Tag Archives: poetry

July 16, 2015

Country Song

By Tony Brown

Dammit,
country —

I wanted to write a song, 
wanted to sing, to play, to love and dance —

and then there was one violation, 
then another and more, and I began

to see how many there were, how many
there are, how the waves of violations

sculpted and sculpt our shores, how the winds
of violations cut and have cut into our sands,

how the surges and ebbs of violations
have been the surges and ebbs of our 

flags, how we are the surges and ebbs and 
our eyes squint through the violations

as if we were free to sing, to play,
to love and dance with no restrictions, as if we 

were free —
and I have no idea how it will be

to be free, how we will ever be free
to sing and dance and play and yes,

to love as if the violations
were not there in the sand and the shore,

as if the eyes we were born with 
had never been violated, as if the flags

were not the whole story
of the violations…dammit, country,

how I wish you were truly mine
to love, to sing for, to dance with, to heal.

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July 15, 2015

Hurricane And Tornado

By Tony Brown

Hurricane plodding on slowly,
snarling threats all the way
as stunned clouds open a lead
on it, race on ahead of it;

Tornado, that rabid dog
of a blowdown, breaking up
with sane weather
to fly along and bite all;

the weather gods
are not always
the gentlest of creatures
and they have ruled

longer than we have been 
challenging them
and longer than we have even
been ourselves.

I place my faith in them 
and them alone
for my understanding of
where we are going.

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July 13, 2015

School For The Dead

By Tony Brown

When the bell rings
at close of day, none of them will go home. 

When the next morning bell 
rings, they’ll still be sitting there.

You don’t assign homework to the dead.
You don’t expect them to answer questions today

you posed the night before.
Every moment for the dead is the only moment 

and it’s a myth that they are eager
to talk to us anyway.

All you can really do is lecture them
as they sit, dulled

and neither willing nor unwilling
to hear you. No one has a clue

about what it takes to graduate.
Not the teachers, not the administration,

certainly not the dead themselves,
and they couldn’t care less.

If they were to move on it would amuse
and astonish them at least as much as it would us.

So: why take such a job?  Why teach 
at a school for the dead?  Because

though it’s a remote chance, a miracle 
might happen — but mostly because the dead

can’t die before your eyes from gunshots
or abuse or disease. Because the worst

that can happen there
is nothing at all.

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July 13, 2015

Misbehaving

By Tony Brown

In summer late at night
from the next house I hear
soca played
just loud enough to be
too loud
for that time of night.

Soca singers
speak approvingly of
misbehavior.
They speak of 
bacchanal,
carnival,
wining,
jumping up.

Sometimes
the music’s just
the usual soundtrack
of the moment.
Then we hear
of people who

get wild,
go wild,
go crazy.
Roofs are raised and then burned
and sometimes blown off.
Faces melt, 
asses shake minds free,
someone’s turned
up and turned out and 

where are you tonight, love?

Not here, not in my
soft and resigned bed.
You’re elsewhere,
misbehaving, shaking,
crazy from the heat in the dark.
Happy.

I’m tossing Fats Waller
and his sweet jazz
off the radio
right now.  

Leaving the house to burn.  

I will come to you 
smoking
from the wreckage

and then, then,
singers and rockers
and rhymers of every stripe

are going to have to come up
with something new to say
about joy,
and rut, and 
abandon.  

New invitations
to party.  

New gasoline
for that oldest fire.

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July 12, 2015

Ego, Shush

By Tony Brown

It is unimportant
that I am ripped within
by doubt.  All are.

It is unimportant
that these hands are not
what I once imagined.
That thought
is the same among us all.

It is unimportant that
I can see so many 
already farther along
than I am. They have
the same view as I, see
others even farther ahead.

What is important:
the music being made.
That there is music being made
at all.  That there are musicians
is unimportant except as music
comes from them as from one body —

one must hear all
to hear all of it
or else spend time
wasting away
for want of connection
to the Great Road
As Walked By All.

That I think this, and
that I think this is true,
are unimportant.

Shush, ego;
ego, shush;
listen, ego;
listen, be still.

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July 9, 2015

Forecast

By Tony Brown

A pink mist puffs out
from the splash
of a bullet into 
the corporal’s gut;

a mutt tugs on 
a naked, swollen leg lying
on the shoulder
of the ragged, blasted
road, and 

all I seem
to be able
to think about is 
what it’s going to be like
to go home.

