If poetry still has something to say, it will say your name
It will say it how I said it on long walks,like you said mine
in between kisses and drags off of my cigarette
on nights when your white teeth shown in the streetlamps
and, my God, will you look at the way they stand up and clap?
Friday, April 22, 2011
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Gloss
In this photograph I have of you
you're licking your finger, preparing
to turn the page of a magazine.
Except all of those glossy sheets are
outside of the frame, so
the whole thing becomes
an immortal monument, a
spotlight on a moment I
was thinking the dirtiest
things about you.
You were wearing that sleeveless dress,
darling,
what were you trying to do to me?
Making me vibrate inside
of my skin inside of
spacetime so I had to
go into the kitchen
and make myself a drink
just to slow the evening down.
I know that,when I remember
you, I will remember
your lips
and your fingers.
I will remember the way
the spades of your fingernails
would rake over the ghostly,chalk
fields of my skin. But mostly,
I will remember how
you would fall asleep,so suddenly,
and I would be left talking to myself
for five,
ten,
minutes without evening realizing.
you're licking your finger, preparing
to turn the page of a magazine.
Except all of those glossy sheets are
outside of the frame, so
the whole thing becomes
an immortal monument, a
spotlight on a moment I
was thinking the dirtiest
things about you.
You were wearing that sleeveless dress,
darling,
what were you trying to do to me?
Making me vibrate inside
of my skin inside of
spacetime so I had to
go into the kitchen
and make myself a drink
just to slow the evening down.
I know that,when I remember
you, I will remember
your lips
and your fingers.
I will remember the way
the spades of your fingernails
would rake over the ghostly,chalk
fields of my skin. But mostly,
I will remember how
you would fall asleep,so suddenly,
and I would be left talking to myself
for five,
ten,
minutes without evening realizing.
Wow
To say,
"please,
not-God,
but the thing we pray to
anyway, never let us stop
being gentle.
To say, never
make it our turn
to become the monsters
we left on the other side
of the river.
With kissed-on lips,
to say, "oh
how strange this is"
how strange to watch
someone new turn into music
under record needle fingers, to have
the limits of this world slid off
of your back like the straps
of a dress,
to have hands
so suddenly
full
oh
how strange it is
to say,
"wow"
because
really living
and really dying
both just feel like exhaling forever
"please,
not-God,
but the thing we pray to
anyway, never let us stop
being gentle.
To say, never
make it our turn
to become the monsters
we left on the other side
of the river.
With kissed-on lips,
to say, "oh
how strange this is"
how strange to watch
someone new turn into music
under record needle fingers, to have
the limits of this world slid off
of your back like the straps
of a dress,
to have hands
so suddenly
full
oh
how strange it is
to say,
"wow"
because
really living
and really dying
both just feel like exhaling forever
Friday, October 29, 2010
Bottle
More or less, in the spirit of Halloween.
In the living room, I struck him with the empty bottle of champagne I had in my hand. There was a flurry of green glass and a mist of blood, as if, for a moment, it was sleeting Christmas colors. They don't tell you the truth about what it is like to kill a man. When they warn you about the consequences, about the guilt and the grief, no one cares to mention how it gets there. It's the strangest thing; how along with all of that blood, a reel of film spools out from the back of the poor bastard's skull, and the sun swings on its axis to project their lives on the back wall for you to watch. The strangest thing. I watched as he skipped stones with his brother, raced him up and down a lake shore. He made love to a pretty girl with bangs in the backseat of his mother's station wagon and after he dropped her off that night cried, inexplicably, with his head on the steering wheel. He tore his knee freshman year of college playing soccer, replaced sports with literature, published a few descent stories over the course of his years. At thirty, he married and this was the first time I met his kids. They looked strong and tan, with their toothy smiles projected against the wall of my study as their father crumpled in slow motion at my feet. I nearly forgot myself, then. Something centrifugal began to turn inside of me. The neck of the champagne bottle, which I had been clutching white-knuckled through all of this, fell from my fingers. Vomit or tears contested for the right to shake through my body. I prepared to pitch myself to the carpet, to clutch at the corpse of this man who was now my friend, and beg to some God for his resurrection. But the film on the wall kept running. And there, pinned up like a calendar girl, amidst all of this man's best days, was the body of my wife. My wife, smiling at him with her head on his chest. My wife making love to him in our backyard, the chrysanthemums I planted for her clear in the background, and shrieking, but not stopping, when the sprinklers came on. My wife mouthing “I love you” over and over as he took her picture with a Polaroid camera. The hot gust of her breath in his ear when she said, “Of course I'll leave him. Of course.” The reel ran black. I looked at the cracked body at my feet and I remembered. I remembered.
