Tag Archives: poems

October 2, 2009

Operation Hermit Crab

By Tony Brown

You can’t trust
that you truly know anything
when you only know what others tell you
and your senses just bring you particles
to be rearranged and interpreted
based on what others have told you.

So you strip it all away
and go sit on a beach
in a different stolen shell,
but with no pretense this time.
Everyone knows the story
of how you’ll just discard this one
once you’ve outgrown it
and you’ll find another one
and you’ll keep repeating the cycle
until you’re consumed
or stepped on
or broken.  There’s no such thing
as a death by anything other
than natural causes in this life.

If you’re lucky
you’ll get picked up
and tossed in a case
and provided with painted shells
while people chuckle at the googly eyes
and the stripes you’ve been provided.
It may look sad from out there
beyond the glass,

but you, you sneaky little machine
of outward deceit and self-awareness,
you’re delighted to be amusing them
without having to pretend
that’s what you really are at heart.

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October 1, 2009

Your Stuff

By Tony Brown

you’ve embedded
tiny angels
within the keepsakes
you carry everywhere

to inhabit wallet
key chain
and jewelry

peace
through possession

called out to cheer you
with a touch of your fingers

but you weary of it
at night
lie naked in bed
lay your stuff aside
and sleep in poverty
without your usual fear

but if you rise
after midnight
disturbed by
something

it may be those angels
cutting loose
noisy and free

the manacles
that have bound them to your safety
have been unlocked
by your lack of attention

since you’re already up
you might as well try
to stay awake
without having your stuff around
to protect you

see if you can recapture
the peace you had
when you had nothing
in your sleep
and your dreams

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October 1, 2009

Noise In The Kitchen

By Tony Brown

only happens when I’m not looking

sounds oddly comforting,
as if some beloved pet was simply
chewing on a favorite toy

but all the pets are accounted for
when it happens again

something going about its business
with no concern for me

construction in the street can’t explain it
I’ve checked for mice and there’s no sign of them
and I know how the house settles — this
is different

and again, nothing to be seen in there
when I try to sneak up on it

so
what could be so calm
and thoughtful as to live beside me
without my being aware of it
having approved it
or having brought it here

it’s going to drive me crazy
until I know

so I’ll wait
do nothing
remain still
all day if necessary
until I have learned the truth

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September 30, 2009

I Know What I Know

By Tony Brown

A country fair in rural Connecticut
two weeks ago
Saturday night

There’s a kid
as crew cut and blonde as a farmer stereotype
wearing a side tipped black on black Yankees cap
and this T-shirt that says in white on black

TODAY I DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TO USE MY AK
I GOT TO SAY IT WAS A GOOD DAY

I know where that came from

I pride myself on trying to know
things my friends don’t know
It’s a hipster thing and knowing that line
qualifies me as a hipster
among my graying pals
and like a good hipster I snicker to myself

What could this hick
still wet behind his exposed ears
know about something like that
out here in the fresh air
next to the cider donut stand
under the fireworks in the woods?

I don’t know where that’s coming from

Then tonight
on a late night drive home
from Providence
I hit the preset on the car radio
and pick up a new station
“BSR in the 401 — 88.1
Hitz From Da Left”

Now I know what I know
but I don’t know anything I’m hearing

Here’s a shoutout to “my boys
on lockdown tonight in the ACI”
and “Jacqui sending this out to Rab-dog
wherever he is tonight”

I think I know this piano sample
Think it’s from Curtis Mayfield
but it’s not long enough for me to be certain
And the beats that travel with it
make it hard to hear the past for the present
so I don’t know if I know

Then the announcer cuts in with
“Who’s making rhymes like this these days?

a few seconds go by before he says

“…that’s right — no one’s
making rhymes like this, son
This is twenty years old”

and the words are similar
to something I know
but far enough away to be strange
to ears that think they’ve heard everything
there is to know

(By the way, if you’re sitting there waiting for me
to bust out in some lame replica
of the rhymes I heard
waiting with incipient glee for my failure
may I suggest
you kiss my middle aged
fat round ass

because I know what I know
and I know when I’m licked
and I’m licked so hard here
I’m still wet behind the ears)

I’ve never heard this stuff before

and the tracks roll on
like breathing that won’t stop
and I’m trying to breathe like this
but I can’t

I’ve got the window down
with this unknown old school turned up loud
listening
to the wind rush by
until the signal breaks down to static
two miles out of Providence
still thirty miles from Connecticut

I hit another button
and find a few more rhymes
a little farther on
I recognize this stuff
and can almost follow the words
but this time when Ice Cube drops
I shut the hell up

because I know what I don’t know
and what I know now is that I know shit
except it seems that hip hop’s not something
to be found in the blood
but in the air

and maybe that kid back home
with the buzz cut and the shirt down to his knees
knows something I don’t
or maybe he doesn’t
but I know I don’t know

I know now
what I know
isn’t enough

and because of that
I got to say

today was a good day

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September 29, 2009

Glassfist

By Tony Brown

Glassfist,

the weirdest superhero
of all time,

broke his hands
on another villain’s face,

leaving the enemy shredded and wailing
and himself
crippled
yet again.

