Art here.
Thoughts During Spring Cleaning
So I go to Grandma’s house one weekend, and it is
in a state of rearrangement. Pop-Pop died earlier this year,
and the attic has to be cleaned. No more reminders. We march up wooden stairs
(you can see where his cane had worn the paint
down) and don’t dare to talk for fear our Southern twangs’ll sing out.
Pop-Pop and Grandma first met at a bar where he was giving a
performance with his rock band. He was on electric guitar;
she was right next to the amp and kept messing with the wires when no one was looking
so he could come over and adjust it. Finally, he found her out, but, much to the
amusement of everyone else, invited her up to sing with him. Her pitch was as accurate
as a muskrat’s, he liked to say, and so high someone might’ve
pinched a capo around it. That’s love for you.
The funny thing about people dying is that you start seeing them wherever
you go. Like how any music starts sounding like rock, and any meat starts looking like
chicken wings (three dollars per basket with complimentary dipping sauce!).
Then it goes away for a little while, and you hear jazz and pop and hip-hop
and see hamburgers and hot dogs and sloppy joes until you see their photographs,
and touch their belongings, and (is that empty rocking chair rocking?) now all you can
hear is the melodic screeching of the guitar and the crumpling of beer cans.
I think about this as I open the first box, dust graying the sun-lit air.
Inside are stacks of notebooks – chords and song lyrics, journal entries and
newspaper clippings. The Huntsville Times. Madison County Record. Black-and-white
memories, sputtering to life under Pop-Pop’s chicken-scratched musings.
Grandma came up with us at first, but as soon as she opened the first box,
she froze up. Inside it were magnets and key chains and postcards from
1970, when she and Pop-Pop drove around the entire continental United States
in his new Toyota Chaser. It was red and flashy and got them pulled over four times -
well, technically five, but one guy was a fan of Pop-Pop’s band. That trip,
Pop-Pop said, was what convinced him to marry her.
So Grandma stays in her room and sifts through what’s
left of her treasure trove of memories.
There are many we share –
when Pop-Pop cannonballed into the lake on his 60th birthday,
when we missed the 4th of July for the first time in five generations
because Momma ordered plane tickets for Huntsville, Tennessee
instead of Huntsville, Alabama
(so that’s why they were so cheap?)
when Peter’s stacks of comic books broke the bookshelf that
Pop-Pop claimed he built correctly –
but Grandma has the most of us all. How do you carry the burden of half a century on
crumpling shoulders? How do you feel when you reach inside a treasure chest
to scoop out more gems, only to find your fingers gasping
at fistfuls of forgotten air?
We sort for hours. Finally, I reach a pile of guitars – some electric,
some not – stacked haphazardly like powdered-sugar pancakes. The rusted clasps creak
in protest under nosy fingers, but what wants to be found will be in the end.
I pick up a light brown acoustic, the kind you see in music classrooms. It has a
capo on it. Momma comes up from talking to Grandma and sees the guitar in my hand.
Go bring it down to Grandma and play Nightingale to her, she says.
Grandma’s sitting down on the bed, hands folded primly and head
up like she’s balancing a book on it. She’s a robot, the way her head swivels
to watch me pass and sit next to her. I want to tell her I’m going to play for her,
but she’s just staring blankly at me, and I realize (a punch in the gut, worse than
that fistfight in third grade) that to her,
I’m not her grandchild, I’m not her family, I’m not even a tiny facet of a sapphire,
and I wonder if any gems are still there, or if they’ve caved into dust, into
kaleidoscopes of color, of powder that stains when you pull away.
But I prop the guitar up on my thigh and try to take the capo off. It creaks under
my nosy fingers (the guitar strings under it don’t want to be found),
so I give up and just start playing.
Luckily the song’s just chords, or I would have messed up immediately.
I almost do – the strings are so out of tune, nearly a whole step down from what
they should be. As I play, the person next to me shifts closer. I chance
a glance and find she is looking at me expectantly – does she want me to sing?
So I open my mouth and start singing (nothing like a nightingale) and
after a verse, Grandma starts too. And Momma and Peter come down and
stand at the doorway and start singing with us, and
none of us care that our pitches are as accurate as a muskrat’s.
Partway through, I think we all forget the lyrics (Pop-Pop had a
crazy guitar part here, so we were all too focused on him, I guess)
so everyone stops and I’m just strumming away. And then we all
start singing, improvising at the same time, some words we think are the lyrics, but
I am the loudest, and after a few seconds, everyone else stops again.
Everyone just
stops and listens to me singing,
and if you’d looked closely,
you would have seen a man playing Nightingale
and a woman sipping beer, their faces half
illuminated under dim bar lights.
