July 29, 2013

It takes approximately 30 years to get the message
that time is actually turning,
that this whirled world is headed somewhere,
that the mirror shows us a new face every time,
only it's nice enough to reveal us gradually
so we're not driven suicidal all at once.

We are creeping towards night
but only because it's day.
The dark clouds loom.
They move into the room.
The sun looms over them.
Do the flowers suffer in rain?
The Black-eyed Susans nod
with tears, Yes, yes, yes.

Yellow is plentiful in our meadow today.
The sun blowing its light all over the grass.
I am not comfortable unless surrounded
by green: grass, leaves, stems.
They place me. They hold me there.
The forest is a spa.

Today, summer, growth is winning
but the birds are not singing
about transcendence. In fact,
they are quite unhappy.
The sun barrels through the sky
burning away clouds.
The living flute of the beak forces
agonized notes into the indifferent face
of a sky so blue as to be totally mundane.

The earth is retracing its steps
like an insatiable nomad
or obsessive trying to find
something it lost it doesn't know
how many years back.

It finds the same handful of skies
it always has, a pearl necklace of stars
strung across it's murky night.
I've been dragged on almost 30 trips already.
It's the same shit every time.

White Fawn

white fawn shunned
finding family in snow
eyes pink
clairvoyant

a roost    hunter
puts eye
to arrow

white faun
closes eyes

growing her
crown

vanishes
into winter

The Art Room

Some kids found their rooms:
Math room pizza parties for those held in place by statistics,
four mirrored walls enclosing those given strong bodies pressing iron into muscle,
a tiny box for the Special broken off and hidden from the general population.
Those who went to the art room followed the music:
Stacks of scratched mix cds flourished with magic marker,
curated directly from fresh teenage hearts
made into sound flying over Doc's Art II class
as they sketch, carve, snack and chat.
The only room where students are allowed
to talk to each other all period
and pencils work to produce souls
instead of information.
There, the ineffable takes shape, in papier-mache, 
macaroni or glitter.

Here are the kids who knew how
to make mistakes. Perched on stools,
napping on the couch in the back,
the duds, the nerds, building things, hanging out,
shaving sculptures into their scalps. Their minds escaping
in paint-smear, light and earth, becoming amorphous blobs,
new species of globule bacteria squirming across a slide of canvas,
things under the microscope, not for interrogation,
but for companionship.
They reach no understanding with the world through movement
or the way the colors talk
to each other, they only reanimate the confusion into something
they can be friendly with.
Visions surface from the blank stare
of a white page.
They know how to get rid of that white;
just start getting it dirty.
Eventually it begins to look like something
clean.

Nate starts new genres every class
though he plays no instrument: oy-punk, ska-core, pinhead blues.
Corban and Chip engineer robots
from their dad's junked wiper blades and orphaned gadgetry.
Quiet Jennifer looks
into the peeled aperture of her camera.
Golden Nick sketches always,
scoring every conversation with his etching.
Their eyes cast aloof
from what everyone else is trained to see,
staring into discouraged hallucinations.
Unable to convince themselves the visions aren't there,
they exorcise them through messes of paint, wavering clay,
kilns burning mud into permanent shape. Splotched
mistakes arch gracefully into unforeseen purposes, the erroneous made integral.
What is discarded or shamed in other rooms is here followed with curiosity,
rescued and incorporated into a perfectly rendered mess
of liquid. The rejected is what was, what became.
Here kids let their hearts out, casually, without having to explain them,
like red paint from a shiny new tube.
Can't everybody see it? It's up there on the wall, collaged out of glue-stick
and diced magazine scrap.
They don't have to clarify it in the desperate pomp
of a poem or the insipid glitz of jazz hands. Put on the run by the logical requests
of Spanish teachers, they can relax here,
and so they are real, and so they are different.

