October 2010

(What Kept Me From Saying This)

The scent we leave behind
and the shade in the curtains,
always around.

The sudden accidents of time
not so accidental ,
the right of these to exist
in me, in a refractory
grimace-

I should not have wandered
there anyway, like a loose child,
none of this would have happened,
not even this.

Or the countless exhumations
we don’t deserve
as survivors,
the way we ought to play
grateful
in our tones of voice.

The generators of interest
play hot stove
to some indecency,
no more than a slight
excitement of our hearts
followed by a trim report
and then, acquittal.
No blood or tear
was ever so unimportant.

(So these I stopped sharing
finished slapping them on the line,
tended them in the orphanage
although their parents were alive
out there, going to work,
buying new clothes - indifferent
to all the fuss back here
where the dead dogs
we remember
keep our secrets.)

We left on empty - without
train tracks or tattoos,
the various futures entrusted
to us had broken open
and been filled with damaged goods.
The fieldwork of exodus
is bent belongings and torn books,
nothing but scraps.
More weather was never felt
in any thrift store
nor any price so high.
(Truly it will say -
my work has appeared
here and there.)

Not entitled to thrills or anger,
several lost years that way
picking up steam as they go -
tethered to a country
and meaningless phrases
where I so obviously belong
and bouncing back,
every ounce of whip lash
a touchdown or
mis-demeanor
as if in our most sullen moods
there might be a broken law
rather than the wicked
human fetish of extermination.
No wonder it is cherished
and has become a career.

It may be a secret
to ourselves,
a family of definitions
innuendo to entendre
hatched open by imitation-
not entirely sure
if reading about this
is as good as writing about it
but they sure are
(the poets)
and were not even there,
a secret to most of them too.

What worries and excites
me the most is the loss
of a world view,
including dirt that enables
more victory to acquire
access to this quaint
inability to tell it
effortlessly, convincingly
enough -
erasing the problem caused
by censure in the first place,
a casual pass at logic
and swift stab in the dark
at magic.

We cannot escape the age
we live in
but it can be painted
as they all were
in desperation prone syllables,
paraphrased, jumbled
latent tutors
paintings tend to be.

It is hard to hear a child
mumble these things
in the decadent gibberish of fools
that their parents probably were
and the marketing told them to be.
Hard to hear about
the consequences of it.


Obfuscation

The things in the backyard
of my head,
of anyone’s
wars - sleeplessness - finances
the undernourished soul of it all,

to think that some stop
at the beginning of certain phrases
and others have no plan
taking great pains to reveal

dog milk and fat action
instant terms,
so be it!

The soul grows weary
the bones of the soul
nearly broken and the skin
was never there at all.

Everyone pointing fingers
at everyone else
so without knowledge
there is no creativity
or is there?

I’ve never learned to separate
what I think and what I write
and this I believe
is the problem.

Things are true for all
sorts of reasons
and to know how unimportant
I was while I was
is important.

The exegesis of the earth
near the stagnant pose
of particular racisms
frozen over centuries
that melt quick and then
disappear
shows the price sticker ghost
and inhabits all there was to say
about a thing, the choice of it
and how it lived a long long time.
One can say that about it
and probably will, it is how thoughts
are finished by time
and the heirs of time’s tomorrow.

There is this sense that we
all know, we all must know
the thresholds and windows
between mornings and mornings.

Here where all the kitchens are fixed
or fixing now,
wanting to be fixed or waiting
to be kitchens again
unlike the past in which
kitchens actually were full
of the legs of old ideas:
domesticity, civility, forgiveness.

Does it matter that the old Gods
were as simple as the new ones,
the back door of Greece opened
up to reveal a precesssion also?

Now a still photo is placed
in the fore of a moving picture,
a dead man perhaps whose heart
was still beating as the bell
was struck,
did not the Golden Calf low?

The end of our privacy
to tradition, the end
to a fancy privileged few,
the Luxury of Gloucester
is everwhere, the anti-war
is almost reasonable again
but it is impossible to argue
with myths,
impossible to drag up the bones,
the pyloric valve of assumption
is long ago closed.

Luckily the West is still
too far away to change,
the silence of the other sides
so dark to bring along.

The Rice Calendar

collects power
and hamstrung camels
as she threads her needles.
Is the first migratory bird
here yet?
All four parts?
or has the sound
beat us to it,
the jewel-case satin -gray
clouds in which the stars lie
wherever did these come from
if three letters
in or out of context
prove scripture, variant
glittered readings
daze us and endear
that sneer of contemplation
called smile until we prove
that baking with honey
is as good as lying about it
to protect the sluggish
and less coherent
from the boredom of accuracy.

Heavy weight champions
of the world,
how do you do!
How are your prizes?

The boys burned dead bugs-
there inside the fire
of boxes and old cloth
were ransom notes-

perplexing as it is
to warm-up to
the process of stylizing
and decomposition.

Here we wait for the how-to
shows to come on
wearing big, cheap bracelets
and push-up brassieres -
our confusion adores us,
clings to our every curve.

Second

“And I call you a feather, and recite:
Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.”
- The Landing: A Stage in The Waker’s Corridor by Jonathan Thirkield

His hand comes up empty
every time from trying.
Fish. Cards. Quarters.
None of it sticks
but it all works
like glue -
we love it so much and talk
that way after the lights out,
the news of the day gels
in our instincts, he is
one of them, a curator
of grief - a helpless victim
with a brain storm -
such delicious preparations
economical - the satire starts
gun fire - down the road.
They too act dangerous
and compose the gospel,
the too pray a lost God

just at different times
and voices: their fathers
playbills, ours with a mouth-
ful of salt, sometimes
the easy meal wins.

With constant work the whir
of words tattles on the truants.
Why would a ghost darken
his shadow so? A demon
or a windy day - some say.

Your song is a whole language.

How many bulbs burn
until then, the verbatim
repose of tonite - lack luster
objects do up and fail
except the stars
while we watch
and while we father
this and many others
who for sundry reasons
don’t believe it matters
if a Jew or that one
yon feather falls forth -

you still don’t know why.
You still don’t know why.