-----
enduring
in icy rain streaked with snow
a unique vagrant beam of sunlight
kidnapped into benevolent captivity
in the deep-blue light
of sparkling diamonds
----------
Welcome
To the bearer of gifts,
The ones in flight,
The causer of shifts
From day to night,
The wanderer of mind
In heart and soul,
Of our bookish kind--
Writing as bells toll--
The one who creates.
The one who cares
Someone who relates
The load one bears,
A musician, writer,
A reader in motion,
I bid a fellow creator
Of similar emotion:
Welcome.
-------
The One-Stoplight Town
Red.
Washing machines
lock their jaws and spin
Until the clothes within them submit
To soap
and centrifugal force.
Green.
A gaudy neon sign
Advertises adult videos and magazines
While below mothers pull their children by the hand
Pretending not to see.
Red.
Quiet men with faces like bricks
Inch their treaded trucks over potholes
The same way tanks crawl through a pockmarked battlefield
Under a wounded sky
Leaving behind bruised hearts and broken bones.
Green.
The sign in the front of the convenience store says
"There is limited cash on this property
Employees have no access to the safe"
It also says
"Help Wanted".
Red.
Shingled carbon copy Levittown houses
Brood like chickens over secrets
Whispered from parent to child
That everyone knows
That no one talks about.
Green.
The elders at their corner
Peer through newspaper articles
At the strangers’ cars
That pass through on the way
To higher expectations.
Red.
-------------
Delirium
Lying in my bed on a cold, winter night,
My cheek pressed against a pillow;
I lie in alone,
My cynic consuming me,
Already taking me over.
Beside me a female voice sings,
The words ringing through a speaker,
Words of a far-off place:
Of beauty, of love, of longing,
Of joy, of quaint folk dance,
Of merriment with friends and neighbors--
Of a place I’ll never go.
The voice floats around me
In still, indoor air;
Filling my room with music.
Sonorities resonating in body and ear,
Flooding my brain with sound.
Outside I hear the howling wind
Pounding against the walls.
To the wind I’m in a far-off place,
A place it can never reach.
If ever it tried it would surely fail,
Gasping back in pain
While smashing against the walls.
The voice from the speaker reaches a climax,
Regressing back in agony
For all the things it’s lost:
The things which made it whole.
Wishing it could do what it cannot
Despite all the times it tries.
To redo its past missteps,
To attempt to do the impossible:
To bring back that which it never had--
And thus that which never truly was.
I sigh, trying to think of happier things,
Of the good that’s in the world,
But nothing keeps me away for long
From the places that I belong.
Depressed for reasons that I know not
I lie upon my bed,
My heart palpitating with sadness.
Crying,
I think sobering thoughts,
Mournful as if for the dead.
…I hear a soprano’s voice in the distance--
Or is it just right here?
Or maybe, is it in my head?
Outside the wind chills the walls,
Howling in its agony.
Blinking, a tear rolls down my cheek,
Suffocating in my pillow.
Soaking the sinewy threads,
It breaks into a million parts;
Forever gone:
Waiting to evaporate.
-------------
The Case Against Love
I fear what you can do
I fear more what I can do
To you and me both
----------
Qualified
I just want to work.
I am a machine with broken cogs and
torn apart limbs.
If I could be fixed, I
would; but I think
I can’t.
I can’t.
I cannot breathe,
but I am exhaling
I read this story
once,
of a mother
who gave her child’s palm
a kiss.
She said that
from then on,
she would always be with him,
No matter what.
Perpetually, I wish.
I wish that someone would be with me evermore.
I dream of
their ability to free me from my torture,
my hell;
their presence a constant warmth,
their arms an unyielding support,
their kiss a faint whisper upon my skin.
They would need to be a mechanic, to be
able to fix ‘Broken’,
as I am shattered.
But if they could feed me breath,
If they could mend my fragments;
If they would breathe me air,
If they would hold me from falling,
I’d fall for them;
No matter what.
Them being my solace.
Them being my love;
That’s all I need.
If they clutch me when I am broken,
If they cradle me in their arms when my oil drips from my face,
If they kiss my palm, just once…
Then maybe, just
maybe... I can work again.
Even though my dermis
frays and frets;
though my lungs rust and
my gears are rived from my chest,
maybe I can be loved.
I am exhaling,
but I cannot breathe.
I can’t.
----------
Requiem for a Red Admiral
On a windswept spit of land in the westernmost reaches of Scotland, near the suggestion of a house revealed by low stone walls filled with long grasses, I found you.
You, trembling like a frightened rabbit in the harsh gale off the storm-tossed waves, were about as long as my thumb. You had been tangled in the grass, or were perhaps clinging desperately to it to avoid being blown into the ocean. I was not certain, could not be certain, at first. Your top set of wings - bright orange with black spots - caught my eye. As my family traipsed ahead like so many mountain goats, I stopped and crouched by your side.
