hard skin
on soles:
a sign of having traveled
weak knees:
relic of prayers
loosened teeth
and
roughened voice:
damage of good living
smoke and rich food
good things left
a splendid wreck
was it worth it
you ask?
wreckage
is wreckage
A lifetime of data.
Almost none of it information.
I want to go back to school —
I want you old school,
high school,
no mature fancy wanting here.
I want to remember what it was like
to just want you
and ask for what I want.
I want to relearn
how to yearn. How to show
it with no parsing of millions
of internal rules and sifting of
reasons. Just to want again
old school, hallway glance,
brush-by, staring for hours
and hours. Want awkward
but obvious. I want you
old school, smell in the air
of crucial locker notes and incidental
books notable for covers doodled full
with obsession. A lifetime
of data hasn’t turned into
information of any use; I want you
old school, want to carry
books, lurk around your schedule.
I want every friend of yours to whisper.
It ought to be obvious to you
how I old school I am. It is to me.
I’m still twisting my toe
in the schoolyard dirt,
and I still don’t know what to do
with my hands.
Dawn.
You’re up.
You begin to dance
around the house,
feet barely touching,
it’s levitation, almost —
the cat’s as terrified
as if you were vacuuming
and in fact your crap is disappearing
from every surface.
Floors and windows are sparkling
for the first time in a while.
This is going so well you decide
you’re not going to speak at all today
and will communicate only in dance.
At the supermarket
people don’t look at you
as they whisper to each other,
who is this fat middle aged hairball anyway?
Is this dancing,
if so why is he dancing,
and how is it
that the floor’s not shaking?
How does he do that with
his feet grazing the linoleum —
maybe in fact
he’s not touching it?
Best to pretend not to notice —
stay close kids.
Don’t get near him.
The guy at the meat counter
tosses you a steak
which you catch in midair
and gulp down
as you realize that somehow
you’re not just a dancer
but a lion too.
You know you need a pride
so it’s back to the house
to call other lions, or people
who you think might be lions,
or at least dancers
who might be recruited to the cause,
but it’s pointless work
because you only communicate in dance
and the phone’s no good for that.
They recognize your phone by caller ID
and come to your house
where they find you swirling
in the kitchen surrounded by meat
laid out on a floor that’s so clean
they want to eat off it too,
but it’s outside their job descriptions
to be lions or dancers
so once they’re sure you’re fine —
and of course, you are —
they leave you alone
with the vision of yourself
at the head
of hordes of lions
moving through savanna grass
so quietly as if suspended
just a half inch off the ground…
Your cat comes out of hiding
and stares up at you,
for once,
as if you’re not crazy.
See how distant
I am now? See me waving
to the horizon from
the far horizon?
See how I am —
it’s like I walked as far away as I could
and then jumped up and down
shouting, “See me! See me!”
That, I think,
explains everything
from my explosions
to my sadness to my
unruly and mistaken
hair.
Why,
I might be air itself:
invisible and everywhere.
I might be weather
that is always coming and going
and present at once.
But no, I’m nothing at all
like that —
more like the damn gnat
you can’t slap and which won’t go.
More and more like that
no matter where I stand,
or how far I run.
The righter you are
the more likely you are
to sleep without dreaming
of tomorrow.
The righter you are
the easier it will be
to commit the crimes
you’ve imagined.
The righter you are
the better the chance
that you don’t really see
the mirror.
The righter you are
the greater the opportunity
to whistle a graveyard
into your pockets.
The righter you are
the more rats you’ll have
who love to nibble
at your tiny hands and feet.
Any number of
killings, rapes, anonymous
moments of violence; any number
of shared meals and acts of love;
any art, any tossed off phrase
laid upon the wind and let fly;
any chord progression
played once
perfectly:
someone, quickly —
make a book. Make
a movie, a recording, a photograph
of the occasion —
we’ve got to resist
the history books
others write if we are ever to believe
that we existed at all.
What I never said to you was just this: I knew.
Knew from early on how you saw me as tether,
reminder of mistake, souvenir of a broken evening,
neither legacy nor hope. What you never said to me
was why you stayed as long as you did, though
I think I know that too: I think you waited until you thought
I’d grown enough to be more whole without you.
When you left, I did not speak of it for a long time.
One day I did the same as you: I left and went
my own way, hating myself a little, but loving
my new world a little more than that. And now that we have met
again, after all is done, we sit on your porch
and do not speak at all, wreathed in smoke and what we never said
to each other, what we do not say even now.
His head’s bent a tad
beyond the average frame,
thus unable
to see straight. He’s skewed.
Be a little
charitable —
his path makes sense
to him, now.
A laugh or two
may be forgiven, maybe
even shared, but more than that
and he may cry,
or rage, or die.
It is not that he
is ignorant of
his ill fit: not at all.
It is not that he
is ignorant of the joke
in how he trips and falls:
no, not at all.
Rather,
he is beyond all that,
most of the time. Has
learned how to get where
he’s going,
most of the time.
You pointing it out
and smirking or fearing
brings him back
to when he did not know,
to when he fell more often.
And so, he cries,
or rages, or dies
inside. Perhaps
outside, too,
if the moment is right.
They’ve changed the Zodiac.
You’re up for grabs.
Your destiny shifts a bit to the right.
You are just a little less the same.
You have to crab-walk through the star tide.
It’s making you see things a little differently.
It’s like finding out you were adopted.
It’s like being a ventriloquist’s dummy.
All the animals in the sky are crying.
Your houses miss you.
Still, you like the mirror well enough.
The night sky doesn’t show up there.
That’s the same old you there.
That’s no cookie.
This wobbly earth is so disconcerting.
