one of my favorite hearts
just fell out of my arm
onto the filthy floor
and when I retrieved it
another toppled from the top
of my head, two more
slipped
from their perches on my shoulders
and there I was scrambling, on my knees
snatching them up before they were past
the five second rule and no longer
fit for consumption. only the original one,
number one out of fifty-five or so,
stayed tethered inside me
though it did flop a bit and bang against
the sternum as I fumbled about. why
do I need all these hearts, I rage,
it’s not like I need them to beat for me,
I’ve only fashioned them for the pleasure
of calling them mine, use them to hold
overgrown emotions as if they were vases
full of blooms soon to be dead. I toss them
aside, put them in the closet though I know
I’ll pull them out again, as they are mine
and never belonged to anyone else,
merely splits from the first, the one I use
to push a pulse around, the one heart
I protect against all comers, these supplements
were only there for protection, little urns
still holding the things I refuse to allow entrance
into me, compartments for those memories
that made and still make them race and pound until
they fall from me and gather
the indelible dirt from the ground on which I barely
can walk anymore.
Tag Archives: poetry
The Hearts
The Pursuit Of Happiness
All I was ever guaranteed
was a right to the pursuit
of happiness, not to
its capture. Not one thing
has ever been sure in life —
there’s no right to see
the aurora borealis, the
emerald flash, the Grand Canyon.
Billions have died without ever seeing
these things, without knowing love,
children, freedom from want,
care, disease, war, famine and
bad weather. Those things are mine
to face as well; I have no more right
to anything more than to be able to strive
for a chance at these things.
So when those rare moments come
of sun on my neck and a good message
from a friend, a word in the right space,
a robin refusing to move aside for my car,
a yellow tip on a daffodil spike,
I imagine myself a hunter
who will eat well tonight,
a seer thrown back into reverie
at a curtain of purple sheer before the stars,
a godly man sleeping soundly
with his family, sure of the morning.
I become a peasant who never expected
any of this, one of billions who have lived and died
since someone first scratched a bison prayer
into a rock wall, thinking of tomorrow
as if it could indeed
be different from yesterday and today;
whoever is modern cannot be more
than an ancient being
when seized by the ecstasy of a second
filled with a promise exceeded,
a pursuit completed for now
to be resumed in the seconds to follow.
Tired
Tired
is Butterfly
on the broken
chrysalis. Meteor
smoldering into
our sky. Tiger
crouching by the remote
irrigation ditch
at dawn.
Tired is the flat wheel
on the new car, the
white noise
of the ventilator,
the pump house wheezing
by the flood.
Tired, I am tired
as material sundered,
air riven, water
summoning its strength
to break through
an easy weakness
and flow freely again.
Tired as a mourner
on the coffin, closing
his eyes and recalling
walks, runs, late night
conversations. Closing his eyes
while still in contact
with the source of his fatigue
and missing the butterfly,
the shooting star,
the tiger choosing another target.
Stairway To Fela
I heard “Stairway To Heaven” on the car radio tonight, for the first time in a long time.
I have heard “Stairway To Heaven”perhaps three hundred times in my life,
having been born at the right time to have been inundated with it constantly
on the radio stations of my childhood. I do not own a copy of it for that reason,
I’ve never needed one if I wanted to hear it, all I have to do is think about it
and every note is immediately present in my head as it was written and played,
as it was in the beginning, is now, and forever shall be, world without end…
in a bag on my couch is a gift from a friend, a CD by Fela Kuti I have not yet heard.
I have heard much of Fela in my life, but never on the radio that I recall
except for the occasional show I’ve caught from the left of the dial
on community stations or public radio or lately on specialty Internet streams
devoted to the propagation of things not heard by many of us who have drowned
for years in the same old songs or new carbons of the same old songs. I have not heard
Fela Kuti three hundred times in my life, and I do not blame “Stairway To Heaven” for that,
it is what it is, and what it is is ubiquitous and perhaps as good as anything Fela wrote
but until now I’ve never had the chance to decide for myself.
Fela Kuti first began recording in the late 1960s, much as did Led Zeppelin.
What would be different if I’d heard Fela in my youth as much as I’ve heard “Stairway To Heaven?”
I’ll never know. I do know I’ll have to work hard and incessantly now to embed anything by Fela Kuti
in quite the same way as “Stairway To Heaven” has been embedded. I assume it will be worth the effort
from what I’ve heard of Fela so far, but I cannot help thinking that I may have been robbed
of something. Years have gone by with me hearing snatches of “Stairway” at odd moments and thinking
that I really didn’t like the song, but much like “Yankee Doodle” it’s one of those things that sits in me
as soundtrack or background, informing me, insinuating itself into the meaning of dates and places
that might have felt different with Afrobeat in its place. And in that alternate world of multiple possibilities,
who knows where I’d be? What arpeggios might I have learned to play upon my guitar
if “Stairway” hadn’t been the first thing to rise in my fingers when a resemblance to it was detected
in some random sequence I’d noodled forth?
