Tag Archives: poems
How To Be Their “Indian, I Mean Native American” Colleague
Accessorize!
Tell them your uncle
Hang no pictures of your parents;
Squint, shade your eyes, and nod
Smile wryly and often
When faced with the questions
Pat their shoulders, firmly but gently,
Always dress as a ghost might dress,
Stifle your screams when you hear the words
Turn down the offer
Get in the car and put your head down.
Man Without Qualities
Previous revision posted 4/5/2013.
On Facebook, there is a man
who has 1500 friends,
approximately 800 of whom
he has met personally.
Of those he’s met
he’s had more than passing conversations
with maybe 200,
had longer and more confidential conversations
with perhaps 40,
and perhaps 15 have the qualities
of “friends”
in the sense of the word
that existed prior to the year 2006.
1500 friends —
800 he’s seen,
400 he’s spoken with in meatspace,
200 he’s connected with,
40 he would tell this story to,
15 who would agree with him
but for the fact
that they are vanishing
into a cloud.
The man one day decides to read
a three volume unfinished novel
titled “A Man Without Qualities.”
He opens the first book,
closes it, opens it again,
closes it…a book,
three volumes long
and still unfinished,
about a man who is nothing
but what he is given to be
by others.
The book will sit on his bedside table
unopened for long spells
as he talks to 1500 friends online.
If there is a Quality
to “friendship”
it is being absorbed into a cloud.
If someday the man wants to speak
to those 15 friends
after they’ve vanished,
he will have to learn a new word
with which to summon them.
2014
Never before posted. Originally written in 2010 or so as part of a suite of poems I was planning to use to accompany some music Faro (the bass player for Duende Project) had written. I ended up discarding most of it, but found a bad recording of this while cleaning up my hard drive. Never titled.
We have
a problem here
that has many strong legs
and stony little eyes,
mistakes and poisoned prongs
wound round it
like barbed wire. It’s bringing
the brine with it:
that flavor of soiled ocean,
that smell of sweat
on ancient bronze.
It’s going to be
one dirty night if it makes it
over the threshold,
and it’s coming in hard and fast.
Naming it won’t stop it.
Connecting it
to something already named
won’t stop it.
Shooting it, stabbing it,
gassing it, loving it — everything
we usually do
to solve a problem
is doomed to fail.
Strong legs.
Stony eyes.
A stink pulsing in the air before it
as it rides its rotten wave.
Our only hope may be
to tear down this house
it was born to infest,
do it fast enough
to save ourselves,
and learn
how to live rough.
Picturesque
Originally posted 3/2/2012.
You exhort me to know and love
the natural world
of orcas and eagles
polar bears and honeybees
but tonight I must put in a word
for silverfish
spiders flies and
centipedes
who speed around
our feet and food
hang suspended in corners
behind the dryer
nearly impossible to
catch or kill and who
always have
the cellar as a retreat
Those are
the beasts for me
Unlovely
and universally reviled
yet thriving
So perfect
for the modern
broke household
I’m getting
tattoos upon me
one for each
shudder-making pest
I live among them
have learned
their habits
have prayed to become
good enough
to fake my way into
their good graces
as this world is ending
I know
the natural world
You don’t survive just by being
picturesque
Neither Dad Nor Jethro Gibbs
Originally posted 10/26/2010, originally titled “Thirty Mescalero Men.”
My father
gave me
my first knife
when I was six.
A man’s
only half a man
without a knife,
he told me then.
On a TV show
the tough but fair Marine
schools his team
on his Rules.
Rule Number Nine,
he reminds them, is
“Never go anywhere
without a knife,”
which is
something
my father
would have said.
At fifty four I keep a box
of more than sixty knives
under my bed
and never leave the house without one.
Some of the knives I carry
are old — I still have
my first, which was old
when I got it —
but some are new,
and I cannot say
I’ll never buy another
or stop adding to the armory.
By all the rules
and lessons I have learned
I am at least
thirty men,
but I feel certain that neither Dad
nor Jethro Gibbs
would believe
I’m any of them.
Fireboy
Originally posted 12/19/2004.
