Originally posted 11/11/2012.
Here is a human heart,
a fist-sized ball of thick meat;
here is its dimly connected brain.
Somewhere
in a sealed box
in the wet of the mind,
buried in
the brain’s ropes and curls,
is an inaccurate map
the heart is supposed to follow,
but never does.
The blind little stubborn heart,
running off on its own;
the jealous careful brain
whining and tagging along behind —
that’s the story of,
that’s the glory of…
Originally posted 8/29/2013.
Providence, dark bayside muse,
lent itself well to his humors.
He glimpsed potential lovers
in the same pits and holes
where potential horrors could be found.
He did not in real life love much or well.
He did not trust others, carried dank biases too far,
mistrusted at last even the devotion
of his own monsters to their creator;
in the long run, he only kept the city
as full companion and partner. He was born
here, left and returned, eventually died
muttering about the pain in his gut and
the Elder Race in his dreams, settling at last
on one phrase to capture all his intention:
“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
In his house at R’lyeh, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.
Think of the man unveiled there:
one so soaked with darkness he had to squeeze out
new words for those depths within him,
the same depths he sensed in the alleys behind the grand homes
of Angell Street, Waterman Street, Benefit Street;
the depths in the drowned eyes that sought him out when he stared into
the waters that emptied here from the New England hills.
New words for something at once terrible and inescapable —
something, at least to him, very much like love.
Originally posted 6/29/2012.
You, flying the prog-rock airplane of your love,
make the crazy leap to stratosphere.
Something comes knocking on the hatch door.
It is the object of your affection, wearing a jet pack,
holding the ring you gave her in her hand;
she hurls it into the plane and swoops away.
Your crew secures the hatch behind her.
They turn to look at you,
stoic in the pilot’s seat.
How did she fly so high as to get to you?
Some questions are meant either to be unanswered,
to be incomprehensible without a life change,
or to be aged into
before answering. It rarely matters which
of these is true. What matters is what the pilot does
with the prog-rock airplane of his love
after it has been rejected. Does the pilot choose
to settle into an awkwardly worded
power ballad nose dive, or to surge higher
on waves of bass triplets and Mixolydian modal guitar runs
until the plane reaches its structural limits and explodes?
You choose another way, push a tear back into its duct
through sheer strength of will; then,
as if in a coda, you head back to base.
Originally posted 11/30/2013.
I will again
call this place “ours”
when we can bury our dead our way
and be buried here that way
when the old blood in the soil
stops weeping from loneliness
I will again
call this place “ours”
when we can plant trees here and feel safe
about our grandchildren living to see them
when those future forests again shrug
at our presence as matter of fact
I will again
call this place “ours”
when the names we give places
hold a music that pulls the land into shape
when we forget how to ghost dance
because it’s become unnecessary
when we don’t dance
for you
when we break the last camera
you’ve smuggled into our homes
when we stop you
from plucking
pointless feathers from thin air
and planting them in your hair
when we open up the shame vault and tell you
no your grandmother likely wasn’t
and if she was
it might have been by force
and ask you if it was by love
why you don’t know her name
I will again
call this place “ours”
when we stop being angry long enough
to pity you
and to laugh more than a little at you
when I realize
that I can call this place “ours”
any time I want
because after all this time
in spite of all that’s happened
it still is
it just is
Originally posted 8/28/2013.
The men of that country
must be sick
for how else can one explain
comb-overs, wars,
long nosed cars,
long reach guns,
filibusters,
a weaponized God, hangings,
unfortunate colognes, blood feasts,
the casual seizing
of women,
of children,
of other men,
the willed ignorance
of lack of consent,
the leveraged buyouts,
the wolf pelts,
the blessing of
radioactive oceans,
the balls of old oil
in the bellies of seals,
the blank-eyed drooling
in rooms full of
vintage guitars
and game balls,
the blackout drunks,
and the hard-engine bikes,
except as symptoms? This is
a country of sick men
burning their surroundings
whenever they open their mouths.
There are women there
about whom little has been written
by the sick men. It’s likely
they have stories to tell
that could clean that fouled air.
If they did,
that would be
a different country.
Originally three separate poems posted between 2010 and 2013.
1.
Once there was a lion in love with a breeze —
neither jet stream nor hurricane,
just a humble riffle of air —
but on that breeze the lion soared.
The lion must surely have been
transformed into some other being, as lions
cannot fly. Yet the lion flew.
There’s not more to be said of that, I think,
unless you are one who must find meaning
in all things, one who must sip rainwater
from a china cup, one who holds a book to their face
to understand sunrise and thus misses the sight
of a lion making a transit across the face of the sun.