In the living room, I struck him with the empty bottle of champagne I had in my hand. There was a flurry of green glass and a mist of blood, as if, for a moment, it was sleeting Christmas colors. They don't tell you the truth about what it is like to kill a man. When they warn you about the consequences, about the guilt and the grief, no one cares to mention how it gets there. It's the strangest thing; how along with all of that blood, a reel of film spools out from the back of the poor bastard's skull, and the sun swings on its axis to project their lives on the back wall for you to watch. The strangest thing. I watched as he skipped stones with his brother, raced him up and down a lake shore. He made love to a pretty girl with bangs in the backseat of his mother's station wagon and after he dropped her off that night cried, inexplicably, with his head on the steering wheel. He tore his knee freshman year of college playing soccer, replaced sports with literature, published a few descent stories over the course of his years. At thirty, he married and this was the first time I met his kids. They looked strong and tan, with their toothy smiles projected against the wall of my study as their father crumpled in slow motion at my feet. I nearly forgot myself, then. Something centrifugal began to turn inside of me. The neck of the champagne bottle, which I had been clutching white-knuckled through all of this, fell from my fingers. Vomit or tears contested for the right to shake through my body. I prepared to pitch myself to the carpet, to clutch at the corpse of this man who was now my friend, and beg to some God for his resurrection. But the film on the wall kept running. And there, pinned up like a calendar girl, amidst all of this man's best days, was the body of my wife. My wife, smiling at him with her head on his chest. My wife making love to him in our backyard, the chrysanthemums I planted for her clear in the background, and shrieking, but not stopping, when the sprinklers came on. My wife mouthing “I love you” over and over as he took her picture with a Polaroid camera. The hot gust of her breath in his ear when she said, “Of course I'll leave him. Of course.” The reel ran black. I looked at the cracked body at my feet and I remembered. I remembered.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Poem--Untitled
It's summer and the sky pushes down its pregnant
stomach until there is no room to breath.
You want to reach up your arms and cut the rain out.
thinking lately about how strange it is
that your neighbors never bother to shut the door
to have an argument
anymore. It's too hot for that,
you understand,
but the stuff of their conversations is fast
becoming the building material of your dreams
and when you wake up hung over,
it's as if you've been another person for four hours.
It's summer and the sun is a cauterizing flame.
They fight about this dog they own together
fight about how it bit the man-- oh it was so long ago-- but
he still can't look at the thing without thinking about the flash
of it moving at him and there's this stupid
phrase that's stuck in his
head about it:
animal enamel.
When you wake up thinking
you're this man, your stomach
hurts because you're so weak--
a weak man who hates a dog
because he's not smart enough to realize
that he actually hates a girl. How could he
hate a girl he's loved since high school?
But then your eyes adjust to the light
and you
remember that you don't give a fuck about dogs
and you
make yourself a cup of coffee
and you
feel better.
It's summer and the line of tombstones
on the freeway inches toward a terrible sun.
Sitting in the shade of the
stairs that lead up to your
place you wonder if it's a problem
specific to your generation
that you feel so much but can't
seem to think straight.
You set out to make lists of things
that could be the cause--
something in the water,
partisan politics,
the absence of authentic American cuisine--but then
you get distracted and it becomes a grocery list
which you lose later on,
emptying your pockets,
looking for your cigarettes.
stomach until there is no room to breath.
You want to reach up your arms and cut the rain out.
thinking lately about how strange it is
that your neighbors never bother to shut the door
to have an argument
anymore. It's too hot for that,
you understand,
but the stuff of their conversations is fast
becoming the building material of your dreams
and when you wake up hung over,
it's as if you've been another person for four hours.
It's summer and the sun is a cauterizing flame.
They fight about this dog they own together
fight about how it bit the man-- oh it was so long ago-- but
he still can't look at the thing without thinking about the flash
of it moving at him and there's this stupid
phrase that's stuck in his
head about it:
animal enamel.
When you wake up thinking
you're this man, your stomach
hurts because you're so weak--
a weak man who hates a dog
because he's not smart enough to realize
that he actually hates a girl. How could he
hate a girl he's loved since high school?
But then your eyes adjust to the light
and you
remember that you don't give a fuck about dogs
and you
make yourself a cup of coffee
and you
feel better.
