Monday, December 12, 2011

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.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

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.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

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.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

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.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

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  

Friday, November 4, 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.

Dichotomy

The sunset, rather than majestic, feels colder.
Rather than orange and purple, it shines dark brown,
a color matching the tarnished brick walk-ups.
A given row of four buildings is likely to feature
an Italian restaurant and a liquor store.
There are bars on all the windows
but still half of them are shattered.
Streetlamps are yellowed or broken.
Illumination comes from billboards
advertising the newest razor and latest fad.
Three university students stand under an awning
smoking unfiltered cigarettes. They speak about nothing.
The pharmacy on the corner boasts a soda fountain.
It has not functioned for twenty years.
There is a clamor in the alley.
An old man has been mugged and shot in the head.
The shooter walks across the street,
staring down cars which motor onward.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Untitled 2

The day you left me a monsoon rolled in the West,
dragging old tin cans down dead-end alleys,
the chirping of birds who so long ago fluttered.

Waves of khaki, their flotsam and jetsam a curious off-white,
washed over the concrete Taedong banks
as Grandmother pulled me by the wrist.

Her apartment smelled of ginseng wine.
The three rooms were appendages of their small inhabitant,
fluorescent pink water-lilies drenched in textured brown.

I sat on her kitchen floor (for the table could seat only one)
and did not speak, the tick-tick of the clock
seeming to enunciate the silence.

I could not look at her when she gave me my dinner.
Five years old, and we had never met.
The four blocks between us might have been a country.

I could not eat for three days in that house.
For each meal I turned away she hit me with her long metal spoon.
The welts were shaped like peninsulae.

I didn’t care. The pain was a distraction.
She watched her one TV channel all day
and everywhere in the rooms I saw you.

The potted bamboo trunk was the jungle tree limb which would hit you.
The stagnant water in the backed-up sink was the murky
river in which flowed your wine.

Every alarm in the night was your call to me
from a filthy hotel room, every car horn
was you screaming through a dream in a dank slumber.

The vivid memories from my a short life
flowed back in torrents without provocation.
I cried into a mite-infested pillow so Grandmother would not hear.

Every night I dreamed of lying next to you on the single mattress we shared.
Father was there, wearing the uniform you buried him in.
You kissed me on the cheek.

I stand on what was to be your doorstep.
Your body was likely washed to sea.
I love you.
Seoul, South Korea

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Cryptid

I asked his name and he said he wasn't quite sure
but he thought it was BagFat or something like that
that he had heard them scream at his sight.

He looked at me and his dark solid brown eyes
stared down mine and seemed to penetrate their
sockets. I understood it now - this was their mating,
the method biology had yet to uncover and had left
wasting away in the forest.

He spoke calmly after our ocular intercourse,
and he seemed the most contented of creatures.
What brought you here, he asked me?
I didn't know what to say. Rape. Fucked like a dog.
A family torn apart.
But now I understood. The best sex of my life
and I would remember it vividly because it happened in my eyes.
Nothing in particular I replied

And I posed the same question as he had.
He paused for a moment but did not seem irritated,
just completely pensive. Every part of him.
He looked at me. The ape, he said.
He had been pushed here by the ape.
Ironic I thought as I asked him for its name.
Man, he said. The only ape around here is called man.

Sunday, October 9, 2011

Abbottabad

May 2nd. Time stands still, minutes hanging in trees
and from telephone poles and fluttering in distinctly
Southern breezes through the cherry blossoms.
Hear the calling, gathering, words shining down
the otherwise empty blocks and courtyards,
characteristics of a nation so far from itself,
a world where mud is valued more than gold,
Marquis is not the only governor in the boudoir,
books are written frantically, invisibly over the air
but no one reads them, their tapping the beat to the
anthem of apathy. Lost, entranced in the confusion
of the moment, staring in my living room at the Second
Going as it races across the glass in front of me, I am
reminded of the vague hours, faintly floating through
the ether of childhood. The bare mattress
on my arms and face. The long, televised awaiting.
The splash of daylight on the dust in the air.
Laughter. The misunderstanding laughter of youth,
the most painful memory of the night.
More than anything, no explanation. Not to me.
It was my first smut, my first taboo,
discovered through hazy, pornographic reports,
discussed in hushed tones, innuendo,
hidden under beds, creasing and stained,
behind models and maps, performed by way
of a hole in a wall. And now they say it ends.
How am I supposed to feel?

Untitled

The dank, black earth,
an aviary, the slate wiped
clean, all clenched in the vice.
On them nicks and scratches
and crevices are dug,
and across their faces the
mark is written, a cue card,
indexed for future reference.
The mark is the Latin docemur
“we are taught.” The storm is my
teacher, spiraling in its circular
reasoning, gathering its disciples,
speaking in time with the
thunder so no one may hear.
It has taught me one lesson,
a chapter alone, gathered
by my pacing and its
tearing a hole in the wooden floor.
The lesson is this:
death is becoming oneself.

To S.