If it happened to you, you would no doubt
seek a parachute; you’d be so unworthy
of the love of a good breeze.
2.
There was a lion once
seated in my supermarket
near the cereal.
I had been shopping
and turned the corner:
there was a lion, not raging,
not sleeping, just sitting.
I thought at first
it was some cardboard promotion,
then realized
only I could see it.
It seemed mostly eyes
and of course teeth.
But color of mane, of fur, of claws —
I remember
nothing of these.
What is this lion to me
now? A reminder
of how we all hunted once
and were hunted.
Speaker for the wild not found
in the supermarket. Disturbance
in the daily, torn fabric in the mask.
Memory of eyes, mostly. Of teeth.
My present emotion?
Mostly still fear,
but now it is less
a fear of the lion
than a fear
of forgetting there was a lion.
3.
Still – good to be Lion.
Sleep between blood feasts.
Be called noble strictly on looks.
Better to be Lioness.
Work the kill.
Stand over it and let the babies feed.
Better to be Gazelle.
Lie there after heart busting run.
Be part of the chain.
Better to be Vulture.
Watch, float down, eat, survive.
Hang away from the others in a pack.
Best, of course, to be Bones.
Best as well to be Leavings.
No guilt except that of unwanted peace.
And as Bones, as Leavings,
best of all to know you’ll be the Same
as Lion, Lioness, Gazelle, Vulture eventually.
Originally posted 7/21/2010.
A klezmer band purchases a sheepdog to act as band mascot. They change the name of the band to the Sheepdog Klezmer Orchestra.
The Sheepdog Klezmer Orchestra begin to travel widely and soon achieve a degree of acclaim. Everywhere they go, they bring the sheepdog (known to the audiences only as The Sheepdog) with them. He lies on stage during their sets, perking up for the dances, then dropping his sad head to the floor for the vocal lamentations and slow songs, peering out at the audience through his fringe of fur, looking right and left.
The Sheepdog is in private life named David. The band keep his real name to themselves, as they keep their own names private from the audiences they play for, using stage names — Aaron Out Front, Judith Judith, Ronaldo Star, Jonathan Regretful, Felix the Cat, Sam The Fiddler.
Sam The Fiddler, in particular, loves The Sheepdog and is David’s closest companion in the band, walking him during breaks, petting him for long hours in the privacy of hotel room, brushing his thick coat until it shines before every gig.
In their hometown south of Detroit, the Sheepdog Klezmer Orchestra plays weddings so often that the sound of a clarinet in the street would lead to proposals and engagements.
I only have ever seen them play once, as I am not a fanatic for klezmer music in general. But at a wedding of close friends from college, The Sheepdog Klezmer Orchestra played for hours, and I danced and wept as much as the families did for their offspring, and I have not forgotten.
Tonight on the radio, in the early dark of pre-dawn, I heard a recording of The Sheepdog Klezmer Orchestra and thought of you again:
how your hair fell before your eyes so often
that I was always brushing it back
to see them more clearly;
how I used to dance and weep with you
and called both things
a celebration of us;
how it seemed that a band was playing
whenever we spoke or loved together;
the air itself blurred into song.
This is not to say that remembering you reminds me of a sheepdog, or of The Sheepdog Klezmer Orchestra, or of weddings or dancing.
This is to say that when I think of joy and sadness mixed, and of the caring that demands the constant brushing of hair from soft eyes, of hours of travel and the rewards of keeping private what is most your own,
those moments
have a soundtrack
in which you still sing to me
like a clarinet, like Gershwin;
like klezmorim singing the music of names
used gently and only in confidence.
Originally posted 2/19/2010.
There are believed to be no tigers
in Worcester at the moment.
Our lone animal park
holds cougars and polar bears.
If anyone here owns a surreptitious tiger,
they’ve been keeping it well-concealed,
but this evening
I swear I saw a tiger
in the shadows by the back fence.
It’s been said that if a tiger
once tastes human flesh,
it will remain a maneater forever.
This one clearly saw me,
but made no move in my direction.
It may have already eaten.
It may not have known how sweet I am.
Perhaps that maneater label is just a legend.
Perhaps the dream tiger, real or unreal,
tried a man and found it wanting,
was seeking goat or sheep
or some game creature instead.
The tiger (and I know, I know, it was unreal
but I could not take my eyes from it)
stopped by the oak tree.
It looked up — perhaps at unfamiliar bark,
or a scent it had not had to identify before.
Perhaps it was listening for voices it knew.
I called it, using a name I haven’t spoken in years.