I say now that if there had been a universe where a Fela Kuti song could have been heard
as often as “Stairway To Heaven” by suburban American teenagers,
I would have been willing to see what glittered there,
what I’d have learned, what music I might have made,
where I would have ended up.
Would I have said it then? Who knows? But I never got the chance to say it
and listening again to “Stairway” in my head I can say I am angry unto death with this unchosen path
and I don’t know if
there’s still time to change the road we’re on.
Slinky World
Once pushed
from the top of the stairs
it is supposed to swing itself
end over end
to the bottom,
but how many times does it instead
come to a quivering stop
only partway down?
Do this often enough
and you will become frustrated
and scorn its alleged magic;
sit instead with it in your hands
and bounce it back and forth,
stretch it out, fan the coils
like a deck of undealable cards;
eventually discard it
or give it away
or sell it to some sucker at a yard sale.
But you always buy
another one,
usually at a yard sale,
certain that this time
will hold the charm —
you,
a middle aged man
who will never learn.
A Thin Hand Moving
I broke
my stride and routine
to watch
a speeding bird
fly into the yard,
dip down over
the sopping mud
by the still-covered pool,
miss the house by a mere foot,
and arc back
above the trees
on its way out.
My watch hesitated
as if to say:
why bother keeping time
when it can be stopped
so easily?
It started again
as soon as it knew I’d seen it,
but a part of me remained
arrested by memory,
thinking of the confidence
born of instinct
that let that bird
swoop low before me,
certain of its ability
to avoid collision
and not die ignominiously
before my skeptical eyes,
its body smashed
and ragged, its spirit
banished in the second it took
for a thin hand to move
across the numbers of a dial.
Wildfire
Some driver ahead of me
must have tossed
a cigarette
into the shoulder grass.
Flames
are rising like thread
along the blades and smoke
is beginning to collect
above them.
I stop, whomp the fire
with a blanket from the trunk
and it spreads out
from the whoosh
of air. Out of control!
I open the cell phone
and call it in.
The trucks come
and handle the crisis in minutes,
though it’s burned much
in a short time. The men
seem almost bored
as they spray and shovel — small
wonder at what for them was small,
routine, nothing really. Third one
today, in fact,
one of them tells me.
Par for the course in August.
Too late now
I think of how careless
I’ve always been, how reckless
so often
in attempting to stop
destruction
with one blow.
Too sure of my intelligence
to use any of it, when all it would take
is a method practiced
often enough to be automatic —
and too late, also, I find
I’ve again made a wildfire
into a metaphor.
Perhaps
that’s also
part of my problem,
that everything looks like
my problem.
Invitation
Come.
Come rejects, come
unfamiliar, come
unfortunate and turquoise
from holding your breath,
you’re welcome.
Come unremarkable
and sticky leftover faces,
you’re welcome.
Come sexy
block-built blood sausage
kin, you’re welcome.
Come.
This is a dim place
paved with embers
but it’s not impossible
to brush aside the floor
and find your place.
The walls are full of razors
but lean against them carefully
and you’ll find rest.
Come, I cannot urge you
enough, come. We need you,
born of skin and rage, of
some errant parental mistake,
of heritage of smoking water
and acid farm, stinking of
slight and disfavor, street stained
and completely out of place,
come.
Come and we will fill each other.
Come and we will eat the arms of power
and wed in the light of pyres.
Come and link eyes and cheeks
with the remnant folk of divine discard
and learn to slink as dogs do, tongues wagging,
permanent smiles on our furry lips,
the best friends the kickers of dogs
will ever have. Come neutered and resentful,
raped and fleeing, safe and restless in affluent
storm drains, risk-friendly wealthy lovers
of filth, ermine fingered, ruby worshippers
at the hearth of fantastic breads: come.
We will butcher the cows of Eden
and explain our hunger for eons after.
We will burn the grains of salt mines
and marvel at the flavor of tears.
We will speak in low voices of tree hearted stars
startled by the force of our longing
for the velvet force of rushing wind
and the iron whisper of mountains falling
upon the necks of kings.
Come.
There’s need of all of us now,
dented as we are, alternative
to clean and tidy, contrast to
mild, challenge to bracelet and ring,
tattooed incisors,
pierced through our revolvers,
branded frontal lobes and no dice
worth throwing with all sides rubbed blank
long ago. Come
and stand. Just stand here.
We will be the fence of honor,
falling before the riot,
pointing forward.
Come.
See the very name
of light itself
begin to shift.
The Songbird
Fatherless
and thus denatured
she created a blue mask
and sang for pennies
of a life of romance
she never knew herself,
but the tunes were worth
the tears she forced
from her listeners, and they paid
more than that for them,
so she lived well
a life of creation
and character play.
Meanwhile,
a bird she’d been
for a short time, a bird
who’d fallen with her broken shell
to earth, died slowly,
unremarked in any lyric,
did not learn to fly,
and it’s hard to say
that’s a tragedy,
but I will, even though I might
be incorrect;
she would disagree, I think,
having most comforts in her hand
and no need to seek in the bush
for the fledgling past, yet
I know a song or two she tried
back then, and I swear
no money could buy them,
they were that lovely
and warm and true.
