I posted this yesterday both here and on Gotpoetry, and got some interesting responses I’ve been mulling over.

The commenters over at GP couldn’t get it — that the poem is designed to speak to anyone who has ever found themselves agonizing over how much volition they have actually had in the decisions they’ve made, but that the initial inspiration was a meditation on the all too human terror and anguish that Jesus must have felt the night before the Crucifixion. People just didn’t go there, and asked about whether the title was a reference to the three day waiting period after signing a contract on Monday, had I been married on a Thursday, etc.

Then, I read it last night at The Spot during the open before tombstonetcs did his first feature ever (yay, Matt!) and asked for people to speculate on the inspiration for it, and got immediate validation from several poets that it wasn’t that obscure a subject — that the inspiration for the poem was the Passion, and that the title alone started to give it away.

Interesting how different audiences react. Didn’t make me want to change the poem at all, but I was struck by the struggle some people had with it. One thing I considered is that a lot of the GP responses seemed to focus on what I’ll call the “poetry as a hobby/therapy” mindset — that every poem is a direct comment on a specific personal experience, and writing outside of that box is hard to fathom. It’s common at GP where a lot of the poets aren’t doing it (poetry) as consistently or regularly as I do.

Any other thoughts? I don’t think you need to know the backstory to get something from the poem — in fact, that was my intent when I wrote it — but I think it throws an interesting light on it once you do. But am I just being overly confident that you CAN get the backstory from the poem as easily as I think you can? (Obviously, some did, so I know it’s not impossible.)

(By the way — I’m not a Christian at all, so don’t think I’m trying to make some theological point here…a good story is just a good story, and this one’s in so many people’s collective unconscious that I figured it was worth exploring.)

Anyway, here’s the poem again…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thursday

a day comes when
you say it.

you say
“i will.”

you have already said
“what if.”
you have said it
more than once.

this is no longer
the argument
ahead of the contract.
this is the contract,
last words,
finger flung high, grand
illusion shrinking
as you say it
because with those words
the next tasks become
tiny: all the things
you have to do now
granulate and stick
in your gears and you begin
to pick them out so the machine
can begin its inexorable
grind.

so, you do them. you collect
tools. you measure and find
wanting. you add and subtract.
you flip the lenders’ tables.
you open the black door to the black room
and you do not turn away.

as you count and plan, wiping
blood and grit from under your nails,
you ask yourself — dammit,
what if your words did not
place this sand in these works.
and it was there waiting?
what if the will you agreed to follow
wasn’t yours?

who set these things
to work? who made the
struggle? was it truly
your words
that made this happen, or
was it all ready to go
and simply waiting for you
to begin?
wasn’t it a previous contractor who said
the word would be made flesh?

you have recalled this too late.

you find yourself
outside,
staring steadily at the flesh of you
taking another’s words to heart.

now that the contract has been sealed,
even if you could take the words back
you’d still be bound by them. they
were never yours to do with
as you wanted. wanting
has nothing
to do with this.

most common
among our
shared dreams
is redemption,
one shot at a do-over.

some imagine
it will come through magic,
seeking the hand raised above the hat
where the rabbit waits
for spring and applause.

some refuse to admit it,
but they expect to spy it first
coming hard on the heels of torture.
(too much time spent staring at a cross
can do that.)

some hunt for it
in others,
make their plays for its attention
from a stage or a bed,
reject themselves by projection.

reading, writing, speaking out.
washing dirty laundry in public, or
endlessly chanting sins in private for a fee.
dancing on coals, peering into stones,
swallowing sharp-crusted bread for hunger’s sake;

longing for enough when nothing can be enough.
the past has passed. our arms,
our hands, our mouths will all stop bleeding
eventually, through clot or scar,
or through our lives leading us

to the only honest chance we have:
ashes and dust, reforming into the next body
that will struggle as we have again,
fantasizing that it is
itself it struggles for.

think of that. hear it in yourself:
a call to tenderness.
imagine your self again, and do the simple
purification of not choosing
your own legacy. it will come in its own time.

was a lot of fun. Good food and lots of good poetry and prose on the subject of food.

I read “A Lemon” by Pablo Neruda, and a nasty and lovely little poem about bad poetry (comparing it to shit after a big meal of steamed rice and meat) by the nineteenth/early twentieth century Vietnamese poet Tran Te Xuong. I’ve been reading a lot of older world poetry lately just for kicks.

