Energy stored
in a chest
is nothing at first sight,
practically invisible.
Then we call the chest
a “battery.”
It becomes
worthy,
we seek connection.
We are batteries
in series
channeling the energy
held in our chests.
We charge the night.
I wish I was a rocket
opening the next frontier.
Wish I was oil
conquering the ocean.
If I were to become a microchip
I’d be inserted under perfect skin
and ride there tracking the travels
of flawlessness.
Wish I had
superpowers — how could I not
considering the way they’re drawn?
Maybe I could take on
the anima of a tiger
and slink my power
through forests seeking
to change lives.
Longing to have some effect
leads me away from wanting to be
human.
If I could talk to animals
would they tell me
they wanted to be me?
If I could be a rocket
or a computer, if I could
ride the waves as oil,
would I feel my being?
I desire technology
or shamanism
for myself, want to erase
the big old man I am
who can’t make anything happen.
Would I still care
that things were changing
around me and because of me
then?
All in now,
admitting
to being a big bad
boomer with a
bawdy voice,
callout captain,
dwelling dimmer,
electric eel tongue
flung free,
gagging on the gape
of my own mouth…
sharp and flat
applied as necessary…
They didn’t give me
this name for nothing —
bastard.
Bastard!
I didn’t know my father,
my mother never knew me,
so I’ve made myself up as I went along —
music to my own ears,
note on my note,
strung up and burning open or closed,
roar of child fantasy of power in my vein,
you’d better hope I never come into my own
interrupted passions
and longing —
my head rolling off my shoulders,
my body caked with sweat and dirt like fur,
no longer quite human but geographic,
my own country, my own continent,
and pray that you don’t live here when that happens…
for I’m hungry,
I sing my hunger,
and you look like nothing but a meal.
What I most desire
is the meat of a lion
and a fork smeared with hemlock
to spear it with,
to raise courage
and a hint of poison
to my lips
at once.
But with what shall I wash it down?
There is currently
the juice of an artist’s suicide
in my cup.
If I want that certainty,
I am a fool —
and I am no fool.
There is water,
but I don’t want water.
There is beer,
but I don’t want beer.
Perhaps I shall choke down the meal
with no drink at all,
feel it roughen my throat
and sicken me slightly
even as I grow strong
and brave.
Perhaps the lion
died feelingthat way,
the spear that killed him
erupting through his middle
even as he turned to fight
that which had hunted him
even as he hunted,
becoming (even as he ceased)
fully
lion.
I would not call this being awake.
I can see the trash on the curb where I stacked it last night,
the fanblades are coating me in hot but moving air,
I’m hungry, the coffee came out pretty decent for once,
but I’m still not sure anyone would say
this is waking life
for I’m not yet free of last night’s dreams,
or even the ones from the day before;
I still feel the laughter of the circle of flashing men,
hear the vulgar songs, the blade of the guillotine
whistling down along its path of rough wood.
The silver warrior birds and the dolls with cracked faces
may not be visible, but I feel them in the room.
If this is being awake,
conscious
in this world and of this world,
I will return to sleep at once
and face what waits there,
get it truly over with
or learn that world
and live there.
Something must happen soon
to hook me into the present,
or I will not leave the shadows
today.
It’s Memorial Day
and I’m going
to burn meat and eat it.
I know it’s a day
for the war dead.
That’s all I know about it.
I don’t know why
some of them had to die.
Neither did they, not all of them.
There are old men somewhere
who have all the clues.
Some signed the orders
that killed some of the dead.
Some had good reasons, some did not.
Some of the old ones (and some young ones too)
watched their friends die
and I’m sure they understand this
better than I:
sometimes people
have to die. Sometimes
there’s a compelling reason.
Sometimes people fight over
compelling reasons. The ones
who sign the orders get to decide.
I don’t know why
it’s come to be a custom
that we burn meat on this day to recall
all those who’ve died. Don’t know
the compelling reasons for that,
but mine not to question why.
All those dead are dead —
no matter why. The smoke
that lifts from backyards everywhere
might be the right thing to see today
along with fireworks, parades,
uniforms and beer. Maybe it makes sense
to burn meat on such a day.
Maybe it’s fitting. I don’t know,
but at least I’m thinking about it.
People
who want to change the world
but can’t change
a diaper
a flat tire
or their underwear
have my grudging respect
for being unskilled
but still willing to dream
The daily
isn’t going to go away
because we ignore it
but it takes a special sort of monkey
to believe
that enough of them gathered together
will make a masterpiece
After all
it has happened a few times before
and there are always people to pick up
what they’ve let fall
right?
Tiro de cuerda —
Spanish for the perfect tension
of a guitar string,
the strain that lets it
cry.
Over time, tuning and
retuning to that pitch
will weaken the string.
I have more than once
sat in an audience
and seen a player, rock god
or flamenco acolyte, snap one
and keep playing, finding
a new course among those
remaining;
but have never heard
a recording that included
that sound —
why? Are we not most thrilled
when we can hear
death cheated
in any language,
even one we cannot pronounce?