Bowls
Nested within you,
multiple bowls
holding the liquid
of you.
When one overflows
another will always catch the spill.
Little, if any, is ever allowed
to dampen the ground
where you’re standing.
How they are filled,
how they are shaken,
no one can say,
and you aren’t telling,
of course. But inside,
you are swelled and warped
from the moist damage,
and the slippery fact is,
you won’t contain yourself
much longer, and you know it.
The bowls teeter, totter,
the contents slopping about
inside. You’re seasick with the motion.
You’re going to founder, and fear —
the tiny bobber that won’t go under
as it is rocked in your head —
will soon be the only thing
you have left.
Funeral Service
Mourners mouth old words
and their prayers rise like desert birds
into dry air from dry footing,
vanish into empty sky
and head for places unknown.
All are informed by a scripture
that is enshrined in a thimble
of chipped bone
filled and refilled constantly
with ash —
its voice
is centered
on solving the mystery
laid away
in graves, is
reflected on with great deliberation,
practiced daily,
softened by time and then reformed
to appear
exactly as it has always appeared
upon the passing
of every believer.
All that being said,
faith remains
a legendary grain we hope to find
is tangible, is located
somewhere in the thimble,
a fragment we seek to hold
between our fingers,
rolling it back and forth.
Without A Song
Listen to Sonny Rollins:
specifically,
to a recording he made in Boston
four days after
the World Trade Center fell;
listen,
and try to tell me
you’ll ever want
to eat your gun
ever again.
Leveled
leveled
by the minute teasing
of greater life
he fell from the top
of the rock wall into
the deep water
but did not die
shook it out of his hide
and came to shore
quieter
ever after he slept
perfectly
and once awake
cared less than he did before
about becoming
another
and so became
another
Persona I (repost)
Repost for connection to the recent poem, “Persona II.”
“““““““““““““““““““““““““`
Part of me steps aside
and another part of me
steps forward
to make a name for itself.
It says:
I am the ocean,
I cover everything that is deep
and swallow everything
that dares me…no, wait:
I’m the harbor, the destination,
the notch in the edge of the ocean.
No, sorry:
I’m the slave ship arriving,
carrying stolen anguish. No,
that’s wrong: I’m the trader
waiting to sell the pain of others.
Again, sorry: I’m the new owner
of what shouldn’t be owned at all.
Ugh, wrong, wrong again: I’m
the cargo, the village of origin,
the buyer’s tag, the auction block,
the chain, the whip,
the eyes leaning on the crutch
of the North Star…
A part of me tosses in bed for hours
listening to this until
another part of me steps up
to elbow that first liar aside
and say:
I’m the feather on the plains,
the oil full of ghost trees,
blood on sand I’ve never seen,
the dirty songster in an alley
glimpsed once from a cab window
and then reimagined
to find room for my moral
at the end of his song.
No, says another part of me,
then tosses pennies at the others
to drive them back long enough
for a chance to say:
I am sponge enough
to have sopped up
everything all my lovers
ever told me.
I’m the mask
that gives me the freedom
to let them call themselves “cunt”
as I misquote them.
I am above reproach
when I put myself
in their mouths.
Closer,
says the sleeping part of me,
admitting that he’s indeed been listening
to all of this.
That part of me
becomes awake enough then
to say:
I’m stupid
and exhausted
from division.
I’m groggy
at this hour
but trying to figure out
who deputized me
to speak on behalf
of what has been screaming unheard
for eons. Why wasn’t it ever enough
that they could speak for themselves?
It’s like everyone and everything
is asleep and I’m an alarm clock
banging out “I, I, I, I, I, I, I…”
on behalf of full-on daylight
that ought to be enough but isn’t,
chattering
until I’m shut off
with a backhand slap
to the panic button.
Yes, that’s it,
that’s the answer,
I tell myself.
The part of me that has been
so fitfully drowsing
for so long
rolls back over,
while another part of me
smooths my hair, tucks me back in,
lullabies me into distant dreams.
When the breathing slows
and becomes regular,
that part of me looks up and says,
I am
the dummy on an insistent knee
with a hand up my back
and a substitute voice.
Look as close as you want,
you’ll never see those other lips move.
That part of me
will accept your applause
while the rest of me is put back in my box
to sleep.
Persona II
In the way a house where a murder happened
is sometimes hated and left empty for months
after, though the wood and walls
were not guilty of anything
and merely contained it, though the house
is not a murderer or a murder,
I let a person
step into me after careful consideration
and listening to them for a long while,
let them use my body and voice to speak
since I had an audience
and they did not, but might
once they stepped back out,
when people saw what I had done
they called me a liar and shunned me,
for ritual demands a sacrifice
and confusion
leads to black magic,
but that is what a shaman does
or a poet sometimes does, this comes
with the title, this dislike
is honorable, who told you
you were supposed to be beloved
all the time, it was never something
I was promised, nothing I expected,
and while there’s pain, in the end
a voice was well-heard though it was not mine,
and is the hearing not enough
to make the sacrifice worthwhile?
The Spirit wants only hearing, after all.
Dark Matter 