As adults, they still use what they learned there. I watch them. They are my friends;
bartenders or line cooks or nurses or clerks, their basements are cluttered
with bric-a-brac, creative purchases, bought not out of necessity,
but simply because they explode the room into life:
A creek painting amended with a rhinestone deer cutout,
the orange booth of a defunct bowling alley,
Happy Meal characters leftover from obsolete Saturday mornings.
Their dens are hung with 4th grade prize-winners, Governor's Show picks,
a woodcarving of an eagle so ugly only a Mom could keep it hung
on her bathroom wall for thirty years.
Exacto knives and staedtler erasers point
from Warhol coffee cups on drafting tables,
T-Squares and light boxes are dragged through a gamut of low-rent apartments.

Maybe in the cupboard, maybe out in the garage,
a box lies closed
but not empty,
filled with crinkled tubes
of hardened oil, a palette stained
with a multifarious rash of colors,
a forest of stiffened brushes growing
from a ceramic ashtray.
Every now and then they put a record on,
pull this box out, open it
and again, with a little insistence,
the colors come flowing.

Drinking the Wine

New lovers lie on a blanket
Inifinity lays six
feet of dirt against the fresh
pine lid beneath

I wonder what they see
when they look in each other's eyes

unperturbed earth
accustomed to a long diet
of deaths most
of its graves unmarked
forgotten

The grass is given
a close shave and a fresh drink

Four corks run
through with the sharp end of a pigtail screw
lightly stained in dark wine
the dark wine pouring
from fingertips into
little covered cask

Seeing in the Dark

A bird is singing all night
He thinks it’s still the daylight
Opened my mouth      and out it came
a litany of blame
not at myself
but at everyone else

I don’t consider it stark
That I can see in the dark
I know the place     where I belong
It’s dancing to this song
without you
It’s what I like to do

Did you find yourself talking to me
Only accidentally
Accept my apology
I am so sorry

A rose isn’t real enough
until it signifies love
This one’s dead     it was mine
I plucked it from a vine
just for you
Now it’s something new

Runyon Canyon is deep
The hills you carved are too steep
It is a well      made out of dark
full of people’s hearts
thrown in coins
They go boing boing boing

Did you find yourself talking to me
Only accidentally
Accept my apology
I am so sorry

I was never Chinese
I only know how to say please
Did you forget      that I was here?
Are you that soaked in beer
because of me?
It is flattering

Did you find yourself talking to me
Only accidentally
Accept my apology
I am so sorry

Walhalla

One of my first High School Friday nights,
we embarked from Staab's house, a caravan
headed for Walhalla in search of frights,
the girls especially eager. Slowly turning man,
I wanted to be wherever they were.
We wound through the bush down the holler,
wild between the parallel struts of High
and Neil, busy mother roads. She was shy
and so was I, but somehow more affected,
senses pumping her heart with excess legend.
Parked under the bridge, Charlie directed
us to imagine a boy swinging in the wind.
Giddy with fear, she grabbed my arm for security.
I could not wait for her to do what she did to me.

Tendering My Resignation or My Last Poem

I woke this afternoon
and no longer wanted
to be a poet.
There was no fame in it.
There was no name in it
and certainly no money.
(That was my last rhyme)

I fell asleep
to words twinkling
in my head like stars.
When I woke
the windows were
clean with light.
I began to speak
in sentences with
no metaphors or similes.
(Those were my last metaphors and similes)

The questions I have been raising,
the ones with no answers:
I put them down and
pick up a tennis racket.
My friend is across the net.
One of us will win        one will lose.
I watch TV.         I ride my bike.
(No more caesuras only plain speech) 
I am not a poet.
I will not die for poetry.
I will live for life.

(One more
for old times sake.
There's something so
beautiful when
words are broken
apart
from each other,
when I
look at one
thing and see
another)

At last, I know
what I'm doing:
I'm giving it all up.
(My last stanza)

Goodbye

Why I Write These Things Down

I write things
down just in
case somebody
else might need them.

Their crisis might
intersect by chance
with my
words

their moment
searching through
a book with
this page.

They might be
looking
for someone
who's been
there before.

