Before you cut
that wrecked and twisted branch
free from the tree, note
that while
something made it
ugly, something also kept it able
to bear fruit:
maybe the same thing,
something we can’t know
without allowing the branch
to remain?
Last week I mailed a letter to my alien abductors
casually mentioning that it had been a while
and if they weren’t doing anything
I had a free weekend coming up.
I received a cordial but firm note today
that simply read, “We’ve learned all we can
from you, and do not wish to pursue
further investigations. Best of luck, Oort.”
I tore it up and burned it in an ashtray.
After all the trouble I went through
to get that address, you’d think I’d deserve more
than a form letter with an auto-signature.
Unmerciful evening:
early morning wake up needed tomorrow
for a work day
with little promise to it —
and yet, unable to sleep.
Three cigarettes left,
the wet hiss
of hard rain on warm asphalt
discouraging any desire to go out
for a fresh pack.
Shit on TV, shit on the radio,
and bored with all the music
in the house.
Words themselves
bore and bore again.
So, decision time:
turn in to toss for a hundred hours,
or bore on to see if something can happen,
to strive to find mercy
where none appears to be?
It’s absurd,
how proud I am
of having no friends
who use “gay”
as a perjorative,
as if
such careful speech
among careful friends
is truly evidence
of care, when
I consider
how quick I am
to provide a disclaimer
regarding my own
orientation
during my own passionate defenses
of equality.
Outside in the street
the dense chunk
of a slammed door.
A hard, confident summons:
“Hey pendejo –”
followed by
two men speaking
I can’t really hear. Then,
the first voice again —
“you never know.
When it comes,
it comes.”
I turn off the light.
When it comes,
it comes. I live that way too,
waiting for it.
But outside —
nothing more. Whenever it comes,
it seems,
won’t be
tonight.
It’s Saturday
at 12:30 AM
in Gilrein’s Steak House and Blues Club
on the corner of Main and Piedmont
in Worcester, Massachusetts:
no showcase club, no fancy fake joint
for polished stars to shine in. It’s where you go
if you feel your blues in your old bones. A place where
the sidemen who kept Chicago steady come
to play for people who know their names
without looking them up.
Hubert Sumlin’s been drunk here more than once,
and more than once the doorman’s cleared a path
for Pinetop Perkins’ ladies
as they queened their way in
to hear Daddy roll those elegant ivories home.
Big names come through that door unannounced after hours
from posher places where the blues are just a way for fancy folks
to slum a little
with something they will never fully understand,
come here for the chance to play their old stuff
with their old friends
in an old, old club.
Tonight, the Blue Dogs are on stage to say farewell.
It’s 1:00
and last call is half an hour away
when Danny steps to the mike.
Danny is
35 years old,
been a legend in this town
since he was 14.
Makes a guitar pray.
Makes you pray along.
The Blue Dogs
are his latest band
have a rabid
following
but Danny
is calling them quits tonight
and heading off to Nashville
to play sessions.
He’s headed for the big time
and we don’t know when we’ll see him
this cheap or this close
again.
We know what’s coming.
Danny doesn’t sing much
but there’s one song he’s done
in every band he’s been in
since he was a kid
and no one here is ready to say good bye until
we hear him sing it one last time.
Dobie Gray, in 1973,
had a hit with one perfect slice
of country soul tinged blue.
Danny long ago
made it his own.
If you took a poll
half the folks here tonight
would likely say he wrote it.
The drummer clicks two sticks together
into the liquid opening
of keyboards laced up tight
to Danny’s shimmering chords.
The bass player lays down a
walking line that’s more like a lope
while the crowd moves in
and the song begins:
Day after day I’m more confused
And I look for the light
Through the pouring rain.
You know that’s a game that I hate to lose
And I’m feelin’ the strain, ain’t it a shame...
The fat man wheezing in the corner
through his cancer
starts rethinking his plan to die on purpose
when he gets home.
Beginning to think that I’m wasting time
I don’t understand the things I do
The world outside looks so unkind.
And I’m counting on you, to carry me through.
The woman with the missing tooth
is imagining a bird of prey
that will scar her husband
when she gets home.
And when my mind is free
You know a melody can move me
And when I’m feelin’ blue
The guitar’s coming through to soothe me
A couple forms
in the shadow of the song’s bridge
and tries to decide where they will go
when they go home.
Thanks for the joy that you’ve given me
I want you to know I believe in your song
Rhythm and rhyme and harmony
You help me along, making me strong.
Danny backs away from the mike for the end,
stretches out in the coda, line after line
of startling decisions, choices made tonight
that won’t last longer than it took to make them.
