mention that you’re not writing poetry, and…

this, by the way, is most assuredly NOT a suicide poem. 🙂
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

revolver

in love with the potential
for the shattering, and not
always prepared to make it happen,

nonetheless you listen
holding your breath
until you hear it
turn until
it clicks into place
with a solid “chunk”
that sounds like fate.

there is a moment like that,
available and explosive,
in every life —
in some lives there are more than one.

but the way you handle the trigger
is the key to how much you’re like
the next guy:

set it down or
pick it up?

steady hand or with a tremble
in the touch?

squeeze, jerk
or pull?

and —

where do you point the thing
in case it does go off?

The man who works these hours has heard a lot of stories from people who swear that they are killers.

Are they true stories? They are certainly real stories, in the sense that they exist.

He tends to shrug them off as being routine — or even routines, as the tellers have told them so many times they don’t change a word from one telling to the next.

It could be said that this would indicate their objective truth; it could indicate a long-rehearsed falsehood; it could denote a certain rote or ritual nature to the telling that has long ago created a fundamental irrelevancy to the stories’ objective truth.

Each teller approaches the man on the night shift, no matter how long they have known him, as if he is once again their first time and only time confessor.

He must nod, act frightened or sympathetic as is required by the teller before him, and send them on their way until the next time.

The man who works these hours must be efficient in his feigned empathy toward the storytellers. Nights are only so long. There are only so many deaths one can squeeze into them. He knows that there are only so many opportunities for a guilty man to squint, imagine the open face of a caring man before him in the night, and with a leaden sigh begin to tell a tale he swears is true.

This is what the man who works these hours does. It doesn’t matter to him what the particulars of anyone’s story are, as long as all the telling is done before dawn.

Saw a picture of someone
and she said it was
the best she had ever looked

I thought about that and decided that
the best I ever looked
was when I was 22
That phase only lasted about fifteen minutes
but I will forever recall
how in the middle of the seventh minute
Trish Powell asked me to turn around
so she could see my ass in my jeans

But today I looked
in the bedroom mirror
at saggy fat ass me
with the wizened eyes and the graying hair
and the patches of sad fact everywhere

smarter than I have ever been

and saggy fat ass me said
start that motherfucking clock
back
up

I stayed home from work today because I was up all night.

Here’s why.

Dead Reckoning

1
You say, can I please live here?

The first word you think of
when you sit down to write is always “left” –
as in left turn, left behind, left over, left hand.

You start over there and move over here
but when you start again it’s another start
from just where you were last time.

Just once you want to stay where you end up.

2
Dead reckoning is
the art of predicting where you will end up
if you keep doing what you are doing.
It does not take into account
current or drift.

3
There are rare times when you end up
somewhere luminous.

I talked for an hour last night with a boulder
that rose from the roadside dark on the way home,
as gray as if lit from within.
The hump of granite said
it preferred to remain still for fear
of learning more than it could handle.

Before I turned away
I kissed it and forgot myself.

4
Legend has it that Death will find you
even if you run to another city.
Death was thinking you were supposed to end up
in that other city anyway. Death
moves on its accustomed course, you move
on your accustomed course, the edges of the world
converge at the vanishing point.

5
Go out to find your bones.

Fall upon the rocks on the coast.
Ask one of them what it’s like on the other side.

You will learn that they were left behind
when the world split and the far coast moved away from them.

You will dive in and struggle forward, promising
to return with news.