It turned and tensed, fangs and stripes
bared but transparent,
and suddenly I saw through its body,
saw it as menacing as I had not before,
as if there was an overlay of pain rippling there
I had not noticed, as if I was seeing it
through a terror veil, and I longed
for it to rush me — I called to it:
mystery cat,
tiger in the mind,
be more real
than I can conjure.
Come and tear me up,
leave my true blood on the ground.
I am tired of my fear of ghosts,
wish to fight something solid,
want to die by the act
something real.
Originally posted 5/14/2008.
I dreamed of winning Powerball.
Overnight a heap
of one hundred and seventeen million dollars
stuffed itself into my head
and wedged itself there,
trapped by the nose of an Aston Martin
left running in my ear canal.
I woke up inside the fantasy
of imminent wealth.
I cleared out a room in there
in which to squirrel away
these cares about how to pay my bills
and how to cook simple dinners.
I can no longer be bothered
with such things.
There are smart folks
who call the lottery
“a tax on the poor.” Bull.
I don’t feel poor
as much as exiled. When I play
I’m just taking my shot
at winning my way home —
like now, for instance; though I’ve only got
five dollars to my name till Friday
that mocking bill is burning a hole
in my ratty pocket
so I am off to buy The Ticket —
that Aston Martin dream
is a roaring in my head
that won’t quit.
Originally posted 7/22/2007.
do not pretend
you haven’t grown up to be
one of those boys
who sits on the grass
at the highway rest area
counting thongs
and nudging your friends, because
I’m watching you do it.
do not gloss over your snickering
when you are called on it.
do not play that game.
stop with the defensive rationale
for using the word “bitchslap,”
for wearing the “mustache ride” T-shirt.
here comes the predictable comeback:
it’s a free country,
you’ve got freedom of expression
all over your smooth little ticked off face
and you’re not afraid to use it. it’s just
talk, you say. you don’t mean it, really, really,
not like that, never hit a woman, just a joke,
fuck you, fuck you, you PC sumbitch, fuck you.
well, I was never expecting much to come of this
so one favor only I ask of you:
stop pretending
you aren’t the kind of guy who does this.
do not play the whistle past the rape camp
game. do not tell me you never
saw a roofie in a friend’s hand
and said nothing. do not tell me
you wouldn’t do it again.
do not tell me you aren’t the kind of guy
who flips off a confrontation over this shit
and laughs with his buddies all the way to the car
and does it again as soon as you reach
the next place you mingle with the rest of the world.
just tell me you’ll remember this moment
if ever you hold your own son
as he asks you to explain the way things are.
just tell me you understand that
first things last.
tell me something surprising. tell me
it’s gonna end someday.
Originally posted 12/10/2013.
Let me introduce myself:
cigarette jump pulse back digger,
game pack smoke rider,
riding my warp plane; you can
call me Knife Wheel Gyroscope.
This packing crate, also my home,
cradles my vision
while I’m stretched on
my musical daybed,
on my hard head spin journey,
flash memoried
with past and potential mates,
crystal mythology partners;
I am a priest of the church
of the hole in the pocket,
an elder of the problematic filth;
to you, of course,
I’m something else: reminder,
caution, guardian bad faithless stinker,
your nearly forgotten uncle —
yes, I’m something, all right —
a something
you wish was elsewhere.
I apologize. Is that better?
I’m the problem, yes indeed. Is that better?
I’m Knife Wheel Gyroscope
and I approved this message
of mess and presage.
Is that better?
Are you better?
Fear and dislike this poor something
if you must.
I’m not moving on.
I’m Knife Wheel Gyroscope
and this packing crate is home
and home is here, not elsewhere;
if you thought of me, ever,
ever as something other than
“make that something go elsewhere,”
you’d know I belong here as you
belong here, dear pup;
you’d offer me your compassion
if I were enough on your mind to organize
a solution for, that is, if only like you
I had a wallet thicker than a hippo tongue with a hyperthyroid bankroll;
if I were not a me,
not a dirty him
or trash heap her,
an I with calm eyes;
if I were only not
Knife Wheel Gyroscope
and if this packing crate, also a home,
did not cradle this vision, I’m certain
it would be easier being you right now.
Originally posted 2/7/2010. Very loosely inspired by a true story.
Sam beat the hell
out of a ghost last night.
His fists grew tangled with cobwebs
and soft blood.
He beat a man
he saw as the vessel
in which resided
his hated father’s soul.
When the body
hit the ground Sam did not stop
but kicked it and broke it
until the bouncers pulled him off.