My towering body shielded you somewhat from the wind, but still your wings fluttered. I could see that underneath the orange wings was a set of white ones, flecked with black spots. One had been damaged, the corner frayed as if you had escaped a predator. Beneath your wings, you were covered in fur; I imagine you would be soft to the touch. But I didn't touch you.
I didn't think you were dead at first. The way the breeze played with your wings made me think that you were just resting, just waiting for the wind to die down so you could continue your quest. But this was your final resting place; you only seemed alive by way of tangled stalks and teasing wind gusts. You could not have been dead long: with your bright colors, one of the seabirds wheeling above the rain-slicked island would have spotted you easily and made a swift meal of your carcass. My presence, looming above you and below them, was only delaying the inevitable. I was struck by a sudden, immensely deep sadness at your passing.
You seemed out of place on the dull grass, under the gray sky, like a sudden sunbeam through a storm cloud. I wanted to stay, a mourner lingering at your wake. I wanted to keep you safe. Maybe I could have carried you into the ruined stone house. Maybe I could have hidden you away from the wind and the birds, if only for a little while. But our boat back to the mainland was leaving soon, my clothes were beginning to transition from damp to soaked, and a million other petty excuses made me stand up and follow my family over the rotting seaweed and barnacle-covered rocks back towards shelter.
Once on the boat, rocked into a hypnotic state by the waves, I pondered over my sadness. Why had your death shaken me so? “Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living,” mused de Saint-Exupery, and for a moment, dear departed admiral, you exposed my core to the howling wind. Perhaps the sadness itself wasn’t the point, but rather its manifestation. That day, on a windswept spit of land in the westernmost reaches of Scotland, I paused for you, and my soul vibrated.
---------
small
small means
not impressive
in size or importance.
people say I’m small.
they mean it to be nice,
as if all small things are
cute and young
and full of life.
I don’t feel cute though;
I just feel small.
-----------
Discoveries
colored stains
paired with drawings.
blood,
prettily a-moving.
------------
Lalita On a Morning Day
i like the color of coffee ice cream
and when we're singing lalita on my bedroom floor
i've got so much to say to you
and no place to hide
except this one spot beneath my tongue
i like the sound of ocean waves
and when we read with our backs pressed together
and i don't know if i wanna dance
or support the wall the whole night
so i'll divine the answer from the flowers you sent me yesterday morning
and i like doing the tango
but i don't like this touch-and-go
when we're swinging on a sunday night
i never step on your toes
and your palms are never sweaty
but i like it the best
when we're still singing lalita on monday morning
and waiting for the rain to pass us by
-----------
what they should have taught you about the water cycle.
water expands when it freezes. that’s how cracks in side-
walks, or roads, or rocks
form. (you don’t
break anyone’s back when you step on them, though.)
now, just imagine
the words in mouths trickling down, tumbling
and sliding, each
over the other, smooth like paper
with paper’s razor edge. just imagine them con-
densing onto your skin, and being soaked in. the
outside takes the brunt of the razor
edges, but the cuts fade over time until you
forget anything ever happened.
inside, the words have been slowly flooding the brain,
turning it into a water balloon,
seeping into sponge-like nerves, drown-
ing synapses and memories
until your lungs feel squeezed by too many thoughts,
until you can’t breathe or speak or laugh, can only
smile like everything’s fine.
it’s strange how winter sneaks up on you so quick-
ly, how one day, the trees will be full and green,
but before you know it, they’ll start to redden,
and the days’ll get longer, colder and colder and
colder until water turns to snow turns to ice. branches
can only hold up for so long before they
break from all that negative
space.
and whenever you feel like you’re about to ex-
plode, just go to the bridges you’ve built.
toss a pebble in the water.
watch it slice through the surface.
watch it get swallowed whole.
all that it once was is only a blip in the past now.
think about how boats slice wounds through water,
how they are smoothed over just as quickly,
how you are as small as a pebble compared
to everything else. they say jumping off a bridge into water
is like jumping from a building onto concrete - you’ll break
either way - but
think about it. all those dry children, all those adults
who haven’t yet reached burst-
ing. think about the mess you’ll make.
if you’re going to explode like a water balloon, keep it
clean. everything goes back to the ocean, anyways.
and when all those words gush out of you,
all that paper a glutinous ball of
dreams that could never quite be linked together,
when your life is told in patterns of jagged ice
and your heart can never be melted, despite what kids’
movies tell you, when
your water balloon hits its target,
all that you once were will only be a
piece of colored rubber.
-------
Stomach Ache
It wasn't the world that swallowed me,
But me who engulfed the world.
And let me just say, it wasn't pretty.
---------
She Did
Smoke fell through the air in white wisps, slowly fading out
Lights dimmed to eerie illumination, an atmosphere of solemnity
Chords from the obsidian piano in the corner, deep and rhythmic
She sang through the smoke
She shone through the light
She swayed through the song
------------
Untitled
You smile so wide for someone with so few teeth, abuelo.
