many things.
Some of them you know,
some you do not.

If the brain
was a flower,
you would be
its scent.

Perhaps
the brain is a
flower, starving
for light, lunging
through the eyes,
seeking nourishment.

If you plucked
your brain out
and held it to the light,
would you have a mind?

The mind lives
in the brain and
hides in its petals.
The mind is the dark
among the riots of color.

You sleep
as the brain tends to the mind.
They talk all night,
pretending they are
you. In the morning
you are nearly mad
from the echoes of their
conversation.

Put your hands
around your mind
and know it’s not
part of the scheme
that you should understand
everything: there are things
shoring up the partners
that would terrify you
if you knew them.

The brain blooms
long after you close your eyes.
The mind rises from its nooks and folds
to escape, moving past you,
playing in the meadows.

The mind drifts back
in the hot late afternoon.
Your head grows heavy
with pollen. You open your mouth
and bees fly in
to take their fill while the mind
avoids being stung
by the danger in the commerce.

When you sleep
the mind and brain bear ideas.
You pretend they are your own fruit.
The brain laughs at you. The mind
strokes you softly, saying,
“There, there…”

You are the scent.
Something plucks your brain
and you die slowly. Maybe
another brain and another mind
recall you for a while, but
you’ll certainly fade.

Anything
fed long enough
on vision, scent, touch,
sound, taste will double back
on its own surety.

The brain
makes you sleepy. The mind
makes you frightened. You
make yourself believe
there are reasons for everything.

A night blooming flower
holds its beauty
until first light, collapsing
at the first touch of your hand,
staining your memory
with a scent you never can
describe.

Leave a comment | tags: meditations, poems, poetry, revisions | posted in poetry

July 28, 2016

Not All Homicides Are Crimes

By Tony Brown

“To begin with, not all
homicides are crimes.” That’s
the first sentence I find
when I look up the word
in a legal reference source. “Not all
homicides are crimes.” Legally

if a person dies at the hand
of another, that’s a homicide and
then a decision must be made
by some lawyer somewhere
about what to do next —

they look
at the body and begin:
this one’s a victim,
this one’s not a victim,
this one deserved it,
this one did not,
this one’s a murder,
this one’s a manslaughter,
this one, this one, this one…

plucking petals
from bouquets of daisies
laid upon a coffin.

Even if they land
on there having been a crime,

hoops must then be jumped through
to get to what is called justice:
the hoops are sometimes huge
and hung low
and easy to step through
and the lawyers practically skip on through
and the killer or killers are dragged on through
and there’s a trial
and some one pays, or doesn’t.

Sometimes, though,

the hoops are small,
are hung high in the air,
are greasy with lighter fluid — and swiftly
the flames rise from them
and no one dares to jump through
the hoops or the flames;

the killer or killers
turn from victimizer to victim
and the victim turns
from victim to slug or thug
and everyone involved bemoans
unfortunate presence in wrong place at wrong time
and sometimes they even call the killer
dutiful servant
or hero.

“Not all homicides are crimes.”
It all depends
on who hangs the hoops
and who has to jump through them.

Meanwhile, the petals
that were counted to decide
whether and how the hoops
would be hung
remain where they fall
on the graves until the wind

pickes them up. They collect
in odd corners in towns named
Ferguson and Baltimore and Baton Rouge
and Winslow and Worcester and
New York and Oakland
and oh, pretty much

everywhere. They collect
and decay. They’ve become sticky
and we are slipping upon them. There are so
many underfoot we can’t help but fall soon,

and if we crack open upon landing,
if we die, will that be
homicide
or accident
or perhaps act of God —

who will count
the petals from our
funeral bouquet, who will decide
where the hoops for that death
will be hung?

4 Comments | tags: meditations, poems, poetry, political poems | posted in poetry

July 27, 2016

Peace In The Shrug

By Tony Brown

Peace in the shrug
as you pull the first two red tomatoes
from your garden only to notice
they’ve been consumed
by bottom rot, the chagrin
you feel at not catching that
earlier, the casual toss into
the base of the fence,
the sudden awareness
of the nearly ripe cucumber
hanging on that fence.

Peace in the shrug
at choices made, choices
that failed to pan out, choices
that went south or north or
every direction not on the compass
without an ounce of malice from anyone
involved, people living their lives
that did or did not intersect with
your own, and the failure
of will, the utter failure of
all your will, then one day
the twenty dollar bill on the ground
at the foot of the pay phone where
you just spent your last dime, and that
was thirty years ago,
and how you remember it, and how
it pays you even today.