I made beautiful things
and they fell apart
like so much overcooked food,
crumbling into fibers and mush
as I set them before you;
so I made harder, uglier things
and they curdled into leather
and hard wood, making them
impossible to chew,
and you turned away.
Then I made an effort to balance
the beauty and the ugly
and couldn’t get it right.
You looked at me perplexed
and said, “It’s…interesting…”
Now I simply order out
and provide the plates.
You seem happy. You seem
to like this better. It strikes me
that I’m unnecessary now
and that nourishment for you
is impersonal, unrelated
to me and my attempts
to be a master of all you desire.
I am trying to consider this a blessing.
Noah invited no insect pests onto the ark, but they came anyway;
flies and roaches, gnats and ants, covering every square cubit
in a seething, confident carpet of stubborn, resilient brown.
The buffalo, once endangered, now have grown so numerous in spots
that they are leaving Yosemite to roam their old prairies, leading to calls
to thin them out by gunning down some of that mass of stubborn, resilient brown.
In the Gulf of Mexico, frightened men drop chemicals and lower booms
against the torrent pouring from the depths, a torrent they once sought to own.
Everything is futile. They stare in despair at the mass of stubborn, resilient brown.
In Phoenix, water pours from sprinklers into the dry soil
and now the desert is held at bay by lawns of green and golf courses;
but let the effort lapse just a bit and soon will come the stubborn, resilient brown.
South of the city, along a border that men have made, soldiers stand
in camouflage and stare south into that shimmering oven, guarding against
the surging numbers moving north — the always present, stubborn, resilient brown.
People here sit and wait in houses of white and gray for their dread to subside.
They do not dare to say what seems obvious — that what they are most afraid of
is that their pastel world is changing back to a stubborn, resilient brown.
I have the same weak fascination
with the popularity
of movies about vampires,
zombies, superheroes,
aliens, and werewolves
that I do with the sound
of the bell around
a lead sheep’s neck:
it allows me to keep my distance
and still be aware
of the flock’s path;
it is founded in a desire to keep abreast
of where they’re all going
and how they feed;
it is an obsession
to understand why
the rest of the herd follows that bell
without question;
and sadly enough
it is barely interesting enough
to make me stir
unless nothing else is happening
nearby.
It connects me, however tenuously,
with a stream of people
I barely understand
at all.
There’s nothing more unsettling
than the feeling
of disconnection, not even
the potential that all that meat on the hoof
is fodder for some creature
yet unknown to any science I believe in,
something undead or transformed
or extraterrestrial, something
that is a more appropriate
agent of destiny
than the probable lonely doom
I face myself as a scoffer at fads
who yet maintains an atavistic need
to believe as the sheep do
that the path leads somewhere
and that myth
is critical to the journey
no matter how glossy or obvious
it appears.
Bite that ghost.
She’s cold.
Potato Salad Cold.
Popsicle Cold, at least as far
as headache induction goes…
It’s a lie that if you walk toward one
you will just pass through.
A little will cling to your face,
get in your teeth,
it’ll hurt. So you might as well
approach with gusto
and an open mouth —
you can laugh or scream
so long as your choppers
gape wide.
Get the rags on your gums.
Get the threads down in there
tight as floss. She’s cold
and you’re going to regret it
and love it —
memories, flavor,
you can’t stop shivering,
chattering, clutching your chest,
seize your head and call out
what might be her name.
Third draft. Changes made after reading this at a reading last night. Comments still welcome.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A white-soled black sneaker,
a Chuck Taylor knockoff,
on sale for 75 dollars
in a store window.
Along the border
of the sole, white thread
on black, the following words:
PUNK ROCK MEANS FREEDOM
I have a violent urge
to stretch out a finger
and blot out
that “S”
so I will be able to breathe again.
In front of me a blond girl, professionally slim,
decked in designer-wrecked rags,
excitedly tells her similar friends
that she wants to get crunk tonight,
while a Ferrari
as black as a hole
bangs out white streams of bass
for the length
of its slow audacious cruise
down Thayer Street.
HIP HOP MEANS FREEDOM —
and again I subtract the “S”
to get at some truth I can stand,
and the more these metaphors are strained,
the more they seem the same.
~~~~
It was 1975
when in two apartments,
one in Queens,
one in the Bronx,
two boys thinking the same thing
stretched out their fingers
and touched grimy windows,
each one writing those same bleeding words
in the gray condensation
on the pane:
Mean Freedom.
The city was falling apart around them both,
and each had a soundtrack
behind him,
and the boys who wrote those words
did not know each other
but for each their soundtrack
was freedom
and for each the soundtrack
was as mean as it was free.
There was a reason for the rhyme
and a reason for the sharp scratch
of guitar and turntable.