You sway past handshakes like a boxer sways past haymakers,
you don’t believe in strangers
so you greet people heart first.
You treat people like porcelain,
you hold them like one wrong move could shatter them,
because you know it's happened before.
------------
On Writing:
A CLUB FOOTED FOXTROT PERFORMED IN THE CALLOUSED HEART OF A SLAUGHTERHOUSE.
Every word assembled with care,
BUT LOOSED WITH RANCOR.
A jagged tooth maw, in charcoal and graphite screaming
I’M STILL HERE.
Every angle acute and every line a bat out of hell leaving dust with every stygian beat of its cracked wings,
I WRITE LIKE I’M CARVING MY EPITAPH BETWEEN THE CURVES OF YELLOW CANVAS HEADSTONES,
TREATING SPLINTERS LIKE SHRAPNEL,
BUT REALIZING THAT THE ONLY WOUNDS THAT MATTER ARE FATAL,
AND IF IT ALL COMES OUT CLEAN,
I wasn’t trying hard enough.
If I seem insincere it’s because I side with poetry over prose,
AND IT'S MY JOB TO MAKE
MOUNTAINS,
out of mole hills.
-----------
Heirloom
The wall of Mary Landhorn’s living room isn’t the most comfortable spot in the world. The mustard paint is cracking behind my bare back and the whole apartment smells of mildew. There’s a fireplace on the far side of the room which, if lit, would brighten the room considerably, but she never bothers. She just turns on her lamps, scattered around the room on tables, under tables, in the middle of the floor, one even sits on a brown leather armchair in the corner of the room. Her lamps don’t do much; most of their light is swallowed by their shades, old dusty maws of thick yellowed paper. I watch the door. I’m always watching the door, waiting for someone to come in and rescue me. I don’t want to be here any more than Mary does, but she has a choice. She says it’s her job to stay, her mother would have wanted it that way. She wants to be just like her mother.
The door opens and Mary swings into the room, a burst of energy interrupted by the sudden gloom of her home. She’s beautiful when she has energy. Sweeping in from the corridor or stepping out for the evening she’s radiant with life. But she always comes back to the apartment. Now she dumps her satin purse, kicks off her d’orsays, and stands still. Her mind is running a marathon, but her body is tightly packed into one spot in the middle of the carpet. She’s looking at me and I know what that means. She decides to wander over, slowly at first, like going up to an old friend and not being sure if they’ll recognize you. Then she smiles. It’s not pretty and it’s not kind; it’s a wild eyed kind of smile, like she’s forcing herself into a high. It’s a grimace masked with a fake sort of pleasure. Mary raises a hand, strokes my ruined lips, and drops it. She has blood on her fingers and she looks sick. She tries to wipe it on my shirt, and dirties herself more. Panicking now, she starts a low whine, wiping faster, getting more of my gore on her wrist, her arm. She’s squealing, her face scrunched against tears, as she dances. My body is bruising under her frenzied blows, but I feel nothing. I just see. She folds into a paper doll, ripped into pieces by the work she’s done on me, her desperation to make herself clean distorting her cleanly drawn lines and finely cut edges. Finally she stops in tears, and I almost reach out to comfort her. The beautiful doll whose mind has been shattered. She limps out of the room, wretched words spilling off her tongue, faster than her tears can rinse them away. I can hear the kitchen sink running in the next room; the smell of soap wafts in. It stops and she comes back, no swinging or sweeping, a hobble of hunched back and crippled motivation. She would crash onto the couch except she’s so slight, so small, and so scant. It ends up as more of a pfff. In her hand, Mary holds a picture, just larger than a book and with all the content. Her mother’s face, framed with silver and garnet, calms her. It’s a nice face, neat in its expression, held together with a fine string of dignity and reputation. It ties her darker secrets in beautiful swathes of silk. I suppose no one bothered to ask what could possibly need such a rich costume when she was alive.
Mary seems to draw inspiration from the picture, and lets her mother’s concrete expression act as the motivation she needs. After ten minutes or so, she looks up. Her eyes are dry and red, her lips parched and chewed. She sighs, gently placing her mother on the cushion beside her, and stands, composed. She's ready for what she has to do, what she does every night before she goes to bed. A sick lullaby before the lamps go out and it becomes night. Standing right in front of me, she stretches, her arms pulling back behind her frail body, her leg muscles lengthening even as they struggle to support her emaciated form. Again, she touches my face, the blood that comes away gasoline to the flame, and she explodes, not in horror, but in zeal. Nails cut me, knuckles rap me, fingers rend my skin. I submit myself to it. I let her rage, becoming the storm that thunders in her mind. It's not her fault. She's just a girl. It’s what her mother would have wanted.