It's summer and the line of tombstones
on the freeway inches toward a terrible sun.
Sitting in the shade of the
stairs that lead up to your
place you wonder if it's a problem
specific to your generation
that you feel so much but can't
seem to think straight.
You set out to make lists of things
that could be the cause--
something in the water,
partisan politics,
the absence of authentic American cuisine--but then
you get distracted and it becomes a grocery list
which you lose later on,
emptying your pockets,
looking for your cigarettes.
Friday, June 11, 2010
Snippit, sequentially after the post below in larger work
Flat tire before I was even out of the state, can you believe it? I thought I was going to beat that letter to you, but now I have my doubts. Maybe if I just drove straight through: it's only 25 hours from here, and the mechanic said I'll be ready to go first thing in the morning. I could make it, but I'm about as good at fighting sleep as I am a boxer. It probably doesn't matter anyway. Chances are just as good that you shred the letter before reading it.
I called you this morning, before I put the last of the boxes in the car. I tried your parents place, hung up right before the fourth ring. How many times in your life have you been walking away from placing an unanswered phone call, and had the phone ring right back at you? It's like an orgasm, or someone bursting a paper bag right next to your ear. It was bill collectors, the same ones that called two months ago, still trying to sniff out the last tenets of, what has just become, our old place.
I called you this morning, before I put the last of the boxes in the car. I tried your parents place, hung up right before the fourth ring. How many times in your life have you been walking away from placing an unanswered phone call, and had the phone ring right back at you? It's like an orgasm, or someone bursting a paper bag right next to your ear. It was bill collectors, the same ones that called two months ago, still trying to sniff out the last tenets of, what has just become, our old place.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Work in progress, untitled, rough, part of larger epistolary work
(Excerpt of larger work in progress. No edits yet.)
Cynthia,
I read that book you were always telling me to read. Out of Boston, bound for NYC, I propped my knees on the back of that threadbare Fung-Wah bus seat and I just tore into it. It was the first book I'd read in months, the only Salinger I'd read at all, except for that one story about banana fish, and I guess I liked it all right. Only problem was, I wasn't even halfway through before I started to notice the things that you had pulled from the pages to line your life with. It became obvious to me all at once, like cracking a code, and the epiphany sent me flipping back through read pages, just to make sure I wasn't imagining things. After that, I wasn't reading a novel, I was trying to work off the dust of a mirror that held your reflection.
When I finished the book, I spent the rest of the ride staring at the ceiling, and seeing your face up there. There was a woman next to me, substantial proportions squeezed into a brown glove of a dress, who kept trying to get me to talk about what was wrong, fancied herself my mother, but I wasn't interested in talking. I was talked out. I was everythinged out. I had gone to Boston three days after you left, shacked up with one of my ex's from high school to try and get you off my mind (if you ever read this, I suppose hearing that will make you jealous, you raging hypocrite, you), and decided to come back because, after just a week, she started picking up my vocal mannerisms and, since I've been talking like you for years now, the whole thing just became too much to bear. When I got off the bus, I spent a full minute blinking in the spring sun.
I'm not staying long. Being one of the few people in New York insane enough to own an automobile, and, at that, a full sized van, has the singular advantage of facilitating hasty get aways. I'll be leaving in the morning. Today, I spent hours immersed in the ruminative monotony of packing boxes, making an exit plan and trying to figure out why you lent me the damn book in the first place. Sure, it's been your favorite thing your whole life. It was on your bedside table in the dormitories, when we were still in school, and when we got our own place after graduation it moved to the plastic crates we used as bedside tables 'cause we couldn't afford real ones. You probably bought a new copy to fill up whatever's serving as your beside table now. What I mean to say is, I guess I should have read it a long time ago, but the thing is that you never asked me to once, not in the whole two years we were together.
In fact, I remember a certain blizzard that locked us in our rattrap apartment for three days last year. I was going nuts for something to do, so I picked it up and set down to read it but you took it out of my hands before I even got past the dedication. I remember, you took it and said, “I know this is going to seem unreasonable, but now is not the time for you to read this.” Your reaction took me aback, at first, but I let it go, easy. Joked around, said, "Well, if that's how you feel about it," and then went and smoked a cigarette on our fire escape. It was something to see, the way the snow swallowed that iron ladder only two steps down from the landing I perched on, even though we lived on the second floor.