Back at Headquarters,
his snickering friends
in their capes and masks
watched
as he thrust his hands into the Superkiln
and refashioned them,
blowing shape back into each finger,
gloving them after they’d cooled.

“What, exactly, is the advantage
of this particular attribute?”
they asked him.  “You’re only good
for two shattering blows in any battle
and then we’ve got to save
your sorry ass.”

He smiled, didn’t answer,
but later in his lair
he pulled off the gloves
and his mask and stared into his palms —

so clean,
no trace of blood anywhere,
and his own honest face
staring back without needing
to blink back tears.

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September 28, 2009

Remembering What Four Stones Said

By Tony Brown

You came to the bank of the stream
and saw them spread out
through the torrent before you.

The first,
white as a fish belly
and small, so small,
said that the Way
has no sense to it, but
leads forward in any case.

The second,
black as wood long submerged,
slick as a suspect, said that
if you could risk believing
that it offers solid footing,
you would find yourself halfway there…

and the third, rusty
streaked, seated high and dry,
solitary and distant,
mumbled a secret worth hearing,
perhaps only minimally intelligible,
but still invariable and true.

The fourth stone
lay below the surface.
It was no more than a shadow
and a threat of tumbling, of immersion.
It urged and coaxed: venture,
leap, steady as you go.

That far bank was high and green
and paths were visible under the pines,
leading up toward
the sun on the high meadow,
the moon on the high meadow:
you fell in love with it at once,
a perfect place for dancing
with wet feet
and knees
still trembling from the journey.

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September 24, 2009

Notice to site watchers…

By Tony Brown

Taking a short break from posting poems here.  Couple of weeks tops…

Good chance to go back over the six years’ worth of work in the back pages, though.

T

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September 23, 2009

Gun Song

By Tony Brown

World in peril
under the lead
night sky: we stare at

the nose of a bullet
aimed up
and viewed from within  —

each of us one grain of powder
ready to ignite
and push it toward its target —

each of us wondering
what blow will create
the moment of ignition —

and how can we know
which of us will be the first
to set it all off?

We were created
to vanish
in that moment of propulsion.

Everything we do
before that
is just waiting:

potential in a chamber,
knowing what will crumple and fall
when The Day comes.

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September 22, 2009

The Remarkable

By Tony Brown

In the middle of
the infield
during a stock-car race,

he lifts his camera
from the roaring before him
and snaps several shots

of barbed wire
atop a chain-link fence
with the blue sky behind it.

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September 22, 2009

Pronouncing Worcester

By Tony Brown

Yeah,

it’s spelled weird

You pronounce it
“Wistah”

Easier to say

with a cigarette in your mouth
and a chip on your shoulder

Give it the strongest grit you can offer
in the face of the unrelenting
derision

Remember

the “Wist”
is for
wistfulness

a wish for it to be
something else

the “Ah” is for
“Ah,
whatever…
it is what it is”

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September 17, 2009

The Original Question

By Tony Brown

Is there any way
to begin a sentence
that doesn’t immediately
predestine its ending?

I keep talking
in hope of breaking through
to one.  It’s not working,
and it’s not easy.

If you speak often,
you’ll repeat yourself
often.  If you act often,
you’ll act and react. 

Whatever chance I have
to say or do something original
before I stop speaking or doing
is rapidly vanishing into the haze

of things I’ve said or done before
that hangs around my head
and keeps me from seeing more
than what I know I have done.

Silence, of course, is the answer
to the original question…

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September 14, 2009

Newport Beach, California

By Tony Brown

In the embrace
of the best Scotch
I’ve ever had
in the Four Seasons Hotel
in Newport Beach, California;

a perfect measure drawn neat
into a brandy snifter.
One hundred seventy five dollars a glass,
purchased on a rich man’s dime.

I catch the crawl
on the muted lounge TV
telling me that Kurt Cobain
has died.