I also wrote this for the evening — just a little ditty; accompanied it with some guitar. It’s been a LONG time since I wrote something light and relentlessly positive and I wasn’t sure I could do it. I may do more with this at some point, but for now this is enough.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Angel Food

the random backfire
one block away
means nothing for once

and the neighbor’s reggaeton
ripping a hole in saturday afternoon
means even less

when there’s angel food cake
on the coffee table
for yolanda’s birthday

daddy’s home for once
instead of serving someone else’s chicken
to someone else’s guests

mama’s not looking as tired
as she usually does
after a week on the Wendy’s register

the whole family’s here
bearing hot dishes and foil pans
full of what they’ve made for each other

someone drops some mac and cheese
in a corner
the dog gets to work on the pile

while everyone laughs and yolanda claps
her smile’s more delicious than usual
with that smidge of frosting on her chin

yolanda has a love for angels
and seven years worth of joy bubbles up today
with all these angels bearing heaping trays

of cookies and wings and old recipes
they just call “grandma’s favorite”
there’s white bread and stewed tomatoes

but yolanda’s got no business there
when there’s sweet sugar frosting
clinging to the white crumbs on her plate

outside this room
there may be people addicted to devil’s food
and the darkness on their lips may be rich enough

but in here yolanda’s having a birthday
with her yellow dress sweetened by more
than the smear of angel food that her mother

rushes to clean away before that dog
starts licking it off her
(even though

yolanda
would probably
beat him to it if she let her)

and when she’s done
she turns to her sister
and says

I’ll never taste
an angel food cake again
without thinking of yolanda

and the beating of wings
covers
the break in her voice

I love the way dead things
are revealed sodden on the lawn
once the mud arrives.

I love how idiotic
the first flowers look
when mocked by late snow.

I love having
the first bees
sting me,

I love the way they die
in the aftermath of battle
and not in the heat of it.

Mostly, I love
the way green
becomes the new white,

how it’s still
just a blanket
over rot.

What do you think about
when you’re facing the near-empty parking lot
at the end of a long day?

Me,
I head for my car trying to imagine
a workless existence, days spent
on artless fantasy, nights wasted on
television and cheap ice cream.

Everyone I know
wants to share their vision of this: lottery
segues to inheritance merges with reality show rewards
and business schemes. At the end of the day, after
all the lunchroom blather, we go home and keep thinking
about the report still looming undone, the meeting politics,
the kids who don’t want to pay their dues
(who seem to get away with that)
and the God-damned boss who does exactly what we do
(but gets more out of it, we think).

What do you do with your hope?

Me,
I push it down to bubble within me, making
thin soup of my blood and talent. I sleep
badly, self-important in the small hours.

Occasionally,
I toil over a single word and tuck it away in the desk
I keep at home
in the spare room
next to the dusty guitar,
the room I call “my office” to make it easier to pretend
that daylight’s cubicle is secondary to the night’s work
I spend so little time on.

What is the nature of heaven?

Me,
I’ve started to think it’s a place much like this one:
a globe with a molten core speeding around the sun.
The same physics apply, the same gravity
holds you. The only difference is in
the level of will needed to rise from your place:
in heaven your feet go where you want them to go,
even if where you’re headed is miles above the ground.

I can imagine that it never rains in heaven.
At the end of the day there’s a shuttle to your car,
and if you decide to stay home tomorrow
no one’s going to call you
to find out where your key is
or how far along you are
on that report. You’re in love with your boss, you’re still one
of the scrubbed young things moving up in the world,
plenty of money, plenty of time.
Your dreams become so compact they smolder
like a coal seam fire, and you’re warm enough at last.

Think about that often enough
and you will barely mind
the long walk to your car,
as long as you can afford
a new one every few years.

There will even be days
when all you’ll want from heaven
is a better umbrella.

If you want the Ecstasy

you will have to set your fingers on the dead garden
and plow. Defile the old neat rows where the stunted tomatoes grew
last year or the year before. Imagine the first
translation of the King James Bible is breathing down your shirt.
Give up the missions and the passions and dig
as if you’ve got a mother down there gasping for breath.
Lift the dirt up over your head and pour it over you.
Watch the earth gush out over the tops and sides
of your fingers as it chooses liquidity over stasis. See your own face
in the quartz flecks hiding in the soil. Urge the stones
to bite you back. Ignore the neighbor’s laughter
and the police waiting for you to finish so they
can ship you to a place built to hold the diggers.
Exalt the broken glass you find lodged in your hands

when you finally stand up with your back sobbing into your chest. Go inside
and find the phone book. Bury it in the hole you’ve made. Spit a glass of sugar water
into the pit and listen to it gurgle around the pages. Tear up a suit and lay the strips
gently upon the Body of the Names of Potential and Contact. Open your eyes
after a prayer and cover it all with everything you have moved this morning.