He’s saying farewell to what he knows,
he’s just another listener listening to himself,
he’s just another reason to keep the night rolling
when Gilrein’s closes its doors twenty minutes from now,
building another story on a castle full of stories,
and when he leaves it behind tonight,
it’s not like he he’ll never come home…
but he knows
he’ll never really come home.
What happened in Gilrein’s
is nothing anyone can describe
without a blue note.
All anyone can ever say is
tomorrow night,
next time,
good night,
let’s go baby,
see ya,
good night…
Oh, give me the beat, boys, and free my soul
I want to get lost in your rock and roll
And drift away…
sticky as beloved cat
on a nubby couch
this good day won’t let me go
but since I like stroking it
I don’t mind
and will let it cling to me
until I fall asleep
to its purring
Science shows
on TV
often broadcast
film of bacteria
reproducing, one little rod
breaking into two, two into four,
and so on until the whole screen
boils with a multitude.
Lately, my mind’s
like that.
A mess of damage,
sinister charges rampant
on a shattered shield,
a damned germ orgy
of bills and issues,
stress and fearsome possibilities
and always, always,
an end
by my own hand
in plain and tempting view.
How does one cope
with that? One sets it
to running in reverse:
billions of hot words
fusing and reducing
into a few, then one:
enough.
Enough,
an exacting
answer to turmoil,
better than either
take me or
make it stop, neither surrender
nor supplication for outside help;
instead,
acknowledgment, followed by
a choice to say
it is finished.
I say it deliberately
though I am full of fever
and prone to impulse,
crushing down
the fatal stirring
as if it were a pill under my tongue:
enough.
If someone were to make a film
of how sick this spirit can become
and how I move it
from death to health,
they’d see
simple arithmetic at work:
subtraction of rationale
followed by subtraction of guilt and self-hatred
until all that’s left is
enough.
Triumph over black mood,
enough.
Regulation of ill-ease,
enough.
Enough.
Calm storm, trigger peace.
Enough.
When they make the film
about how I have survived
my self,
it will be a still frame
centered on one small cell
holding something
waiting to disappear
in two syllables as soft as a gust
of spring:
enough.
On my street we all avoid
getting pulled into a conversation
with the guy
who lives on the second floor
of the pale yellow triple-decker.
If there is an iris
in the front yard, he’ll mention it
and will have taken the time to look up
which variety it belongs to. You will know
if it is bearded or Siberian
almost as soon as he does. He’ll follow that
with a report on all the tangents he took
on the way to that information.
You will soon be as bored as he apparently is.
I suspect that he talks so much
because not to speak
would leave him alone with his thoughts
and if you’ve listened to him at all,
you can understand how scared he should be
for having them.
He says he would like to have an invisible hand
in one of history’s defining moments
and be the only one who knows of it.
He would like to go to China
and buy a farm child to water his garden
so that he could watch her
and then tearfully describe to her
how carefully she moves among the plants
and then he would take her home
and not ask for his money back.
He believes it would be worth it to see
how baffled they all would be.
He would consider it
an improbable adventure which evolved
strictly for his own pleasure.
Someday she’d come back to him as a famous journalist
and tell him her eye for detail
and her robust self-esteem
were all due to him
and then she would sit with him for days
and capture his story
for her book on great men she had known.
But instead he looks out the open window
down at the ragged yard
and waits for the neighbors to come by
so he can speculate out loud about the hens and chickens
growing in the wall, how they got there, he never planted them,
must have been the previous tenant, did you know them,
what were they like,
his voice rising in volume and pitch
as we back away claiming
we are late for an errand, late for work,
anything we can think of
to get away from him,
the one we call the garden guy,
whose name we do not care to know.
When I start to believe that love is not enough
to steady my rickety progress through the world,
I recall how often I’ve been up from dawn
to well past midnight
waiting for her to come home.
Exhaustion can’t keep me
from needing to see her
the minute the door opens, even if only
for a moment. I know
that one glimpse will be enough
to settle me into my pillow
and let me rest for a while.
If you want
things to change,
learn to call them by names
other than exploitation and oppression.
Get yourself far away
from the slogans on TV
and radio, from your books and your blogs.
Go to work
in a factory
making beige mayonnaise
in vats alongside brown people
who don’t care if they never touch the stuff again
because they know too much
about how it’s made, but they still
have picnics and if the kid wants mayo,
the kid gets mayo.
Sweat your ass off in a card room,
combing raw wool into cloud fiber rolls
awaiting spinning and warping into tough cloth.
Notice how every card room worker is a shirtless father
actually looking forward to pushing through 100-degree overtime heat
in the sweaty bowels of the ancient mill,
and how every spinner toiling upstairs from them
is a tired mother who may be stained in stink
and dust but who carefully applies makeup
before work and touches it up at every break.