“What the hell did he have
to be depressed about?”
says one of my companions,
and I take a swig, not a sip,
and mumble,

“You wouldn’t understand…”

I notice the rich man
turning his eyes down,
looking into the gold
rapidly disappearing
from his own glass.

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September 14, 2009

This Ship

By Tony Brown

Considering
the vagaries of life
and time, we should discuss
what will happen if
we do not see each other
again,

for this ship we’re on
is vast and leaking,
and a boatload of mystery
it is, with a cargo of loose ends
not likely to be tied up
while we roam rootless
around the Earth.

I can say on my part
that I never meant
to deliver the first wound
and am sure each of you felt the same,
it was never in our nature,
I know that now; we hurt each other
through unsteady footing
as we rocked and fought storms
and lost sight of the horizon,
I know that now.

There are words each of us meant to say
which remained unsaid
and things we did say
that we left mostly undefined,
so let us
admit without judgment
that we did not understand
each other well enough to be clear
of our mutual necessities for the voyage;
let it pass that all those things were unclear
and will remain so,
let us accept that this is how we are
and who we are,

for we were put aboard
with blank charts,
no anchor, too little sail,
no engine worth the mention.
No need for such power
when there’s no course before us;
we were put here not to arrive,
but to journey.

If we do not see each other again
in this life or any other, let’s agree
to each take the time,
whenever we can,
to imagine us all standing at the rail
confused but delighted at the endless,
deathless sea before us
with no need to speak of desperation
for once.  Imagine us all
in sunset, in sunrise, under a laughing moon.
Imagine a shared moment
where it didn’t need to make sense
that there was no sense to the voyage.

Imagine that moment
is this moment.

What is there to say but:

isn’t this
a grand, daft,
sacred sea we’re on?

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September 13, 2009

NYC alert:

By Tony Brown

Details in the Show Schedule accessible at the top of the page, but here’s the story in a nutshell of a reading I’ll be participating in on November 3rd in NYC.  Show up!!!

Who: “November 3rd Club” editors Victor D. Infante and Tara Betts host a night of poetry and politics featuring Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Corrina Bain, Tony Brown, Jane Cassady, Lea Deschenes, Amy Holman, Emily Kagan Trenchard, Geoff Kagan Trenchard, Erika Lutzner, Jon Sands, Jade Sylvan, Edwin Wilson Rivera, Darren Taffinder and Derek JG Williams.

When, and when should I get there: the reading is at 10 p.m. Tuesday, November 3rd, following the Urbana Poetry Slam.  (And if you’re inclined, Victor and Lea are co-featuring at the Urbana Slam beforehand, so feel free to come early!)

Where: The Bowery Poetry Club,308 Bowery (Between Houston and Bleecker), Manhattan.F train to 2nd Ave, 6 to Bleecker; mail@bowerypoetry.com, (212) 614-050.

The November 3rd Club is available at:

http://www.november3rdclub.com/

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September 13, 2009

The Poet Reflects On The Nature Of His Body of Work

By Tony Brown

Dug a hole
with my face

Dug it wide but not deep
Then threw my face into a stream

Pulled it out sputtering
“damn, that’s cold”

to no one in particular
Scared a young couple on the bank half to death

They were so in love
I wanted to buy them a house

but of course I’d been digging
and still looked a sight so they screwed

I’d snotted myself solid
with dirt

and now it was mud
and I couldn’t breathe

Not sure what the hole was for
Not big enough for me

Maybe a dog-friend
familiar and lifelong dear

Maybe a bundle
made for concealment now

and discovery after I’m gone
A time capsule full of cryptic souvenirs

Maybe that young couple
will come back someday and find it

a pit of bones
or postcards from lost names

Maybe it’ll be a foundation
they’ll build that house on

and maybe one day the house will be haunted
and they’ll finally put two and two together

and one of them will say
“Remember that guy on the bank

who was soaking wet
muttering something

about digging a hole with only his face?
Remember how cold he said he was?

I can feel the chill now
Maybe we shouldn’t have built here

Maybe it wasn’t a sign
and now we’ve learned something

about making a home
on a crazy man’s strain

and we ought to move”
And they move

to a different river bank
less full of self-destruction and wasted efforts

and this saga of my folly will end there
leaving me to shake my head

in a good plain grave
someone else dug for me

still trying to clear my nose of dirt
while thinking about how little I really knew

of love and work
that time I shoved my face into the ground

and started to excavate
the shallow site of my future memorial

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