If you want the Ecstasy
you have to dig.
You have to be ridiculed.
You have to be filthy.
You have to wait.

It will not be at all as you expect when it happens. You will be
clean and the garden will have been long ago forgotten. You’ll
have moved. You’ll be in another city on the day you see
the long buried Phone Book in the eyes of a badger encountered
in a foreign backyard.

Ecstasy — there in the badger’s eyes.
Upraised dirt and blood
on the badger’s paws.
He has been feeding on the tendrils that grew
from what you buried long ago: connections
to the larger world.
You’ll know him:

the old man, the flattened man, the man
who dug past his humanity to reach
the breast of the Mother.

If you want the Ecstasy

you will have to set your fingers on the dead garden
and plow. Lift the dirt up over your head and pour it over you.
Give up the missions and the passions and dig
as if you’ve got a mother down there gasping for breath. Imagine the first
translation of the King James Bible is breathing down your shirt in the back
and strangle the clods in revenge. Watch the solids gush out over the tops and sides
of your fingers as they choose liquidity over stasis. See your own face
in the quartz flecks hiding in the soil. Get dirty and factor in
the way water feels when you finally get to wash it off even though
some of it’s going to stay on you no matter how you search for it. Defile
the old neat rows where the stunted tomatoes grew last year or the year before.
Ignore the neighbor’s laughter and the police waiting for you to finish so they
can ship you to a place built to hold the diggers. Urge the stones
to bite you back. Exalt the broken glass you find lodged in your hands

when you finally stand up with your back sobbing into your chest. Go inside
and find the phone book. Bury it in the hole you’ve made. Spit a glass of sugar water
into the pit and listen to it gurgle around the pages. Tear up a suit and lay the strips
gently upon the Body of the Names of Potential and Contact. Open your eyes
after a brief prayer and cover it all with everything you have moved this morning.

If you want the Ecstasy
you have to dig.
You have to be ridiculed.
You have to be filthy.
You have to wait.

It will not be at all as you expect when it happens. You will be
clean and the garden will have been long ago forgotten. You’ll
have moved. You’ll be in another city on the day you see
the long buried Phone Book in the eyes of a badger encountered
in a foreign backyard.

Ecstasy — there in the badger’s eyes.
Upraised dirt and blood
on the badger’s paws.
He has been feeding on the tendrils that grew
from what you buried long ago: connections
to the larger world.
You’ll know him:

the old man, the flattened man, the man
who dug his way past his humanity into
the breast of the Mother.

What do you think about
when you’re facing the near-empty parking lot
at the end of a long day? Me,
I head for my car trying to imagine
a workless existence, days spent
on artless fantasy, nights wasted on
television and cheap ice cream. Everyone I know
wants to share their vision of this: lottery
segues to inheritance merges with reality show rewards
and business schemes. At the end of the day, after
all the lunchroom blather, we go home and keep thinking
about the report still looming undone, the meeting politics,
the kids who don’t want to pay their dues
(who seem to get away with that)
and the God-damned boss who does exactly what we do
(but gets more out of it, we think).

What do you do with your hope? Me,
I push it down to bubble within me, making
thin soup of my blood and talent. I sleep
badly, self-important in the small hours. Occasionally,
I toil over a single word and tuck it away in the desk
I keep at home in the spare room next to the dusty guitar,
the room I call “my office” to make it easier to pretend
that daylight’s cubicle is secondary to the night’s work
I spend so little time on.

What is the nature of heaven? Me,
I’ve started to think it’s a place much like this one:
a globe with a molten core speeding around the sun.
The same physics apply, the same gravity
would hold you. The only difference is in
the level of will needed to rise from your place:
in heaven your feet go where you want them to go,
even if where you’re headed is miles above the ground.
Can you imagine such a world? I can.

I can imagine that it never rains in heaven, at the end of the day
there’s a shuttle to your car, and if you decide
to stay home tomorrow no one’s going to call you
to find out where your key is or how far along you are
on that report. You’re in love with your boss, you’re one
of the scrubbed young things moving up in the world,
there’s plenty of money and plenty of time.
Your dreams become so compact they smolder
like a coal seam fire, and you’re warm enough at last.

Think about that often enough and you will barely mind
the long walk to your car, as long as you can afford
a new one every few years. There will even be days
when all you’ll want from heaven
is a better umbrella.