As for the way
the corporal fell, the way
the dog squealed and ran
when we spanked him with
a thrown rock —

I suspect I won’t recall those 
until I am home.

Then,
I suspect, 
they will be the only things
I can think of.  

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July 9, 2015

A True Story

By Tony Brown

Originally posted 2010; revised again in 2012.

Let us start by saying
that it may not be true

that a famous poet
once committed
psychological torture
upon a graduate student
in order to observe her behavior
and derive content
for a book of poems.

It may not be true
that he was not alone in his effort,
having enlisted other graduate students
to assist him and observe and report
on their comrade.

But it is true
that as an undergrad
I once sat in a dorm room
hearing this story
from the woman
who had been abused
or claimed
to have been abused,
and I believed it,

and in outrage
I told this story
to many people
for many years
as if it were certainly true,

naming all the names as I did.

When the book in question
was published to no acclaim
and general bewilderment (what had
happened? where had
the famous poet’s talent gone?)

I kept telling the story; then

the famous poet
redeemed himself
with better books,
I began to be noticed myself, 

and I began to choose my listeners
and hedge the details
and withhold names,

and soon I stopped telling the story.

What I tell you now is also true:
I have read the work of the famous poet
and wondered,
and thought about it,
and looked for clues,

and I have written a lot of poems since then
and wondered,
and looked for clues,

and thought about truth
and redemption
through poems,

though I am too often
amazed and ashamed
of what poets will do
in the pursuit of poems,
truth,
redemption; 

for instance,

I wrote
this.

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July 7, 2015

Damselflies

By Tony Brown

Originally posted on 7/24/2013.

My favorite loving to watch
is that of damselflies:

him arcing back, 
her looping forward;

lighting on the edge of marsh grass,
then breaking free of the spell

to fly off separately, not to meet again,
all having been fulfilled.

I could look up formal names, describe this in 
minute words, kill it as biology lesson

or treatise on the aerodynamics of mating,
write an essay on metaphorical imagery, but honestly

I’d much rather lie here in sunlight
with you, practicing such poses,

delighting in
the sensation of flight.

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July 7, 2015

Sales

By Tony Brown

Selling you the dream car
that all the kids love,
that makes you big and potent,
that opens all the warm garage doors,
that sniffs out the best parking spots,
that finds the unexpired and broken meters,
that speeds without consequence,
that stops with each front wheel centered on a bison-headed nickel,
that eats nothing but air and good intentions;

selling you the best house
in the best neighborhood,
in the right zip code,
in a grove of window-shading trees,
in a street of charm and comfort,
in a color mixed from eagle’s tears,
in a weather pattern best described as personalized,
in a storm of good and distant thunder,
in a rainbow promise of yours forever;

selling you the joyous reincarnation
of your grandparents’ hard and fast belief in a just world, 
of their stubborn faces bent over task and faith,
of their bank-backed presence as good citizens,
of their trust in the handshake,
of their unshakable duty to the flag-donning boys of summer,
of their simple vision of resting under a willow at the close of day;

selling you on it 
as a mythology, a set of stories
that gives shaded meaning
though a different one is glaring;

as a cover up for the human-selling
that made it all happen;
as a screen before the bloody grounds
of human villages burned;
as a way to sate a gnawing truth
before it wakes you up starving
in the night: 

that what’s being sold 
is stolen property and labor
from the back of a rickety truck
in the dark, 

and the whole thing’s
built on a slim prayer
that we will never stop buying.

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July 4, 2015

Tom Sawyer On The Fence

By Tony Brown

You ask me
what I would write in a message
to be placed in a bottle
and sent to sea: what would I say,
to whom would I want it said?