Peace in the shrug
at the end of the world, the end
of order and justice, the shambling
walk of the long-awaited Beast,
the pseudo-shambolic walk of the
Giant No, the edible flesh of
Harmony, the smacking of
thin jaws around the bones of
All You’ve Held Dear, and now
at the very close of the last snap
of those jaws the silence
of the sunset, and the dawn
beyond your own experience
that will come, that will surely
come even without you.

Peace in the shrug
as you pass, with your last thought
forming around how the seeds
from the tomatoes you tossed
will grow there in the dirt along the fence
as long as rain falls and sun shines
next season, with or without you
there to moan, or wail,
or shrug such miracles off
as too little, too late,
when they were never meant
to feed you.

Leave a comment | tags: death, meditations, poems, poetry | posted in poetry

July 26, 2016

Bad Reception

By Tony Brown

You come to a door,
are just outside,
hand on the knob;

you can hear singing
and it seems
the verses clearly
and strongly say

step up,
you broken dogs, you
stolen lambs, you
marked and burned darlings
of those who long ago
gave up hope of seeing you
whole again;

step up
and tell every detail
of where you’ve been and how
it felt to get here
and we will take those tales
and make them part of our own tale;

step up,
and someday those you left behind
will hear your stories in ours
and they will come for you
and take you into
their long-vacant embraces
and on this soil,
all will be well for all;

step up,
step and over the threshold
and come in and
sing.

You step up and
over the threshold —

all that noise was coming out of
a tiny radio from the last century.
The singing, the outstretched hands,
the promise? All coming from
a torn speaker. How did
such bad reception
sound so good
from out there, back beyond

the door you just came through
that is
no longer there?

1 Comment | tags: meditations, poems, poetry | posted in poetry

July 23, 2016

Election

By Tony Brown

They are clearly at the point
of casual denigration, of shameless
spitting upon us as they cannibalize our children,

apparently near the point
of openly tossing all their copies
of their own law books into their cross fires;

they are closing the distance to the point
of admitting they simply adore
the warm ruddy rush from our open wounds,

and are long past the point
of shrugging off every last breath
drawn from among us by their guns.

At what point do we accept
that no vote will stop them
because they have made sure

that they are the ground
upon which the vote rests,
and up or down and yes or no

are now pointless?

1 Comment | tags: meditations, poems, poetry, political poems | posted in poetry

July 21, 2016

Old School

By Tony Brown

old school
talks about all
those things everyone
used to hate and longed to
change or escape from
old school
old school
means
muscle memory
of what used to hurt
hurting then is how
it knows what it now
knows
old school
old school
old school doesn’t know
how to teach a lesson
how to school without
hurting a fool or anyone
it thinks a fool
old school
old school a bland ploy
no change no room to exchange
and play ball with new school
old school
old school told and got told on
old school
tell what you’ll tell then
tell then
tell what you told
new school damn bored enough with
old school yet
new school damned if it doesn’t shout out
old school for being old school
pain and bad marks
disdain and sad barks like
packs of whipped dogs
old school get behind
old school get out of sight and mind
old school
old school just
OLD and that’s
just about all

2 Comments | tags: humor, meditations, poems, poetry | posted in poetry

July 20, 2016

A Foxy Kind Of Stand

By Tony Brown

A snippet on a neighbor’s radio,
old Bowie cut,
the singer taking a “foxy kind of stand.”

“When you rock and roll with me,”
title lyric,
that one time scandalous phrase now tea cozy quaint.

My neighbor whose radio is rocking
this bit of antiquity
is no more than thirty. The song

is, as of today, forty-two. I’m in
my mid fifties, out
in the sun, a lizard in the heat.

“When you rock and roll with me:” I’m not
old enough
to recall that line first spelling sex to everyone,

but I know about it, and about sex of course,
how often
the one once led to the other, and can recall how Bowie

scared so many and made it a little
dangerous again
to rock and roll with him, to rock and roll

like him. “I’m in tears again.” The neighbor looks
at me funny as I
turn away. I don’t know what he knows about

any of this — Bowie, rocking, rolling, sex,
nostalgia — but he must know
enough because he changes the station

and lowers the volume.

Leave a comment | tags: Bowie, meditations, music, poems, poetry | posted in poetry

July 19, 2016

A Small Remnant, A Small Revision, A Reclamation

By Tony Brown

on my driveway
a small cloud of flies above
a small drift of feathers
in blue and gray.

a small remnant
and a small revision.
a reclamation
of what is always left over.

flies are sometimes
the sole reason I feel
hope —
a small buzz of hope only
as i am unsurprisingly
somewhat reserved
in my enthusiasm
for any hope
found that way
because of what
must precede it.

the flies
live and breed
where death is.
they follow death
and rise from it.

i must take my hope,
however sticky,
however distasteful,
where I find it.