I hope
they find
me

and if
they don't I
can rest easy.

I tried.

I'll be
around
in case they
need me.

Excuse for Not Returning Your Text

The birds call from the vines clenching the church
next door but it’s the drums that clatter
me from sleep 8 o’clock Sunday morning
into that good prelude to the hangover
where you’re dopey and lucid as the young grey light
sneaks through the window without it’s  pants.

I have no girl with me, so I remember you
by your rambunctious smell, not at all like the perfumes
on the shelf of the Rite-Aid, your feral hair,
the wide wing-span of your eyes.
I click right past your text. Leave me alone again.
Alone is where we belong. We can give each other that.

She didn’t mean that much to me.
I’m not sure what does. I’m not sure anything can
in the delirious corral of this city.
You’re the last girl I’ve got to think of.
Maybe you regret that. Maybe you don’t know.

The D-train sleepwalks the bridge.
The Gowanus lays down and dies. The Hudson does not.
I am a Mummy in dirty brown sheets.
I turn up the volume on the birds and go back to sleep.

saints

the african marigold's melt in the sun
orange burning black like hot plastic
dad asks how they're doing from
3000 miles away. it is the last thing
he is permitted to nurture in his son's life
who unexpectedly and audaciously became
a man, marrying and moving across the country.

everything warns against attempting sainthood.
the saint's irrefutable soul is alien to
this world. many diseases rise to the skin.
persistently misunderstanding the logic of man
until no other conclusion can be drawn than
to be shot with arrows
he voluntarily strays into a fragmented wood
of renunciation and illuminating morbidity.
conclusions chime as bells of light
around the edges of his eyesight.
he climbs new sierras of pain
and he is on no journey but to climb higher

his head is a golden apple and his heart
belongs in a dog. later eras will pray to it
for now it's on loan and wrapped
in a fast-food sack on the dashboard
of a late-80s econoline.
most are saints.
none are beatified.
A seizure lifts him
and he is gently eviscerated
by the stars
halo melting to his scalp

Second Life

they packed the town into a big box
and shipped it to southeast ohio
they packed bryan adams into a box
and shipped it to southeast asia
they packed the baby into a box
and shipped it to madonna

drawn up with a silver pen
the EPZs jurisdiction
the cease fires declaration
and the stockyards reopen for business

the hundred thousand leaves shrouding
the white house roar
like a crowd, like a nation
a few man's hands
shake that sound
like snake's tails rattling
into a megaphone

the heavy metal band pleads self-defense
they just play music. that's all they do
they're not protesting
except in a vague way
against everything, they're not sure what
perhaps specifically the chaotic volume
of their early adolesence

a child bent around a pen
is told to count the lima beans again
he counted too fast
a snarling dragon pulled up
and he rode, logically concluding
in a sorcerer's castle's broad construct
of speedy fretwork and overbearing tablature

the card game made us
wizards, frankly, and we enjoyed it
more than being what we were
I throw the dice and the king's head
tumbles with them into a basket

a burmese girl sews the silhouette
of a man performing a feat
not meant for man
into the side of a shoe
that will wing you to heaven
if heaven is as high
as a slam dunk. boys
in a park joust styrofoam swords
and a hand is folded
behind the back to signify its heroic
loss in battle. it is regrown momentarily
to dunk a chicken mcnugget
boys in another park no longer
kill each other for the shoes
they stand and admire and compliment
I don't know what's going on in the ghetto
jay z is in a booth with warren buffett
and jerry seinfeld at daniel

they are saving the galaxy
the only one we have to save
which nobody lives in anymore
the forest is off in endor
the snow belongs to hoth

a boy fights a war
on his television set
in an afghan marketplace

in hd and widescreen
it's practically photorealisitic
the guns sound authentic
coming in 5.1 digital surround
from every direction

another boy fights a similar looking war
in an afghan marketplace
he wishes it did not look so real

the internet, our new planet

i shut the computer down
404: File Not Found