You had to be there, but
soon there was everywhere
and that was that. A snarl
and a linking of arms. A beat
and a charming discord.
A free hand against the slapdown.
~~~~~
Let us proclaim
the mysteries of faith:
To deface a culture
is to create a culture.
Distortion
of a signal
begins with a tight embrace
of its source.
Degradation
of a signal
is a function of distance
from source.
A clean channel
doesn’t exist.
Genre is expectation.
Expectation can be packaged
for indefinite shelf life.
There is a shelf in the store for every expectation.
~~~~~~~
If you are hip hop,
if you are punk rock,
you understand that theft
is your birthright
and whenever you steal from a thief
you are washed free of stain.
A tag is reclamation.
A sample is recommendation.
A headspin is a compass in a maze.
A microphone is always aimed at Jericho.
A crunched chord is a fingerprint.
A sneer is an oath sworn in a kangaroo court.
A downbeat is a sustained objection.
A mohawk is a crown of broken handcuffs
and a microphone is always aimed at Jericho.
Whatever it is
is always defined by volume.
It does not matter
that the sound
will be heard by different people
in different worlds.
It matters
that those worlds shake the same way,
and that someone always complains.
It matters
that it is not heard as music
by musicians.
It matters
that the instruments are dismissed,
the clothing is spat on,
that the culture of the cultured becomes afraid,
that spatter and cut and mix and shred
are chained to the juggernaut
and drag the weight of freedom behind them,
mean freedom inflicting itself with a roar and rumble
of jubilation
at the sound of breaking glass,
and then,
always,
someone buys the shards
and the sound,
sells them at a profit,
and we have to begin again.
~~~~~~~
Mean freedom
understands that freedom will hurt.
That there will be blood flecked skin
when the hand travels through glass
to snatch back what was taken.
Mean freedom doesn’t wait for Independence Day.
Mean freedom lights its fuses any time a match is available.
Mean freedom haunts. It spooks
convention. It curses and spits
because it knows it will be imprisoned again
at some point.
Mean freedom
makes us grit in the cogs, the static
in the signal.
~~~~~~~~~~
The signal
degrades, fades,
a channel
falls like a rusted bridge,
a supercar goes boom,
a college girl gets crunk —
and an old punk
steeped in nostalgia
reimagines a slogan.
An embrace tightens and distorts
both holder and what is held.
Long ago I fell into arms
that bent me tight.
I burned holes in my jeans at 18.
I burned my hand with a cigarette at 23
then quit smoking for 25 years
only to begin again
on the street tonight,
standing by the store window,
bathed in the sounds of war,
because I am reminded that every riot
starts with the sound of breaking glass
and ends in fire.
I smash the window,
toss the sneaker at the Ferrari,
run like hell itself is after me.
God, how I have missed this.
~~~~~~
Somewhere back in 1975,
those boys
gathered the fingers they had just used
to write on those dirty windows
back into their fists.
They punched out the glass
and in the trickling blood they felt
at last
the cool sting of the real.
Freedom
rocked from side to side,
shouting as it
prepared a counterpunch:
That’s a good start,
but if you come through that window after me,
I will not let you pass any more walls
without a war.
Bring it on,
responded the bleeding boys,
when we scream for freedom,
we mean freedom.
Is that really your name?
Is this really your song?
And now, thirty five years later,
one more question:
How much is this gonna cost?
The best thing about a hot day in spring
is driving at night with the window down
and feeling cold. Humid air rushing over
a bare arm hanging over the outside
of the door. Taking the long way home
to keep it going. Hoping the house
will have cooled by the time you get there.
The best thing about not owning a gun
is thinking about owning one. Thinking
about understanding the nature of safety
and risk without having to practice
their balance. Fantasy of capture
and defense and an easy Wild West answer
to the dread of getting out of the car
and walking to your door unbothered
by shadows waiting to do you harm.
The best thing about a key is how it promises
that you will be able to get in and out
with little trouble. The plain and singular
permission that is granted to you and only you
to come and go as needed or desired, to occupy
and refashion your own space as your castle
or womb or tomb, and only you will live there
and allow entrance or egress at your whim.
The best thing about the Holy Grail
is the Knights Templar. The legend of
protectorate and secrecy, possible heresy
in the face of a disaster lurking outside
their castles and strongholds. The romance
of a single artifact that holds salvation,
a climate that holds true to a promise
of eventual peace. The need for war
in service to that. The myth of something
precious that solves the world.
Giving up the integrity of your body
because you would not give up the integrity
of your poem,
trader,
seems fair to me
who has not been offered that barter,
ever. I do not know
if I would have felt the same
had I been in your shoes —
but then,
I am not sure there was ever an offer
at all. Perhaps it was simply
an equation: a poem
equalled death. No chance
at bargaining. No variable
rate of exchange…
I will try and spend my poems
as if I would have
done the same.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-lundberg/writer-killed-over-a-poem_b_576817.html
Dark Matter 