I say to you:
content here
will be governed by
process.  To answer that
I must know

the bottle’s color, heft,
its material,
its origin.
I must know how it will be
stoppered against filling

and sinking,
its message
dissolving into the ocean
long before reaching 
its addressee.  I must know

on what kind of paper
I am to write,
with what I am to write —
and where am I to be
when I toss the bottle to sea

in an act
of desperation
or hope or pure
ridiculous artistry, which 
can be all of the above

if need be.  Tell me enough
to go on if you can’t say it all
or if you don’t know it all and I
will write it all down, every word of it

for as long as it takes to tell.
I’ll sit here with the pen and the paper.
I’ll fold and roll the pages when done.
I’ll answer your question then, hand you the 
pages, hold the bottle

as it dawns on you what has just happened.
Will you laugh or will you cry? I don’t care.
Content is determined by process,
after all, and process is my job, my only job.  
I think sometimes it is the only job there is.

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July 1, 2015

Seagulls

By Tony Brown

When the seagull
grew bored with my
randomly tossed French fires
it went back to the trusted surf
and walked figure eights
in the incoming tide,
head darting into the water
and coming up
with something
almost every time.  

Now and then
it would look at me
as if to say,

here’s another way,

but I then would toss
a French fry
and another gull would dive
and take it.

I don’t know
that there’s a moral here
except that once I was out of fries
all the birds took to the surf
and left me to listen to their calls,
straining to hear
one note of regret there
about the fact,
sad to me and apparently me alone,
that I was no longer relevant to them.

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June 29, 2015

Worse

By Tony Brown

they burn down
your ancestral dances
and languages

or worse,

call you
by their own names for you
and then ask you
to teach them those dances
so they may dance them badly 
in a movie

or worse,

get rich-busy with
your ceremonies,
put them out on the street
half-assed to pull
some commercial duty

or worse, 

take it all away
only to flush back upon you
mostly dead pieces
of what you once had and tell you
to make a home there

so you do,

and there are moments of
drum-happy and meth-sad, time’s as mixed 
as the dogs who cur and mutt
your dirt streets and you say
it could be better

or worse:

you could choke in that miasma
between their better and your worse,
you could disappear

or worse,

you could forget all of it
and burn your dances down yourself
in a moment of surrender

or worse, 

you could let them choose your definition,
let them give you their blood banner to follow,
let them claim they’re your ultra,
let them stifle your last whimper,
let them take your children because
it’s all for the better — 

and worse,

you could realize that where they are,
where they want you to be,
there’s no better at all
for the likes of you and yours — 

and worse even than that,

you could realize
you have no choice but
to be there anyway.

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June 25, 2015

Exiles

By Tony Brown

A wild guitar sings
from a dark corner
of a deep porch.

A defiant song shifts gears,
gathers voices, challenges
for primacy

as my neighborhood
offers a show
of slow rebellion.

To stay alive for long here
is to be in full revolt
simply by existing.

To stay alive here
is to have hard, hard work 
always in progress.

The ones who do live here?
I don’t know if they would say
they are thriving, though

in the midst of despair, 
they do not despair. They 
don’t know how to despair.

A wild guitar sings of this,
ringing from a dark corner
of a deep, crowded porch — 

I don’t know the song.

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June 24, 2015

Without Reins

By Tony Brown

Originally posted 11/8/2013.

Abandon and joy
have pulled the bit
from your mouth;
you’ve begun to dream without reins.

The broken bell of your body chimes.
Sing to us of the failing ring of its last note
and of the ear cupped to catch it
before it’s gone forever.

Then sing the return, the rebirth,
the orbit swinging ’round.
Sing the bloom gone to seed,
the seed gone to fire.

Sing us a blue-throated love song,
a dense jewel  in full sun glinting;
a dark-tattooed work song, gospel
of opening, echo of pure belonging.

Sing the emblem 
of circularity, the zero;
sing its completion
of the eternal round.

Your mouth is free of its bit.
Your song is free of your knotted tongue.
Sing.  Sing of horses running,
manes and tails, summer’s winds.

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June 22, 2015

The Cold

By Tony Brown

My raw throat converts
breath to fire: no, not with poems —
I’m sick tonight and

it burns to inhale.
Every third breath
draws a cough

that carves me
up. I’m not ready to
die from a cold, of course, 

but at my age
every illness feels like
a flag for a caution lap;

you can’t shake off
what you used to. Slow down, take
as many laps as needed

before coming back
to the line at full speed.
Where’s that green flag

when you want it? No, not for
poems, not tonight.  I’ll settle
for sleeping then waking up tomorrow

and then we’ll see about changing
the fire in my throat
from breath to words.

 

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