Leave a comment | tags: death, meditations, poems, poetry, uncharacteristic hope | posted in poetry

July 17, 2016

The Shell Game

By Tony Brown

On the day I will likely die
I will not likely be heroic,
falling for a cause in a leaden rain,
protecting others with torn flesh.

It’s not at all clear today
how I’ll die on that day, of course,
but it likely won’t happen during
some last stand for my beliefs,
some war for my soul,
some battle I choose
or one that comes to me
against my will
only to be grimly faced
by me as warrior,
me as fighter,
me as memorial in waiting.

I will likely not be mourned
by those who never knew me
but who may choose to honor me
based solely on what symbolic message
my death will send. I will likely not
show up on an historic death list
afterward, commemorated yearly
by ceremonies, bowed heads
in a classroom or office,
a pretty average song
written by a pretty average songwriter
played on a pretty average radio station.

No.

When I go, I’ll likely be bedridden,
poor in dollars and cents and sense,
shitting and pissing myself,
wispy under stiff yellowed sheets
in a stiff, puke-green room;

or just as likely
I’ll be in whatever passes for my own home
doing all those same things unattended;

or just as likely
I’ll pass in a crap car wrecked in some crap fashion
by my own mistake or deliberate hand.

When it’s done they’ll truck me off
from wherever I happen to fall
as hazardous waste to be handled
with due care and precaution
until I’m disposed of.

Fine, then. Anyway it happens,
it will be fine.

It’s always a shell game at closing time;
you end up under some shifting cover
while someone tries to call out
the one that holds you,
seeking a win from your presence
or your absence.
However that plays out on that day

what I was will be gone
in any one of a number
of likely or unlikely ways
that won’t matter to me.
I would like it to matter to someone.
I do what I can to make that so
but when that final shell
is at last raised,
what’s underneath
won’t be up to me.

1 Comment | tags: death, meditations, poems, poetry | posted in poetry

July 15, 2016

A Friendly Reminder From The Protest

By Tony Brown

Sign a check
you never expect
to be cashed;
take a stand
somewhere your face
can’t be seen, someplace
safe, warm,
and dark; after all,
you’re nothing like the ones
on the front line.
They’d rather be safe too,
and feeling the same,
but safety’s not for everyone,
even if it should be.

If you
are one of those
inclined to hide,
you should hide,
even if it’s
behind them; go ahead,
hide
behind them, but
not so close
to their backs
that they
have to worry
about you;
they wouldn’t want
to mistake you
for what’s in front of them,
and you wouldn’t want that either.

They got this
without you,

without
you back there
safe and sound
and
breathing down
their necks.

Leave a comment | tags: meditations, poems, poetry, political poems | posted in poetry

July 15, 2016

USA, July 2016

By Tony Brown

It’s still early.

Still only beginning to be
unpleasantly hot here.

Still looks to be a bad one for the garden
and the people.

I have a hose with a problem
called a drought.
I have a political lawn sign
with a problem called
a small matter of
a war in the streets.

I had a little love for many.
I have turned that into
a lot of love for a few
and the rest can shrivel
or burn or both. I don’t have
time for them — there’s
a small matter of a war and
also a drought.

I had a bet down on getting out of here
before it got too hot
but I’m a loser and a sore one
at that

so now I have a problem
with a drought and a
problem with a war
and a political sign and a hose
won’t do me much good — can’t
fly out of here on a sign,
can’t keep a battle off my lawn
with a hose, not anymore.

And it’s still early,
or at least it’s still early in this dry heat
of a summer, early in the skirmishes,
early in this last late show about
problems with drought
and war and lost wagers
that it wouldn’t come to this,

and not a drop of cooling in sight.

9 Comments | tags: meditations, poems, poetry, political poems | posted in poetry

July 15, 2016

Tough Going

By Tony Brown

Originally posted 11/4/2013.

To wake before dawn
is to wrestle
a fat, angry angel
every morning, one
who would prefer
I stay asleep indefinitely.

We struggle until I put that angel
into brief submission, then go about
this life where the easy stuff
takes forever to do
and the impossible presents itself
as regularly as church.

Weight and difficulty
are what I know best.
Some of us, it seems,
are born to be
ground underfoot,
born to wear out.

I trust the universe
to get it right,

and when the last of me crumbles,

my remains will serve some purpose,
I’m certain, for that fat and angry angel
who will crush me
and then lift me
tenderly
from where I’ve mingled with dust.

1 Comment | tags: meditations, poems, poetry, revisions | posted in poetry

July 14, 2016