---------
EGG
I am an egg, cracked
On the frying pan of life
Not sunny side up
Thoughts During Spring Cleaning
So I go to Grandma’s house one weekend, and it is
in a state of rearrangement. Pop-Pop died earlier this year,
and the attic has to be cleaned. No more reminders. We march up wooden stairs
(you can see where his cane had worn the paint
down) and don’t dare to talk for fear our Southern twangs’ll sing out.
Pop-Pop and Grandma first met at a bar where he was giving a
performance with his rock band. He was on electric guitar;
she was right next to the amp and kept messing with the wires when no one was looking
so he could come over and adjust it. Finally, he found her out, but, much to the
amusement of everyone else, invited her up to sing with him. Her pitch was as accurate
as a muskrat’s, he liked to say, and so high someone might’ve
pinched a capo around it. That’s love for you.
The funny thing about people dying is that you start seeing them wherever
you go. Like how any music starts sounding like rock, and any meat starts looking like
chicken wings (three dollars per basket with complimentary dipping sauce!).
Then it goes away for a little while, and you hear jazz and pop and hip-hop
and see hamburgers and hot dogs and sloppy joes until you see their photographs,
and touch their belongings, and (is that empty rocking chair rocking?) now all you can
hear is the melodic screeching of the guitar and the crumpling of beer cans.
I think about this as I open the first box, dust graying the sun-lit air.
Inside are stacks of notebooks – chords and song lyrics, journal entries and
newspaper clippings. The Huntsville Times. Madison County Record. Black-and-white
memories, sputtering to life under Pop-Pop’s chicken-scratched musings.
Grandma came up with us at first, but as soon as she opened the first box,
she froze up. Inside it were magnets and key chains and postcards from
1970, when she and Pop-Pop drove around the entire continental United States
in his new Toyota Chaser. It was red and flashy and got them pulled over four times -
well, technically five, but one guy was a fan of Pop-Pop’s band. That trip,
Pop-Pop said, was what convinced him to marry her.
So Grandma stays in her room and sifts through what’s
left of her treasure trove of memories.
There are many we share –
when Pop-Pop cannonballed into the lake on his 60th birthday,
when we missed the 4th of July for the first time in five generations
because Momma ordered plane tickets for Huntsville, Tennessee
instead of Huntsville, Alabama
(so that’s why they were so cheap?)
when Peter’s stacks of comic books broke the bookshelf that
Pop-Pop claimed he built correctly –
but Grandma has the most of us all. How do you carry the burden of half a century on
crumpling shoulders? How do you feel when you reach inside a treasure chest
to scoop out more gems, only to find your fingers gasping
at fistfuls of forgotten air?
We sort for hours. Finally, I reach a pile of guitars – some electric,
some not – stacked haphazardly like powdered-sugar pancakes. The rusted clasps creak
in protest under nosy fingers, but what wants to be found will be in the end.
I pick up a light brown acoustic, the kind you see in music classrooms. It has a
capo on it. Momma comes up from talking to Grandma and sees the guitar in my hand.
Go bring it down to Grandma and play Nightingale to her, she says.
Grandma’s sitting down on the bed, hands folded primly and head
up like she’s balancing a book on it. She’s a robot, the way her head swivels
to watch me pass and sit next to her. I want to tell her I’m going to play for her,
but she’s just staring blankly at me, and I realize (a punch in the gut, worse than
that fistfight in third grade) that to her,
I’m not her grandchild, I’m not her family, I’m not even a tiny facet of a sapphire,
and I wonder if any gems are still there, or if they’ve caved into dust, into
kaleidoscopes of color, of powder that stains when you pull away.
But I prop the guitar up on my thigh and try to take the capo off. It creaks under
my nosy fingers (the guitar strings under it don’t want to be found),
so I give up and just start playing.
Luckily the song’s just chords, or I would have messed up immediately.
I almost do – the strings are so out of tune, nearly a whole step down from what
they should be. As I play, the person next to me shifts closer. I chance
a glance and find she is looking at me expectantly – does she want me to sing?
So I open my mouth and start singing (nothing like a nightingale) and
after a verse, Grandma starts too. And Momma and Peter come down and
stand at the doorway and start singing with us, and
none of us care that our pitches are as accurate as a muskrat’s.
Partway through, I think we all forget the lyrics (Pop-Pop had a
crazy guitar part here, so we were all too focused on him, I guess)
so everyone stops and I’m just strumming away. And then we all
start singing, improvising at the same time, some words we think are the lyrics, but
I am the loudest, and after a few seconds, everyone else stops again.
Everyone just
stops and listens to me singing,
and if you’d looked closely,
you would have seen a man playing Nightingale
and a woman sipping beer, their faces half
illuminated under dim bar lights.
-----
enduring
in icy rain streaked with snow
a unique vagrant beam of sunlight
kidnapped into benevolent captivity
in the deep-blue light
of sparkling diamonds
----------
Welcome
To the bearer of gifts,
The ones in flight,
The causer of shifts
From day to night,
The wanderer of mind
In heart and soul,
Of our bookish kind--
Writing as bells toll--
The one who creates.