My mother has always said
that when I was born,
I yelled like kindling
crying for a match,
but I have never yearned
for the fires I’ve started
as much as I have longed
to be soothed by their quenching.
My deepest hope is that
one can of gasoline away
from wherever I am,
there’s a world
that forever smells
of approaching rain.
My Bastard
Originally posted 9/23/2013; originally titled “Lie Of A Brother.”
Wake up at midnight to find
my daytime mask gone from the nightstand.
I can hear one of my fictional characters
typing somewhere. I’ll bet he has it on
and I’ll bet he’s working
on another fictional character.
I can tell by the tempo —
it’s my tempo. He’s killing those keys.
It’s OK with me that someone I made up
handles my day-face so well he can make up another.
My myth is taking over my life
and my bastard is better at being me than I am.
I built him well, it seems.
He’s caught my spark for creating
so I think I’ll roll over, go back to sleep,
maybe skip living altogether tomorrow.
Let him and his creation handle it.
I like it better here — dozing off
while listening to my betters
laboring in the dark.
Commuter Moment
Originally posted 6/27/2008 — original title, “Mass Pike Moment, June 2008.”
The pond by the side of the road
is obscured in a green-brown mist.
If I wasn’t stuck in traffic
I might never have seen that color
that may be the result of the sunlight
pouring through the green leaves behind it,
or perhaps it is caused by the oak pollen
so thick in the air
that it clearly has changed
more than my breathing.
It is something I would not likely have seen
if I had gone whizzing by
intent on my eventual destination,
or if I had noticed it
I might have missed its hue,
and if it showed up again
in my thoughts
I might have decided
to say it was mist colored,
the default silver-gray that shows up in every poem.
I might then have turned it into a metaphor
for something else
instead of letting it stand on its own.
Perhaps all morning fog
carries a shade worth noting, a shade
only visible when the viewer
is halted in his progress toward importance
long enough to see it,
long enough
to be content in the viewing
and the knowledge
that everything that is known and believed
has a loophole in it somewhere
that is large enough to drive through.
By the way…my OTHER project is…
I’ve mentioned here and there that I perform much of the time with a tight jazz/rock/funk/folk/what have you band, The Duende Project. I do the poetry and play a little guitar and cuatro while Steven “Faro” Lanning-Cafaro (electric and upright acoustic bass, nylon string guitar, and archtop jazz guitar), Chris Lawton (electric and acoustic guitars, Dobro, banjo, mandolin), and Chris “O-D” O’Donnell (drums) do the heavy lifting behind that.
Here’s a cut from our most recent album, featuring Faro on 5-string electric bass and O-D on drums.
Zodiac Mindwarp, by The Duende Project.
If you like this or any of our other work — and there are five albums worth at that site — it’s all available for purchase. But not really pushing that — just thought you might like to hear what we do.
Polish Hall, Uxbridge, MA
Originally posted 12/19/2005.
nothing has changed
except for the higher prices
it’s now two seventy-five
for a jack on the rocks
and a bag of chips
is now seventy five cents
I could end up drinking here all the time
the way I used to drink here all the time
thirty-odd years ago
some of my old barmates are still drinking here
dave parker
sue something different now but born boulanger
rat guertin
we all get to talking
rat hits the rest room before he takes off and
suddenly i’m helping dave
push rat’s car
out into the center of the parking lot
while it’s locked and running
and then rat’s cussing us out
and we’re laughing our saggy asses off
the car looks like it was made in 1980
I’m wanting a cigarette bad
it’s damn cold out here
it’s warmer once we’re back in the bar
six drinks
in one hour
seems about right
once again
Phoenix (for Blair)
Originally posted 7/24/2011.
The cut on my arm reminds me
that after the phoenix has flown some
always gather around its birth-hearth
to stir the ashes with dirty sticks.
What do they expect will come of that —
is it the same thing
I expected
from the blood
I drew from myself
when I heard he was gone?
Did I think that if I drew enough,
the phoenix would rise again
from where my blood
had pooled? I don’t know.
I’m old enough to know better
but for a second there I became young again
and fell in love with childhood magic,
believing that if I gave enough
and hurt enough,
the phoenix would return.
I am old enough
to know better
so I bind the wound
and listen as I do
for the song.
