Getting Away (vignette)

I can remember those long days driving in your car. I sat in the passenger seat and pressed my face to the glass. You would speak to me; ask me how I was doing, as we made that three day drive back to Milwaukee, back home, where I freeze to death in the wet summer heat. I knew I would be going back to the hospital, back in Madison, where they sent me just a year ago and said I would change. Maybe I wanted to go back, I thought, maybe I wanted to hide away for another season, miss another year of school. Maybe it would let me drop out of school instead of flunking out. Maybe it would exculpate me from this goddam vacation I ruined. Maybe it would give me an excuse for being impotent at twenty-two years old. Maybe it would give you a reason to dump me like you should have the last time. I have changed, I guess. I’ve learned that coping and healing are two different things.

Untitled Vignette (6/8/11)

I awaken bitter in the late spring afternoon. The sunlight pinches my eyes. I feel the sweat and filth of my midday nap engulf me. I recollect the details of a dream. In it I am 15 and my father is dead and I am living with my mother and sister in a house that is much too large for a orphaned family of three, much larger even than the obscene size of the house we really had. In it I wander halls that seem to go on forever. I come to a door, the only one I have seen on my quest. I open it and my grandmother stumbles into my arms, as though she had fallen asleep leaning against the door and had been startled awake as I opened it. “How is your father?" she asks, "how is your father?" He died, I say. She collapses, slips from my arms to the floor. And then I wake up. My father is alive and well and living in Cleveland. I glance through the window blinds at the cherry blossom tree on my lawn, shedding its leaves to the summer sun.

The Cavern, or Tribunal on a Suicide (repost)

Death is becoming oneself.

Darkness mulled over with a decade of scuffed boots and rainwater,

shattered watch crystals littering the stone beneath.

No murmur scars it. No illumination.

Only the concussive silence of being,

traumatic understanding, most crushing realization:

“I am.”

The shortest speech, the minor soliloquy.

I am reminded of that tale which frayed as it fell across your lips;

that writer of fiction who ate himself sick on blank pages.

I am held still by the morality of a roasted lamb,

the one which swung writhing by its heels while outside the blizzard roared.

 I am shocked by your revelation that spring has come and passed since our time

beneath the planet Earth.

The last day above my eyes were held open by Hildegard the singer,

and the hymn which she chanted turned my ear inside out

that I may hear it,

in the same sort of way that you now hear this,

this passing communication which reminds you of your life.

Tonight that metaphor will break free of my language

and hover in the realm before space, where the undecided go,

that anesthesia of original sin.

In this way we are all becoming.

An Announcement (in case anyone is reading)

I just want to say that I may be removing some of my poetry from this blog, at least temporarily. I want to begin submitting poetry for publication, and many periodicals will not publish works which have been previously posted online. This is not to say that I will stop posting, just that the creme of the crop may have to wait for submission before they are posted here.

Poem for Waiting

The days stay, the hours cower,
The cares scare, the fright upon sight,
The mind unwinds, rhymes in time
with the sigh as it dies.

Jornada del Muerto (VERY rough draft)

Clouds in the dusty stratosphere form the circumference,

above us a sky the color of Cobalt-60

and a star beginning the asymptotic phase.

We float in a cracked bowl of uranium glass,

the rim carved in the shape of San Andreas at his crucifixion,

desert wind blowing his untidy beard,

jagged, wrinkled face burnt and hardened by collisions of nuclei.

I tumble the shards in my hand, wiping away the sand

from this shattered visage, attempting to burn the letter X into my palm.

An igneous obelisk rises in remembrance of lives not lost,

a published excuse, the Jinn of the Arabs released from his hydrocarbon vessel,

auguring lethargy to be measured on the Richter Scale.

Gypsum seems to develop a language of its own under these conditions,

a quantum suicide note scrawled in Enochian script across unknown tracks,

which extend for miles to no end.

Now we are all sons of bitches.

Alamogordo, New Mexico, 2011  

Untitled 3

The only transmission was encrypted.

The key had long ago been forgotten,

and none of this mattered,

since no one could tune to its frequency.

Wading through dead air, shaping, modulating,

Passing tunes with two chords from the throats

and lutes of motley troubadours,

who sing the same songs which once felled

that mistress of the Spartans.

This poem will not be read.

It will be forgotten like the words

to the tales on the walls in Montignac;

it is fancy, an impressive attempt,

but shy, disputed, belligerent, disturbing.

These sketches are in crayon,

a cute demonstration of fine motor skills,

proof of progress toward the Hellenistic ideal.

These songs are bar-room lullabies,

just slightly out of place coming from sober lips.

These questions are a lingering excuse for ignorance.

These answers are reason to fall apart.