The one who cares
Someone who relates
The load one bears,
A musician, writer,
A reader in motion,
I bid a fellow creator
Of similar emotion:
Welcome.
-------
The One-Stoplight Town
Red.
Washing machines
lock their jaws and spin
Until the clothes within them submit
To soap
and centrifugal force.
Green.
A gaudy neon sign
Advertises adult videos and magazines
While below mothers pull their children by the hand
Pretending not to see.
Red.
Quiet men with faces like bricks
Inch their treaded trucks over potholes
The same way tanks crawl through a pockmarked battlefield
Under a wounded sky
Leaving behind bruised hearts and broken bones.
Green.
The sign in the front of the convenience store says
"There is limited cash on this property
Employees have no access to the safe"
It also says
"Help Wanted".
Red.
Shingled carbon copy Levittown houses
Brood like chickens over secrets
Whispered from parent to child
That everyone knows
That no one talks about.
Green.
The elders at their corner
Peer through newspaper articles
At the strangers’ cars
That pass through on the way
To higher expectations.
Red.
-------------
Delirium
Lying in my bed on a cold, winter night,
My cheek pressed against a pillow;
I lie in alone,
My cynic consuming me,
Already taking me over.
Beside me a female voice sings,
The words ringing through a speaker,
Words of a far-off place:
Of beauty, of love, of longing,
Of joy, of quaint folk dance,
Of merriment with friends and neighbors--
Of a place I’ll never go.
The voice floats around me
In still, indoor air;
Filling my room with music.
Sonorities resonating in body and ear,
Flooding my brain with sound.
Outside I hear the howling wind
Pounding against the walls.
To the wind I’m in a far-off place,
A place it can never reach.
If ever it tried it would surely fail,
Gasping back in pain
While smashing against the walls.
The voice from the speaker reaches a climax,
Regressing back in agony
For all the things it’s lost:
The things which made it whole.
Wishing it could do what it cannot
Despite all the times it tries.
To redo its past missteps,
To attempt to do the impossible:
To bring back that which it never had--
And thus that which never truly was.
I sigh, trying to think of happier things,
Of the good that’s in the world,
But nothing keeps me away for long
From the places that I belong.
Depressed for reasons that I know not
I lie upon my bed,
My heart palpitating with sadness.
Crying,
I think sobering thoughts,
Mournful as if for the dead.
…I hear a soprano’s voice in the distance--
Or is it just right here?
Or maybe, is it in my head?
Outside the wind chills the walls,
Howling in its agony.
Blinking, a tear rolls down my cheek,
Suffocating in my pillow.
Soaking the sinewy threads,
It breaks into a million parts;
Forever gone:
Waiting to evaporate.
-------------
The Case Against Love
I fear what you can do
I fear more what I can do
To you and me both
----------
Qualified
I just want to work.
I am a machine with broken cogs and
torn apart limbs.
If I could be fixed, I
would; but I think
I can’t.
I can’t.
I cannot breathe,
but I am exhaling
I read this story
once,
of a mother
who gave her child’s palm
a kiss.
She said that
from then on,
she would always be with him,
No matter what.
Perpetually, I wish.
I wish that someone would be with me evermore.
I dream of
their ability to free me from my torture,
my hell;
their presence a constant warmth,
their arms an unyielding support,
their kiss a faint whisper upon my skin.
They would need to be a mechanic, to be
able to fix ‘Broken’,
as I am shattered.
But if they could feed me breath,
If they could mend my fragments;
If they would breathe me air,
If they would hold me from falling,
I’d fall for them;
No matter what.
Them being my solace.
Them being my love;
That’s all I need.
If they clutch me when I am broken,
If they cradle me in their arms when my oil drips from my face,
If they kiss my palm, just once…
Then maybe, just
maybe... I can work again.
Even though my dermis
frays and frets;
though my lungs rust and
my gears are rived from my chest,
maybe I can be loved.
I am exhaling,
but I cannot breathe.
I can’t.
----------
Requiem for a Red Admiral
On a windswept spit of land in the westernmost reaches of Scotland, near the suggestion of a house revealed by low stone walls filled with long grasses, I found you.
You, trembling like a frightened rabbit in the harsh gale off the storm-tossed waves, were about as long as my thumb. You had been tangled in the grass, or were perhaps clinging desperately to it to avoid being blown into the ocean. I was not certain, could not be certain, at first. Your top set of wings - bright orange with black spots - caught my eye. As my family traipsed ahead like so many mountain goats, I stopped and crouched by your side.