The myth says when the bird flies
he sings, and the song
burns the air behind him
with the fire
that released him.
A myth becomes a myth
not because it’s a lie,
but because it is a truth
that cannot ever
die for long.
It rises again and again.
It flies blazing
up from the ash.
It is never in the ash.
It is in the clean, bloodless sky.
— for David Blair
Obsidian
Originally posted 3/6/2013.
A man who has never been rejected
is watching women on Highland Street
as if Highland Street were the ruins of a Mayan city
where these women are exhibits to be viewed
as if they were souvenirs
A man is shopping for a souvenir
among the women of Highland Street
imagining he is a prince of a lost realm
A lost realm he learned about in school
or perhaps in books from his father’s library
that displayed women as souvenirs
for the taking by princes of the realm
who may imagine themselves
against the backdrop of old roads
and palaces and even temples where men
are never rejected
because they never ask permission
when they take a woman for a souvenir of the realm
A man watches women
on Highland Street
Imagines himself
crafted in sharp obsidian
Ordained as prince and priest
Taker of live hearts
Imagines himself
hero of a bent myth
written by princes and priests
of the realm
Face No Face
Originally written in 1981 or 1982. Never posted; not certain it has ever been performed. Significantly revised here.
This is not a face I love
so I’ll gladly give it to you.
Pull it from my head.
Put it on your own.
I don’t need another, people would just
recognize me then, don’t need that.
Would rather look at them bare
and then scare them away
with my front skull.
Gradations are odious.
My face is all gradation
and subtlety and neither
is a thing I love.
I surrender them
with this new wide smile.
The flesh we devote to expression
is annoying and extraneous.
I would gladly dispense with emotions
beyond the largest of them:
ecstasy, terror, rage, despair.
In the new world
we won’t need subtlety.
In the new world
we’ll stick with ecstasy, terror,
rage, and despair. These
will be our default settings.
Will guide our appetites.
Will drive our businesses.
Will admonish our gods.
Will break us in.
This is not a face I love.
I’ll gladly give it to you
but you should ask yourself
before you take it:
in this new world
why have a face at all?
Three Scenes From A Weekend
Originally, this was three separate poems written over the years 1976-1980. Never posted before, found in my ancient archives from that period.
I was a kid then, a teenager, and my reach was often far greater than my grasp. I had an essay and a whole theory about what I was trying to do with poetry that when I read it now (of COURSE I kept it!) makes me giggle and blush. But I was aiming at something, something larger than the individual Poem, even back then. Didn’t have the life experience or the skill back then to make it work.
Not sure I do now either, of course, but I am far more clear on my small abilities and my large ambitions than I once was, so…let’s say I think it’s worth a try.
Overheard from a dusk-dimmed driveway:
“Basketball’s simple —
you take the ball,
you dribble it, you move,
then you
shoot…”
Father, uncle or big brother speaking,
but who’s listening? There is no second voice —
until after that, the good flat notes,
the rhythm of rubber on asphalt.
Two worn men on the sidewalk ahead of me.
One says,
“Every time I get my check
I try to hold on to the money.
They rob me at the bank
so I keep it all at home
but they rob me at home
but now I got them all fooled —
I give all my money
to the man behind the counter
at the liquor store,”
and his companion howls
and slaps him
on his age-sloped back.
On the bus
another old man, taller than I
by a head and a half,
muttering
again and again,
“…had a big
fat fat
fat fat
fat fat
wife, seven kids, forty years,
I know her face I think
but not her name…”
and now, by myself, in bed alone,
I say
may I never forget
that there are innumerable ways
to get from one end of the court
to the other
and may I never
scorn a journey
simply for where it ends.
Answer To A Question Posed To A Friend Home On Leave
Originally posted in 2002 on the ancient blogging site, Diaryland. Which, much to my surprise, is still up and running in 2014.
The moment I knew my life
would be different forever
was when the whoosh-snap
of the rifle
dissolved into my chest.
The sound of it and the feeling of it
were one and the same and the only way
I knew the sound had been there
was by its immediate absence
as I fell back.
All that – and of course
this too: my target
fell back without making a sound of his own,
and did not get up again.
Dark Matter 