There is something waiting out there, you know.
It waits unsure of how the two of you ended up

so distant from where you were supposed to be,
from where you were supposed to stay.

tony-boy sits
under a salt tree
growing a crust.

he molts three times a day.

a bowl full of mousebones sits in his lap.

he mumbles a skull song
while sifting his fingers
through the white skittles.

he would prefer to be living his vision
of accountancy and fuel-efficient cars.
he would like a marriage and a stable
full of tony-boys to love and smash full
of his dreams,

but he’s stuck with a salt treehouse
and a magic bean.

one at a time he takes out the worms
he’s been asked to keep safe
and stretches them until they break.

he strokes his way toward an absinthe horizon.

he pretends he is a doctor.
he demands a lawyer who can defend the rights of chiggers.
he thinks an Indian chief would starve if
subjected to an entire forest of salt trees
dropping salt leaves on the ground
even though the deer who flock to feast upon and suck them
are too swollen to escape a hunter —

much like tony-boy,
sobbing under his salt tree,
growing another crust as
the scabs from the last one fall
in a squall of bad white luck.

leaves falling,
air cooling, scent of
burning bridges.

he is not ready
to give up
yet.

he’ll give it until the weekend,
long enough to let another storm blow through,
and he’ll wait to see what’s still standing
before he lights his last match.

finally i have determined that
what it has meant to me
to live by poetry

is that i long ago gave up feeding
my bones in favor of
my eyes and ears

and when i eventually needed the bones
all i could do was hear me crumble
and see me fail and fall

but the view on the way down was perfect
my slow collapse resolved me beautifully
into a helpless cautionary tale

get thee to the gym
and give up the pose
while you still can kids

no one with any sense that they might have a choice
should ever have to do the things
you need to do for this to be your life

honestly
living by poetry is a load of crap
and you are better off without it

leave it to those of us
who are dragged to it
kicking and sobbing

leave it to the dead-eyed ones
the sharp-eared ones who give up
form for function

the ones who are called
to fail at living
in favor of noticing living

road after road has been
hard on my feet.

long stretches of slim shoulders
that fell off into ravines.
falling rocks. rumble of thunderstorms
miles away but not far enough off to disregard,
frequent flooding,
and no overhangs beneath which to shelter.

most steps felt like staggers
and most of those felt like sins.

but i’m sitting now above a valley
that looks like it might slope
more gently down. i see smoke over there
by a silver oxbow.

there is such an urge to tuck my head
and roll breakneck down into
that place. i need that peace
so quickly and there are so many things
i need to say to whoever’s down there.

and god, my butchered feet hurt so much
i am bleeding into my chest.

_______________________________

here’s a first draft of a poem i worked on during the chicago trip.

missing a point (draft title)

In an O’Hare Airport cafe
a tall woman with red hair
and salt highlights reaches across a table
to take the hand of a younger woman —
fair skinned, dark haired, and softly stunning —
and clutches it while
speaking rapidly, leaning close so
only the two of them can hear.
I am so busy trying to decide
if they are mother and daughter,
close friends, relatives, co-workers, or lovers
that I cannot tell you
whether they appear to speak
in pain, or joy, or confidence.

Once again,
I’ve fallen
for the unimportant.

It is not that their relationship is unimportant.
We live and die by knowing what flows between us,
and by reaching rung over rung to climb together
from who we are to who we must be.
What is unimportant is my need to know,
my need to tear into the fabric
of what I see and analyze the stitching to death.
That is not my story seated in front of me,
and I will not be the poorer
for not knowing it.

I should say instead only what I know I see:
that two women in an O’Hare Airport café
are speaking quietly to each other,
and when connected at the hands they light up;
and they have lit me so well
that I know that tonight I will lie awake
for hours in their incandescence,
wondering what else I have missed.

I posted this at the Nov. 3rd club community a day or so ago, in response to a prompt from Victor about a poem “in the moment”.

in this moment
i am trying to remember everything i know
about new orleans

and i realize i don’t know much
beyond storyville and the second line
dirty dozen and dr. john
tipitina’s and preservation hall

i know i never got there
i know i never will get there
at least not to the city
it used to be

so many cities these days smell
like their own brand of ghost
i walked past the world trade center a while ago
and that smelled dry and crusty
i bet bagdhad smells about the same

so what would you call the smell of new orleans?