My towering body shielded you somewhat from the wind, but still your wings fluttered. I could see that underneath the orange wings was a set of white ones, flecked with black spots. One had been damaged, the corner frayed as if you had escaped a predator. Beneath your wings, you were covered in fur; I imagine you would be soft to the touch. But I didn't touch you.
I didn't think you were dead at first. The way the breeze played with your wings made me think that you were just resting, just waiting for the wind to die down so you could continue your quest. But this was your final resting place; you only seemed alive by way of tangled stalks and teasing wind gusts. You could not have been dead long: with your bright colors, one of the seabirds wheeling above the rain-slicked island would have spotted you easily and made a swift meal of your carcass. My presence, looming above you and below them, was only delaying the inevitable. I was struck by a sudden, immensely deep sadness at your passing.
You seemed out of place on the dull grass, under the gray sky, like a sudden sunbeam through a storm cloud. I wanted to stay, a mourner lingering at your wake. I wanted to keep you safe. Maybe I could have carried you into the ruined stone house. Maybe I could have hidden you away from the wind and the birds, if only for a little while. But our boat back to the mainland was leaving soon, my clothes were beginning to transition from damp to soaked, and a million other petty excuses made me stand up and follow my family over the rotting seaweed and barnacle-covered rocks back towards shelter.
Once on the boat, rocked into a hypnotic state by the waves, I pondered over my sadness. Why had your death shaken me so? “Sorrow is one of the vibrations that prove the fact of living,” mused de Saint-Exupery, and for a moment, dear departed admiral, you exposed my core to the howling wind. Perhaps the sadness itself wasn’t the point, but rather its manifestation. That day, on a windswept spit of land in the westernmost reaches of Scotland, I paused for you, and my soul vibrated.
---------
small
small means
not impressive
in size or importance.
people say I’m small.
they mean it to be nice,
as if all small things are
cute and young
and full of life.
I don’t feel cute though;
I just feel small.
-----------
Discoveries
colored stains
paired with drawings.
blood,
prettily a-moving.
------------
Lalita On a Morning Day
i like the color of coffee ice cream
and when we're singing lalita on my bedroom floor
i've got so much to say to you
and no place to hide
except this one spot beneath my tongue
i like the sound of ocean waves
and when we read with our backs pressed together
and i don't know if i wanna dance
or support the wall the whole night
so i'll divine the answer from the flowers you sent me yesterday morning
and i like doing the tango
but i don't like this touch-and-go
when we're swinging on a sunday night
i never step on your toes
and your palms are never sweaty
but i like it the best
when we're still singing lalita on monday morning
and waiting for the rain to pass us by
-----------
what they should have taught you about the water cycle.
water expands when it freezes. that’s how cracks in side-
walks, or roads, or rocks
form. (you don’t
break anyone’s back when you step on them, though.)
now, just imagine
the words in mouths trickling down, tumbling
and sliding, each
over the other, smooth like paper
with paper’s razor edge. just imagine them con-
densing onto your skin, and being soaked in. the
outside takes the brunt of the razor
edges, but the cuts fade over time until you
forget anything ever happened.
inside, the words have been slowly flooding the brain,
turning it into a water balloon,
seeping into sponge-like nerves, drown-
ing synapses and memories
until your lungs feel squeezed by too many thoughts,
until you can’t breathe or speak or laugh, can only
smile like everything’s fine.
it’s strange how winter sneaks up on you so quick-
ly, how one day, the trees will be full and green,
but before you know it, they’ll start to redden,
and the days’ll get longer, colder and colder and
colder until water turns to snow turns to ice. branches
can only hold up for so long before they
break from all that negative
space.
and whenever you feel like you’re about to ex-
plode, just go to the bridges you’ve built.
toss a pebble in the water.
watch it slice through the surface.
watch it get swallowed whole.
all that it once was is only a blip in the past now.
think about how boats slice wounds through water,
how they are smoothed over just as quickly,
how you are as small as a pebble compared
to everything else. they say jumping off a bridge into water
is like jumping from a building onto concrete - you’ll break
either way - but
think about it. all those dry children, all those adults
who haven’t yet reached burst-
ing. think about the mess you’ll make.
if you’re going to explode like a water balloon, keep it
clean. everything goes back to the ocean, anyways.
and when all those words gush out of you,
all that paper a glutinous ball of
dreams that could never quite be linked together,
when your life is told in patterns of jagged ice
and your heart can never be melted, despite what kids’
movies tell you, when
your water balloon hits its target,
all that you once were will only be a
piece of colored rubber.
-------
Stomach Ache
It wasn't the world that swallowed me,
But me who engulfed the world.
And let me just say, it wasn't pretty.
---------
She Did
Smoke fell through the air in white wisps, slowly fading out
Lights dimmed to eerie illumination, an atmosphere of solemnity
Chords from the obsidian piano in the corner, deep and rhythmic
She sang through the smoke
She shone through the light
She swayed through the song
------------
Untitled
You smile so wide for someone with so few teeth, abuelo.