Then the poor vessel got up
and shoved a knife into Sam
before anyone could stop him.
Sam didn’t die, though —
not right away. It happened
in the ambulance
on the way to Milford
and Sam got a sour laugh
when his dad
was waiting for him
when he made the leap
into that space. He
would have leaped
at him if he’d still
had solid arms,
but instead he just
hovered and snarled
with no material way
to resume the fight
right then.
Fortunately, both Sam
and the guy who killed him
have brothers,
so no worries.
In a day or two Sam Ghost will seize control
of his little brother’s body
and force him to square off with the brother
of the man who killed him.
He will move his brother’s arms
to smash at the face
of his demise and it will be
the face he always sees.
He’ll hear his father speaking
through the other guy’s broken mouth.
Shut up and fight me, his father will say
in the other guy’s voice;
fight like a ghost
in a man’s body,
the way I taught you
to fight.
Never before posted. From hard copy files — maybe 1993, 1994? I’d stopped obsessively dating every poem I wrote some years before that. In terms of page numbers it’s roughly from the same time as poems from my first chapbook, “In The Place Of Definitions,” which was printed in 1994.
Pretty heavily revised. The original kinda sucked. Trust me. This might too, of course.
they burst thru
my door
my body door and
my body opened into
a vacant store
you stood in the torn way
and held the rain back
wiped the rain back from
the shaken wood and
didn’t speak until
you said
together let’s forget
a closure
that won’t come
let’s forget a false home
where we’d hang our misfortune over
the body door as a bad blessing
a wrong message a sad scroll
a temporary prompt
for an unsafe locale
violations were made
they are made whole again
when we
don’t rehang the broken door
instead we together make
a new
door and
until the next break
may we now call
this shelter home
Originally posted 2/20/2012.
We did not at first believe
how not slight and not brittle
she had turned out to be
We’d thought her so broken
it broke our language
to speak of her so we stopped
and then stayed mostly away from her
(to let her heal herself
is what we said)
When she found out
we were the world
and she was the children
she got angry
and lo and behold
by then was strong enough
to show us how brittle
we’d become
our smooth tongues notwithstanding
We could not explain
to her satisfaction
why we’d left her alone for so long
We splintered
a little more
each day as we saw
her strength and also
what scabbed and hardened creatures
we were
Horrible comrades
who lied
and turned away
not even
close
to being
of much assistance
in any guise —
not even
as the condescending parents
we had first appeared to be
and which she’d never wanted anyway
Originally posted 9/11/2010.
When it comes to popular proverbs,
laws of physics, rules of thumb, common knowledge,
sensible notions, and given assumptions,
exceptions are becoming more and more the norm.
Geometry is shifting.
Angles, never before provably trisected,
now regularly fall into neat triplet piles.
Shelter is losing its place in the hierarchy of needs.
Soon, it will be forgotten entirely.
It appears to knowledgeable observers
that knowledgeable observation is becoming a lost art
akin to alchemy and divination by gut of pigeon and pig.
If there are ghosts, they wear visors
and lean deep into ledgers
with our very dimensionality at their calculating mercy.
Nymphs, fauns, and revenant Pan himself establish Websites
and collect scores of followers
who fondle tokens of their avatars while staring at doorknobs,
thinking of the potential for rattling entries in the dark.
There are suspected reserves of container ships laden with butterflies
who are waiting to change the world’s climate.
My love, this world is slipping away into an immeasurable mystery.
Nothing we have known to be true is certain.
We should sleep with our eyes open now, scanning the dark for signals.
When we think we have seen enough, it will be up to us how we choose to live.
What we choose to measure.
What we count on.
How we refine and define the terms.
If a butterfly comes close, hold your breath.
If a god possesses you, count rapidly to one hundred seventeen.
If the door rattles in the night, we’ll cast a cold eye on it,
pass through the walls,
and escape carrying nothing with us —
not even the meaning of love, or of home.
We will come back for them later,
or make new ones
while holding up our thumbs to plead for rides to new places.
Our thumbs —
once the measure of punishment, as the story goes —
will become our transport.
We will have to depend on each other to carry each other.
Eventually, we’ll forget the evil source of the term and say:
a “rule of thumb”
measures the distance you were carried from your point of origin
before you decided you could live where and how you are living right now,
and is only fixed until the next departure.
And then we’ll say:
Love is the vector of human travel.
We’ll say:
Home is the fare humans paid for the transport.
And when we say human,
what we will see is aluminum pie plates —
when full,
flaky and soft centered;
when empty,
easily flung into flight,
shining as they fly.
Dark Matter 