As if all things were meant to wake
In the wrong hours of night
And all waking moments
Measured by the changing light.
Monday, January 18th, 2010
we write only what we know
the verbs wake us, keep us awake
with their incense
they surround us, their incessant
songs waking what once was night
now morning
now lunchtime
we write only of our narrow view
while bukowski paened his whores
and his liquors
we pain only for our shadows
these are not friends, at night i drink with
a hundred acquaintances
while my friend is dead, asleep
all his verbs now gifts to outlines
that remain
* * *
Cleaning out the drafts. Written in late 2008.
Monday, January 18th, 2010
Sister says, mother never lied
And father never told the truth;
Everything changes after that.
Why did it come so late,
Reason,
In its absence, one might still know
Magnificence, the outpouring of warmth,
Cross-eyed plateaus
From which the sky unfurled
And even keeled solitude,
A favorite companion.
Then it arrived,
Guarded like a gnawed tibia
In the storage closet.
Whole skeletons unraveled,
Filed amongst disco pants
And an odd tweed coat;
A dirty decade of unlaundered secrets.
There is no consolation, not yet,
Mother only knew her truth
Father believed his lies;
Everything changed before that.
* * *
Cleaning out the drafts. Written in mid 2009.
Monday, January 18th, 2010
Well, we were young
And turtlenecked all through spring, then it was
Summer on a turning millennium;
And when we turned
From one another, way back when,
It seemed like youth was always a safe excuse
To have been in love:
The heart darts and pushes
Past the curtains
Of sunshine, a furred critter
Suddenly wild.
Then, David says we can’t be it all.
I’d like to know why not (though
his logic is irrefutable),
A short fall cuts to a long winter;
The things in between
Were made in opposition.
The millennium no longer young;
Well, then there was that slow day so many
Years later
Wondering if this cat twisting
On my chest was a thing
Returned
Or if that other thing
Had ever run past the gardens
Into those wicked billows of sunshine.
Saturday, December 26th, 2009
He was born with hands as large as his appetite, grasping for his fair share. The other, not so lucky.
Monday, November 30th, 2009
Implicit in every word
Is the danger of being heard, as
On a sunlit afternoon
The rain ruined against
Her brow, and how she
Pronounces the coming wet
Might yield a gentler storm;
When all is flood,
How the arc gets named
Might defer a differing frame.
So tonight, she speaks
Of revelations, and I turn
To watch it in the clouds:
Implicit in every bird
Is the stranger being heard.
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
Should you wake
One morning on a small patch
Of green where love
Had grown careless out of neglect,
Should you froth
To consciousness beside
The sea of foam that
Swallowed your golden fleet,
I’ve only got a few words to say:
Stop drowning.
And for God’s sake,
Do something about the lawn.
It’s a mess.
* * *
That’s it. I’m done.
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
1.
We are to the brim with aches from teeth long shaken out on green apples and poised fists. Our teeth had left us toothless; we spat stones for each temptation, hands the manifestation of longing: two insects fluttering in search of a mating home.
2.
We are to the brim with blacks and blues remembered from tall dark woods trimmed to a single brilliant stick. Lo! How each generation seeks to define itself by suffering. I am damaged goods, she says, I may learn to love again but not now, not really.
3.
We are to the brim with wanting triggers emblazoned onto skin. For each tattooed minute we had lost a fighting head and thus gained a double conundrum. This is no way to live. This is no way to sing. The jagged son of Jupiter rises at our throats.
4.
Or none at all.
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009
Even so, we are not yet lost
As tanks clog the arterial heart of a city
And rockets swing above us.
We are not yet lost.
And here, spring still abounds
Amongst the lush fires along the Rhine,
A yearning more brilliant
Than the blush
Of a summer war.
* * *
Sigh. Completely unsatisfactory.
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
On the balcony across from where I am reclined, a young couple speaks to one another on a checkered couch. The man’s lips move with energetic discussion, the woman’s arms paint the gesture of a vase or the shape of some sensual curve. Their sliding door is open and I can hear the faintest afterthought from the record player in their living room. But even as the distant voices from down the street are carried to me, I cannot hear this couple just a balcony away. They speak in pantomime. Their outlines blur in the sunlight, and now they glimmer. This could be a scene from one of infinite dimensions: a perfect world where a young couple speaks to one another on a checkered couch, oblivious and silent to the other world watching just a balcony away.
* * *
This post might conceivably remind one of a similar scene(s) written a year or many years ago. I might conceivably agree.