You sway past handshakes like a boxer sways past haymakers,
you don’t believe in strangers
so you greet people heart first.
You treat people like porcelain,
you hold them like one wrong move could shatter them,
because you know it's happened before.
------------
On Writing:
A CLUB FOOTED FOXTROT PERFORMED IN THE CALLOUSED HEART OF A SLAUGHTERHOUSE.
Every word assembled with care,
BUT LOOSED WITH RANCOR.
A jagged tooth maw, in charcoal and graphite screaming
I’M STILL HERE.
Every angle acute and every line a bat out of hell leaving dust with every stygian beat of its cracked wings,
I WRITE LIKE I’M CARVING MY EPITAPH BETWEEN THE CURVES OF YELLOW CANVAS HEADSTONES,
TREATING SPLINTERS LIKE SHRAPNEL,
BUT REALIZING THAT THE ONLY WOUNDS THAT MATTER ARE FATAL,
AND IF IT ALL COMES OUT CLEAN,
I wasn’t trying hard enough.
If I seem insincere it’s because I side with poetry over prose,
AND IT'S MY JOB TO MAKE
MOUNTAINS,
out of mole hills.
-----------
Heirloom
The wall of Mary Landhorn’s living room isn’t the most comfortable spot in the world. The mustard paint is cracking behind my bare back and the whole apartment smells of mildew. There’s a fireplace on the far side of the room which, if lit, would brighten the room considerably, but she never bothers. She just turns on her lamps, scattered around the room on tables, under tables, in the middle of the floor, one even sits on a brown leather armchair in the corner of the room. Her lamps don’t do much; most of their light is swallowed by their shades, old dusty maws of thick yellowed paper. I watch the door. I’m always watching the door, waiting for someone to come in and rescue me. I don’t want to be here any more than Mary does, but she has a choice. She says it’s her job to stay, her mother would have wanted it that way. She wants to be just like her mother.
The door opens and Mary swings into the room, a burst of energy interrupted by the sudden gloom of her home. She’s beautiful when she has energy. Sweeping in from the corridor or stepping out for the evening she’s radiant with life. But she always comes back to the apartment. Now she dumps her satin purse, kicks off her d’orsays, and stands still. Her mind is running a marathon, but her body is tightly packed into one spot in the middle of the carpet. She’s looking at me and I know what that means. She decides to wander over, slowly at first, like going up to an old friend and not being sure if they’ll recognize you. Then she smiles. It’s not pretty and it’s not kind; it’s a wild eyed kind of smile, like she’s forcing herself into a high. It’s a grimace masked with a fake sort of pleasure. Mary raises a hand, strokes my ruined lips, and drops it. She has blood on her fingers and she looks sick. She tries to wipe it on my shirt, and dirties herself more. Panicking now, she starts a low whine, wiping faster, getting more of my gore on her wrist, her arm. She’s squealing, her face scrunched against tears, as she dances. My body is bruising under her frenzied blows, but I feel nothing. I just see. She folds into a paper doll, ripped into pieces by the work she’s done on me, her desperation to make herself clean distorting her cleanly drawn lines and finely cut edges. Finally she stops in tears, and I almost reach out to comfort her. The beautiful doll whose mind has been shattered. She limps out of the room, wretched words spilling off her tongue, faster than her tears can rinse them away. I can hear the kitchen sink running in the next room; the smell of soap wafts in. It stops and she comes back, no swinging or sweeping, a hobble of hunched back and crippled motivation. She would crash onto the couch except she’s so slight, so small, and so scant. It ends up as more of a pfff. In her hand, Mary holds a picture, just larger than a book and with all the content. Her mother’s face, framed with silver and garnet, calms her. It’s a nice face, neat in its expression, held together with a fine string of dignity and reputation. It ties her darker secrets in beautiful swathes of silk. I suppose no one bothered to ask what could possibly need such a rich costume when she was alive.
Mary seems to draw inspiration from the picture, and lets her mother’s concrete expression act as the motivation she needs. After ten minutes or so, she looks up. Her eyes are dry and red, her lips parched and chewed. She sighs, gently placing her mother on the cushion beside her, and stands, composed. She's ready for what she has to do, what she does every night before she goes to bed. A sick lullaby before the lamps go out and it becomes night. Standing right in front of me, she stretches, her arms pulling back behind her frail body, her leg muscles lengthening even as they struggle to support her emaciated form. Again, she touches my face, the blood that comes away gasoline to the flame, and she explodes, not in horror, but in zeal. Nails cut me, knuckles rap me, fingers rend my skin. I submit myself to it. I let her rage, becoming the storm that thunders in her mind. It's not her fault. She's just a girl. It’s what her mother would have wanted.
---------
EGG
I am an egg, cracked
On the frying pan of life
Not sunny side up
