Tag Archives: poetry

Recycling

A Bible and a wallet together on the nightstand.
Glasses (repaired many times) as well.
A body unmoving on the bed beside them.

Stop thinking of this as a tragedy.

That the Book is currently not being read is a case of inconvenient timing.
That the wallet contains only three dollars is a case of simple timing.
That the glasses may still be used in their condition is good timing.

Consider the body on the bed beside them as token spent upon a future.
It originally passed into sleep with the expectation of waking.

Inside the body, spilled oil and unending war combined into a greasy swirl.
Inside the body, scent and noise and smoke will be alive and thus contradictory.
There is meaning to be drawn from them in the unstirring body.
It sleeps because it cannot be awake for that to happen.
It remains asleep because it has not found what it sought.

The body was a piece on a board to be moved.
Movement was the domain of the money, the book, and the lenses in their glued frames.
When all were combined a man existed.

Do not imagine that because the man ceased the remainder is of no value.
Each is a section of a puzzle.
Each is one clue.

Bury the body where it can sustain something as it grows.
Give away the Scripture and the glasses.
Pay the Ferryman with the money.
All will be of use in the effort to solve the world.
That this man has stopped solving means nothing to the solution.

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When We Were In The Cult

When we were in the cult
we didn’t get a lot of sleep.
But they said we didn’t need it,
so we didn’t need it.

When we were in the cult
we talked funny; words had meanings there
that seemed a little off,
but we understood each other well enough.

When we were in the cult
we slept with others in the cult
and made a lot of noise about how
everyone ought to be with us.

When we were in the cult
everything that went wrong
was caused by something we’d done.
There were no accidents or errors.

When we were in the cult
we didn’t call it cult.  We just called it
“being there.”  We slept when we could,
fucked each other now and then,

tried not to mess it up
by thinking or saying or doing
things we shouldn’t.  When we were
in the cult, it wasn’t hard

to be in the cult
as long as we didn’t think
we were in one at all.
As long as we told each other that,

it wasn’t bad at all.

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Fear Of A Stupid Death

The fear I have the most trouble shaking
is not the fear of death itself —
I have no fear of inevitable things
like rain or sun or sagging in my chair
with a clogged heart.

It’s the fear of a public and stupid death:

choking on a paintbrush
in a bizarre art accident.
My stomach lining slit
by an errant bay leaf.  Stabbed
with a compass flung
by a petulant eight year old.

I know I’ll laugh about it in the afterlife
but if it happens, if one of those incredible
but embarrassing things takes me out,
in the seconds before I succumb
I know I’ll be thinking,

Christ,
all those years of smoking
and drinking and eating
fried bologna after midnight
were a total waste.

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Butcher Boy

I slip and lose myself
in the dim light
of the tale you’re telling,
struggling under its red surface.

There’s warm blood
and cold blood.
I can tell the difference,
and this is warm
almost to boiling.
I like how it feels,
and it doesn’t matter to me
if the blood you’re crying for here
is yours or another’s,
if the story is fiction or not.

All of us have bathed
in the stuff at some point
and understand how it clings
and tastes of iron, no matter
the source.  When it’s stage blood,
it stinks of sugar and sham;
there is steel here.

My tongue sliced open,
my ears full.
I break into air as you finish,
crawling onto the shore
you’ve provided for me.

A ride worth taking,
butcher boy.  May you never
have to tell it again.

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Dance Hall Days

You dance with perfection
now and then.

She tugs you forward, flirts you onto
the floor for a twirl, licks your earlobe
and says, “come with me.”

You beg off and she winks at you,
certain you’ll be back.

She knows that you know
that the only path
to loving her
means leaving this world permanently behind.

It does thrill you when perfection says,
Simply close your eyes and melt
into my sweet arms.  She smells of gardenias
and is soft as hollyhock pollen
on a bee’s leg.

It’s no wonder
you count pills into a ring box
and tie it a noose for a bow
after a turn around the floor with her.

But then you consider the impending poppies,
the fuschia regaining strength
after you brought it in from a blistering sun,
the cardinal couple on the feeder, the joy of
the three legged dog upon your arrival.