Shoveling at night
while the powder settles.

Bare pavement underfoot,
soft hills on either side of the driveway.

Snow falls back onto the black
from the mounds I’ve made.

I clear what I can,
leave little behind, knowing

it will come back when my sore back
is turned.

I’ve been cleaning up after snow
most of my life, bending and lifting

in the dark, muscles crying out
more loudly the older I get.

Every time, I tell myself spring is coming
and for a moment, the pain stops.

Every time, it snows again
and I go out to shovel, thinking

that next time I won’t bother,
but next time never comes. I bother,

am always bothered, with drift and shift
I can’t forestall. So late at night

I bend to the task at hand. In the dark,
any progress is worth the ache.

good night, america. tonight
you don’t matter. tonight you’re just
a shell around my room, and it’s cold out there.
i’ve got the heat up in here higher than i should,
too high to save the earth, keep it green and all that,
but it’s a small room after all and i’m cold.

good night, america. you’re a thin blanket tonight,
and the comfort you can offer me is just more rough fabric
on a tired hide. tonight i’m just another poor dog
far from home, wanting for nothing, really, but wishing
for so much more than this. it’s not enough for this
tired old pooch.

good night, america, i’m sure you’re something to see in the daylight
with your mountains and your majesty, but really,
when you’re always playing at being so far away, so remote, it’s all i can do
to remember half the words to the songs i used to sing you,
all that glory, those rockets, that flag. good night, america,
a man’s gonna die in this little room, maybe tonight, maybe later,
and it’ll be just another day for you, you and your spacious
and absent skies, so perfect if you look at them the right way.

Just now the light
flickered and the sound
of the dryer broke before
kicking in again, and

I began to wonder if these things
were real, or was I dead or dying
for one moment, the world I know
collapsing and then reexpanding

to its original size all in the course
of a single dimming.
It doesn’t matter now
as I am here, alive, and full and bright again,

but from now on I’ll be waiting for it to happen,
and when it happens at last I have to believe
it’ll be that swift — and I’ll have no flashlight, offer no fight
against the dark on that night; calm

as an old filament, I’ll just fall apart
and rest. It’ll be quick. The sound
will fail, the light will fail, and I’ll be sitting
in the dark, wondering what just happened.

Once they strap you in the electric chair
it’s only a matter of time
before the lightning becomes your advisor,
telling you this storm is of no consequence
as you go into the Light.

On the other side, you find
no one. No God, no Devil,
no deity wild or tame, no resting place,
neither cloud nor flame. All there is
is a droning in the dark, a song that keeps you guessing

for hours, perhaps days or decades —
who is that chanting for?
Is it your dirge, or perhaps your accusation come to haunt you
for eternity? Or are the angels simply telling you
that murder is murder, no matter how many laws

are made to explain it away? You will sit there
wondering for what back home you’d have called “forever”
before you meet the reason you’re here. When he comes up to you,
whole again as he was not when you left him
on the street back in the life before,

you are briefly terrified until you recall that nothing more
can happen to either of you. He sits beside you,
and that singing envelopes you, you join in,
but these are not your voices!
What is left inside you after death cannot sing the way you sang in life…

here, you are brothers. You killed him, he died, and all
is forgotten as you sit together waiting for the ones
who sent you here to join the chorus. It is not
for you to understand how you came to be here.
All you can do now is sit, sing, listen, and wait.

What joy to finally understand
that someday
we’ll have flowers growing
out of us, that
whether we become
ash or meat
it will happen one day that
we’ll all be green and happy
fodder, entering
mouths and departing through lower
intestines once
the blooms have dropped away,
and that means
we’re shit already even as we’re imagining
ourselves as future fragrance and
metaphor, even though we’re fated to be just
waste! It’s too good to be true,
we tell ourselves, that we will have such
a humble purpose.
We’ve wasted so much time and prayer
thinking we’ll be gods someday,
or hired hands of the gods, that when we finally see
that we’re individually of little value it’s as if
Jesus rose from the tomb and didn’t recognize us.
How comforting
to be at last forgotten and anonymous!
Once that’s over we can diminish ourselves,
cease fantasizing about our own
particularity as we secretly revel in knowing
that we’re just one of the innumerable warm left behinds,
ready at last to join the wide sea of
utility, to at last surrender
the folly of being so lonely, so
singular.

the dark truth we won’t admit
is that many of us
think the world would be better off
if different people were bleeding

as if putting the pig
in the apple’s mouth
would keep either
from burning