in this moment
i imagine
it smells like rotting stories
untold: the men and women
who propped up the pretty legend
are drowned or scattered and we
will not know their names again

and that is how it has always smelled, i bet:
abandoned, funky, with a song in its heart:

house party on the edge of decay
all those tombs under water to stay
all those parasols and all that rain
(laissez les bon temps roulez)

and someone tell the government
that those hands smell like an accident
if you can call it that — can you call it that?
(laissez les bon temps roulez)

like i said
i don’t know very much about new orleans
but i know enough to know
a murder when i see one

a spark fell onto the back of the hand

and from where the skin lifted up
(like a parachute, like a dome)
over the matchhead burn
there rose a need to touch
the yielding bubble over and over again
(tenderly, knowing how fragile it might be)

with the hope of understanding it,
in the hope of learning from it

how to examine those hurts
that might not blister as this one did, learn
to allow them to settle on their own instead of always
needing to open them so their foul oil could flow from within
onto the previous stains, making them ever darker;
a blister gives a chance to practice, and

we always make time for practice, even though
we always end up peeling back the slack skin and letting
a drop of fluid fall, one tear, onto the scars
we swore we would never worry again.

Kirsten Dunst

I sing of you,
Kirsten Dunst,
and your dark blonde image;

recall you tweaking me
in the vampire movie —
how did they get a little girl

to be that ravishing,
and what does it mean that
I noticed?

As a cheerleader you were
exactly as I imagined you would be,
like the girl I saw swimming

down the beach from where I fished
in high school,
and I reeled in the pickerel

knowing that you’d never be
mine, and I threw the fish back
in jealous anger.

In the superhero movie
you were perfect and unafraid
of the freaks who surrounded you,

and I began to have hope —
until I heard that out of character you were dating
the supermen around you and not the freaks.

Kirsten Dunst, those are all of the movies
I’ve seen with you in them. Maybe
you’ve made more, maybe not. Maybe

the kid in the coffee house
who insisted you were the sister
of that guy in Limp Bizkit

was right, maybe not. Maybe I’ve never really
been in love with you
and your wicked eyes. But it takes a village

to smother a child, and I think back to you
vamping for the villain
when you were so young, and I wonder

that I was so easily suckered myself,
that I dislike blondes but stop to stare
at you on a magazine cover, that I think I know

your every mood and move
without stepping inside a theater, that the village
makes us think you are someone we should know.

Can I demand
joy
of the universe?

Can I imagine
myself
into an ecstasy?

Can I say that
this is not perfect?
Can I lie about God?

Can you look me in the eye
and tell me I don’t know
happiness when I see it?

I see it.
I am not afraid of it now.
Can I be unfraid long enough

to take it, hold it close,
deathless,
until I lose myself inside?

he thinks Sunday
is something
like a chance for love

thinks something
like not knowing what it means
to be in love, or about love not being an answer,
though it is not a question either, more a punctuation mark
in a long sentence, and something about it being
a way of knowing the difference between
stretches of encumbrance and moments of freedom

something like flight

something like a woman on stage
opening herself like an envelope
never mailed
something like postage due

something like understanding eyes
and a whiff of memory

something like the way
he sits on the stool
and after four drinks
sneaks a peek
into the strippers’ dressing room

something like grasping
for someone else’s
sanctuary
something he thinks he’s been given
by right of birth

something like a false idol
something he never had
something that disowned him
something he is ashamed of

something like the way he turns away
retreats to his car
drives the short way home

something like waking
from a just deferred thought
of home and knowing
it’s not likely to be recaptured

something like the dread that says
never go home

something like another sabbath
devoid of rest and sacrament

something like God
not having a bloody thing
to say to him
in the still of the car
after the engine
is turned off
and before
he opens the door

the greatest measure
of her pain

was that sole eyelash
that fell
from her face
as she wiped away tears
disbelieving
what she was seeing

but the scale tipped
back in her favor
when she closed her eyes tight
and turned away
from them

she was a whole year lighter
by the time
she reached the door