Maybe if you sleep it’ll stop.
Maybe in the morning it will have stopped moving.
Maybe you’ll see a Zodiac discarded on your lawn.
Maybe you’ll pick it up and put it in the garage.
Hide it behind the packed up tent till summer.
Maybe you’ll forget about it till the next time you go camping.
You’ll find it and wonder what it is.
You’ll put it aside for when you get home.
When you’re lying under the stars, you won’t even think of it.
If you ever become
the estranged middle aged son
of still living old people
with middle aged siblings and
a middle aged heart, lungs, and back,
you will one day reach a point
when the shovel
and the snow
will defeat you
right in the middle of a snowstorm.
You will have long abandoned
the over the shoulder toss in favor of
the tip and dump of each shovelful
onto a growing pile of packed trouble
and you’ll have this moment of despair
when you realize there is no place left
to put the next load. You will
have to figure that out soon
but for that moment you’ll be stopped
cold.
Your back will feel broken. Your
chest will be caving and exploding.
You are going to cough
every time you move.
You are going to have a moment
of thinking about how far you are
from your still living old parents
and your middle aged siblings
who are likely standing helpless
in the same storm.
You are going to look up and see
families on the street
digging more vigorously
than you are, see their children laughing,
see their cars beginning to move.
You are going to think of
your aged parents and
your unhealthy siblings
in the same storm, struggling
to dig out but doing it together,
and you are going to be
ashamed.
When you get out of bed,
remind yourself
that anything you can think about
you can sing about.
Anything worth thinking about
is worth singing about.
Seize hold of the faucet handles
in the bathroom, consider
the logical piping, the gravity feed
of waste water, think about its path
from you into the marvel
of what’s under our streets,
and start humming as you load
the toothbrush with toothpaste.
Add now the lyrics about the nature
of up and down, about
the muscles in your arm leveraging
and bulging under the thick blanket
of skin. Rhyme “dermis”
with something, something…
rhyme “dermis” with “firmest”
for now, you can come back to it later.
Choral parts for the process
of putting on pants? Yes.
Antiphonal sections on
the buckling of a belt? Yes.
Why not write a piano line
on the way the T-shirt
molds over your nose as you pull it on?
Compose, solo, harmonize, improvise!
Don’t tell yourself,
“there’s nothing to write about.”
Don’t tell yourself,
“I’m not angry or depresssed
so there are no subjects left in the world.”
Don’t convince yourself
of a need for emotional upheaval
to make your claim to the title of artist.
And don’t fall in love with a person
just to get cracking on your masterpiece:
love the floor,
love the walls, the fly parts
embedded in the plaster.
See the fugue in coffeemaker,
the symphony in litter box,
the string quartet in the way
the coolant runs through your car’s engine.
Anything worth thinking about
is worth singing about.
You know that. You’ve thought
about everything at least once,
and there was music
when you did.
I used to be a little man. Now, I’m fat
as a good pancake.
Used to be I could slip out
of sight in a crowd of three people
in a living room; now,
everyone pretends I’m not there
but they know. They know.
I catch them staring at my excessive gut.
I used to be a quiet man. Now,
I’m noisy as a gas demon in church.
Used to be that when the choir sang,
I opened my mouth and only God could hear;
now, just try and speak over me. God knows
everyone else does. I catch them raising their voices
to drown me out: polite SOBs pretending social deafness
to the blurting heap in the corner.
I used to be a wanna be. Now, I’m what
I thought I might end up as.
Used to be. Now, I’m not. And
everyone’s obviously in agreement about that.
I catch them smiling once my way
and then I’m not even a memory.
What I gained in mass and volume
never developed density.
I should have known.
Jeremy,
says Abner,
I don’t want you to take this the wrong way
but you’re kind of a pain in the ass.
What’s that, Abner?
I said, you’re kind of a pain in the ass.
Eh, we’ve all got trouble
with that at our age, pal.
I think it’s just natural.
No, you’ve been that way for years.
Some of us get a head start,
says Jeremy,
stealing pretzels from Abner’s bowl.
Hey! What’s next —
you want my beer too?
Too late,
says Jeremy, swigging from the mug.
Anyway, I bought this round.
Come to think of it, I bought the round
before it too.
Your turn next time, you deadbeat.
I think I’m tapped out,
says Abner.
See? You’re
catching up to me,
says Jeremy.
The door? One good kick would do it.
The walls? Pretty, flimsy, pretty flimsy.
At home with the feared yet longed for television.
At home with ice in the toilet bowl.
At home with virtual friendships.
At home with cold legs.
At home with foreign junk food.
At home with a creed of tiny movements.
At home with smoke, stale beer, no music.
At home with blank paper and tooth-torn nails.
The windows? How shiny, how brittle.
The floor? The coins don’t roll far when dropped.
At home with uncomfortable sinning.
At home with omission.
At home with small abuse.
At home with no room at the inn.
At home with darker.
At home trying to decide.
At home not deciding.
At home. What could be better than this?
The ceiling? Too far away.
When she says
“come home sooner rather than later”
it means “come at your own convenience
but do not forget
to take mine into account
as you decide
what that is.”
When she says
“do you understand, or do you?”
it means “whether you do or do not
understand, there is no way
you will wriggle out
of behaving as if you do
whether or not you ever do.”
When she says
“I guess she’s pretty enough”
it means “she’s lovely, but
I don’t like
your attraction
to her.”
When she says
“it doesn’t matter to me”
it means
it does.
When she says
“you can do what you like”
it means “what you like
will likely be
the death of all your doing.”
When she says nothing
it is a filibuster.
Dark Matter
Dark Matter 