Last night’s mad music
fades.  Perfection blows you a kiss.
She’s the everlasting love of your life,
but she steps back to her table.

She’ll be there, her kiss as reliable
as a single shot shotgun
when you’re ready.  She’s on
your dance card and she’s sure of you
even as you fall to your knees
to bathe in the wind through your window.

You both know it will bring rain
eventually, a beat as smooth
as brushes on a cymbal,
that can’t be denied forever.

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Bite

sparked by the love of my own teeth
i smile even when i’m hardly ready
to show a face someone might like to touch

i’m thinking bite and sharp and blood
and torn armskin while it looks to all
like I’m echo of sunshine and good cheery days

i’m thinking cracking down to the marrow
and the pop of fingers as they’re bitten off
while it seems likely to the casual viewer

that i’m just being friendly
but i’m a smiley kinda villain
i’m a fake snake who looks splendid on a good lawn

during the day i follow criminals
to learn their shit
at night i regale the adoring with the day’s stories

longing to spit in their faces
i’ve got acid in a mouth pouch
i like the idea of the melt

and then i come home
alone and say gimme a reason
and a word to make into a vulture

and i’ll let it feast on my liver
moaning the whole time like i’m in cat heat
about how it hurts

i like it hurting
i like to spread the hurt
it makes me smile

and people love it when i smile
i look so good and smell like impending christmas
though i’ve got a gift for being hell

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Comment

Comment, son,
on the darkness you feel
when you hear the word
“Father.”

Comment on
its bat wings, how it navigates
in darkness, how it fills its mouth
with mosquitoes full of your blood.

Comment on its
soft opening, seduction
in its syllables and
its growling finish.

Comment, Mother,
on how it feels
when your son says it
in the hopeful, dreadful way.

Comment on its acid
and the bag of regrets
that hangs from it
as it flies from him.

Comment, say something
to make the word mean something
it hasn’t meant for a while.
Comment so you can both remember

how to breathe.

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The Book Of Father

Mario stirs
from a dream where he’s become
a children’s book.

He looks at the clock
and thinks, “I need more time.
I don’t know how I begin.

I know where I am supposed to end
but that first sentence, how to lead
a child into me…it is not there yet.”

He falls back into
his pages
and finds himself

staring at that first white leaf.
“There ought to be some
huge illustration here, bursting

with all the colors,
and one line that sets me in motion
and makes me irresistible,

but nothing comes to mind.
Why would I as a child
would have wanted to know

this story?  Maybe
there is no beginning
and I’m a pure middle,

graspable once I’m formed
but hard to enter.  Would I
as a child have made an effort

to look into me as I am now,
or would I have been ignored
in favor of another?”

Mario dreams on
as his daughter tosses and cries out
in another room, another house,

and Daniel, the new man her mother married,
rises to comfort her.
Dan reads her a story

full of moon and stars, mice
and fishes and bluebirds and turtles
who speak in rhymes of lovely things

set in a full home, a place
with no blanks.  She falls uneasily into
her own incomplete dreams.

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Haircut

shaved for battle…
used to be a rallying cry.

now, it’s half-assed half-blind
redemption song.  you laugh
to see what’s covered you up
as the locks hit the floor
and you’re hoping the old you
was underneath it all along

but you look a little balder
than you’d hoped, a little less
warrior and a little more cueball,
you can see how your greater silver
makes your brown look like less.

you’re shaved for a new battle
and the breeze in your scalp
makes you cooler,
in temperature if not in style;

if you’re going to lose the war,
you might as well get to the front
in comfort.

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These Sounds, These Holy Songs

My favorite sounds:

The clapping together of the halves
of an open book
because I realize
that it no longer matters to me
how it ends.

The sudden hum of a guitar
when struck by an errant hand,
as if to say a mistake
can lead to music.

The puff and crackle
of the end of a cigarette
as I inhale, simple fireworks
at a not too distant memorial.

The squirmy abrasion
of my fingers rubbing my closed eyes,
distant sand dancer in his box
on a stage in the past.