Go live on a cubicle farm
and discover that the analysts and auditors
don’t all wish they were artists
while they’re mashing the keys of their computers
and that some of them even enjoy it, or at the very least
they enjoy what the effort brings them.
On the street there are some people
who chose that rootless life over
some other hell, and others who admittedly
would be anywhere else if they could
but believe this is all only temporary
until they find a foothold somewhere
that’ll get them back into the grind you deplore.
Many of them fought for the country
that put them out there, but they’ll still
fight you to the death
if you say a word against it.
No, you think, this isn’t right,
it’s not the way it’s supposed to be —
but it is. It’s not that the shackles don’t exist
and that they don’t hurt. But for so many
a job’s a job and a call to duty is all it takes
to extract a salute. Sometimes, a means to an end
is just that, and “the end justifies the means”
is for some not a horrid phrase to justify evil,
it’s just the way things are
and have always been
and are always likely to be.
Tell yourself whatever you want
about how it’s all a big scam
but don’t you dare call them “stupid”
when they’re the ones who have to figure out
a way to make it all work
while you brood over the big, big words.
In love this morning
with the sounds
of a child crying,
adults good-naturedly
trying to calm it down,
and all this set amid
the steady gutter drips and asphalt hiss
of a daybreak summer rain…
a melody and a poem
to start my day,
and I’m not even out of bed.
Sunshine on
mental illness
is a good thing mostly.
But it’s just like rain.
Too much
can stimulate a train of mood
that runs off the track
and kills what’s in the way.
Too little and it withers.
How much good
is enough? You can’t
know. That is the problem
with being this kind of sick.
There’s no clear path from diagnosis
to cure. It’s not like tending a garden.
No instructions for this much shade,
this much sun, this much water,
what food and how much to feed.
What triggers blight
is unpredictable except in broad terms.
Don’t push it, whatever it is,
is all you can tell yourself. And
how far is too far? Only way to know
is to watch for failure. Success
isn’t measured
in bloom or fruit
but by dying in a reasonable season
for dying.
A sigh of grieved relief
is the only validation that matters
and seeing yourself mulched
when all is done is all you can hope for.
It’s enough to know you’ve not poisoned the ground.
A giant heart, perhaps a cow’s,
soaking in brine
on the window sill.
(It’s always better not to ask.)
Immense cat
apparently sleeping on the counter
with a cutting board and cleaver
next to him. (It probably means nothing,
but why chance it?)
His sudden move to block
access to the fridge when you ask
if there’s anything cold to drink.
(Oh, he’s just very private, or perhaps
he rarely cleans it?)
His hands twisting in his lap
the whole time you’re speaking with him,
his knee a piledriver ramming the desk.
(Not used to people staying more than a minute,
maybe? Too self conscious about that smell?)
That smell…
(but who doesn’t have something they are
embarrassed about?)
Such a quiet man usually, nice to all,
keeps to himself. (His voice, so eager
one moment, so guarded the next,
and always the shaking leg…)
You say goodbye — neighbor talking
to neighbor. But you’re filing away details
you’ll never mention until
the news trucks park in front of the house.
(If they ever do…which, of course, you highly doubt
will happen. Why would it?)
To build a case
against insomnia
so as to enjoin it from
canceling you out
you may purchase drugs or
forget how it feels to be
awake long enough that
you trick yourself into
sleeping and thus render it
harmless. You will have to do this
often. Relentless and vigorous
defense is required.
To choose a tattoo
that will not be an
embarrassment shortly after
its application you may need
to look at how it feels to lack
a thing you’ve never had. It is
often difficult to imagine
how a patch of your hide could be
improved so deftly that such a lack
could be erased. Impulsive tattoos
may be representative of illusory
absence felt strongly but only for the time
it takes to nod your head at a stencil.
Their disappearance would reinforce
other moments of loss you’ve suffered
and it is therefore usually advisable to keep them.
To reject a parent
is to demonstrate a certain respect
for their historic presence or absence.
It is usually easier to maintain some contact
even if only on high holidays
so restraining yourself
from all touch
and declaring any bridging
of the distance between you unsafe
is a way to honor the place they have made in your
experience even when that place is a hole or a wound.
To own a life you have been given
is a rigorous responsibility
that demands a certain acceptance of folly
and exceptional flexibility in the areas
of communication and self-care. What may seem
on the surface to be various forms of harm
may in fact be completely logical
if not always comfortable adaptations
to facts and environmental factors.
You will choose often.
You may never choose wisely or consciously
but you will choose.
Dark Matter 