The rustle and creak of the bed
when I have been sleeping alone
and I am joined there by my lover.

My planet turning in space,
in orbit, constantly explaining
the nature of inevitability
(this one so rarely heard
I am amazed by it
as if for the first time
each time I hear it).

The whistle
in the back of my raw throat
as I drift into sleep, singing of persistence
and a hope of morning.

These are the sounds
of end time,
of my last lingering pleasures
in life, all speaking so softly
I might miss them, and I often do;

they move me enough to imagine joy
at hearing them again.  Keep me
alive, wonder-filled, straining
my ears for more.

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Karaoke

“When I’m singing that song —
yeah, I know it’s stupid, a stupid
song — who cares?  It’s like
I’m the star and I remember
why I liked it once, and I like it again
for a few minutes.”  She is clinging to
a margarita.  Someone
is singing a Prince song
very very badly
but the crowd screams
as if it was Prince himself
up there. 

I want to run out the door
of this young loud club, but I can’t:

it’s my turn soon, and “Dock Of The Bay”
is calling.  At least it’s not a stupid song
and I’ve always liked it
from when I first heard it
on a white clock radio
in my bedroom at fourteen. 

I’m no star
but I will do it
justice,
and then I’m gonna leave
and never come back.

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The Tree

Division returns
us to ourselves.

One cannot praise
oppression, but it
at least makes us
take a stand and say
“this is who we are
and as we are this
let us celebrate and mourn
what we alone understand:

that there is a tree
in a cleft
in stone
in a desert
and while the tree
would have been stronger
had it sprouted
elsewhere with more soil
and water, it still
stands and everyone
wants to touch the tree.”

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Kinship

Don’t shade your eyes against
the hawk above you
or the animal, unnamed but present,
that is slipping through the brush on the roadside.

Invite them
to your day — include them
as if they were family,
for they are, a branch

you have never known well,
but who nonetheless
carry news of kinship
from unknown regions.

You will not understand them.
That’s all right.  It will be their world
and yours touching, not blending
or overlapping — you are too far along

this path for that to happen,
at least right now.  For a moment, though,
you’ll feel them breathing, see flight
in a different way, try to name

what is in the underbrush simply by sound.
Skunk, possum, raccoon…or something else?
You’ll invent, perhaps, a new word
for what is unseen there.  It may call out

that swift creature
to stand before you unafraid. Maybe
you’ll stare back into its amber eyes
while the hawk observes you two,

gathers your images in, tells itself: yes,
I recall this, there was a time when all of us
took each other on as simple travelers,
and did not scare so easily.

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Hubris

Imagine his delight and surprise
at reading news of black widow spiders
in supermarket grapes
and lightning that burned down
Jesus. 

His first thought:

Some things are too improbable
to be feared
or understood.

He looked at the stories
with a practiced eye
for discerning meaning
and finding connections;
was at a loss
until he saw a third story
of a miracle cure for blindness
in a remote land: a child
touched by an electric eel
awoke from a three day coma
with sight. 

Then in an instant he recognized
how to spin it all
into a narrative he could believe:

the sky’s fire stroking down;
the poison in the seemingly safe fruit;
the girl opening her eyes to see
incredulous doctors straining to understand
what was happening —

pride stumbling against nature,
and nature just laughed.

He congratulated himself on figuring it out.

That all the links were only in his head
was something he never stopped to consider.

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Soft

Walking
among the hard and careless
without mentioning what I see
makes me soft.  There are
buddies, friends, and acquaintances
who do not see how things connect.
Can’t read between lines, can’t see
or hear the trembling in voices
afraid to be anything but soft.

Soft —
I long to remain in bed
all day, melt into the covers
and only think and speak
in cotton and down.  To be
legitimately soft and caring,
to slide into the pillows
comfortably with no desire
to rise; how can I remain so
when the world is hard
on the soft? 

Morning is the time
for the diamond tongue
that scratches truth into
the bathroom mirror.
I want to see those words
across my face.  Always
a reminder that hard
is necessary if soft
is to follow, and that soft
cannot be enjoyed
without knowing hard.

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