I didn't understand it then, but now I am far more confounded as to your intentions. Cynthia, darling, you abandon me and run to Texas, but you leave me the book. Why? In hopes that, once I found so many allusions to the text in your life, I would write you off as a charlatan and let you go? That I would suddenly find you disappointing and unoriginal? Darling, if your life is just some movie adaptation of a book, then it's a loose one. A reimagination, to give the accuracy of your interpretation the most credit it deserves. And that's no slight to you. You did a brilliant job with it. It's just that, however much you feel like you're indebted to your influences, your work is still unmistakably original.
Anyway, the point of this is to say I'm coming to Texas. I know that you told me not to, but I'm not listening. Even if it's only one more time, I need to see you. I'll explain why when I arrive. After all, if I could do otherwise, there would be no point in taking the journey to begin with. I'm mailing this letter to your parents' address, which is also the first place I'll come looking for you. I have some confidence that, with economic matters as they are, you haven't been able to find your own digs yet. But who knows: you have friends, you have ingenuity. Regardless, it's a place to start.
I hope I beat this letter to you for my sake. There is some concern that, upon its receipt, you will run from me.
Love, despite everything,
Michael
Cynthia,
I read that book you were always telling me to read. Out of Boston, bound for NYC, I propped my knees on the back of that threadbare Fung-Wah bus seat and I just tore into it. It was the first book I'd read in months, the only Salinger I'd read at all, except for that one story about banana fish, and I guess I liked it all right. Only problem was, I wasn't even halfway through before I started to notice the things that you had pulled from the pages to line your life with. It became obvious to me all at once, like cracking a code, and the epiphany sent me flipping back through read pages, just to make sure I wasn't imagining things. After that, I wasn't reading a novel, I was trying to work off the dust of a mirror that held your reflection.
When I finished the book, I spent the rest of the ride staring at the ceiling, and seeing your face up there. There was a woman next to me, substantial proportions squeezed into a brown glove of a dress, who kept trying to get me to talk about what was wrong, fancied herself my mother, but I wasn't interested in talking. I was talked out. I was everythinged out. I had gone to Boston three days after you left, shacked up with one of my ex's from high school to try and get you off my mind (if you ever read this, I suppose hearing that will make you jealous, you raging hypocrite, you), and decided to come back because, after just a week, she started picking up my vocal mannerisms and, since I've been talking like you for years now, the whole thing just became too much to bear. When I got off the bus, I spent a full minute blinking in the spring sun.
I'm not staying long. Being one of the few people in New York insane enough to own an automobile, and, at that, a full sized van, has the singular advantage of facilitating hasty get aways. I'll be leaving in the morning. Today, I spent hours immersed in the ruminative monotony of packing boxes, making an exit plan and trying to figure out why you lent me the damn book in the first place. Sure, it's been your favorite thing your whole life. It was on your bedside table in the dormitories, when we were still in school, and when we got our own place after graduation it moved to the plastic crates we used as bedside tables 'cause we couldn't afford real ones. You probably bought a new copy to fill up whatever's serving as your beside table now. What I mean to say is, I guess I should have read it a long time ago, but the thing is that you never asked me to once, not in the whole two years we were together.
In fact, I remember a certain blizzard that locked us in our rattrap apartment for three days last year. I was going nuts for something to do, so I picked it up and set down to read it but you took it out of my hands before I even got past the dedication. I remember, you took it and said, “I know this is going to seem unreasonable, but now is not the time for you to read this.” Your reaction took me aback, at first, but I let it go, easy. Joked around, said, "Well, if that's how you feel about it," and then went and smoked a cigarette on our fire escape. It was something to see, the way the snow swallowed that iron ladder only two steps down from the landing I perched on, even though we lived on the second floor.
I didn't understand it then, but now I am far more confounded as to your intentions. Cynthia, darling, you abandon me and run to Texas, but you leave me the book. Why? In hopes that, once I found so many allusions to the text in your life, I would write you off as a charlatan and let you go? That I would suddenly find you disappointing and unoriginal? Darling, if your life is just some movie adaptation of a book, then it's a loose one. A reimagination, to give the accuracy of your interpretation the most credit it deserves. And that's no slight to you. You did a brilliant job with it. It's just that, however much you feel like you're indebted to your influences, your work is still unmistakably original.
Anyway, the point of this is to say I'm coming to Texas. I know that you told me not to, but I'm not listening. Even if it's only one more time, I need to see you. I'll explain why when I arrive. After all, if I could do otherwise, there would be no point in taking the journey to begin with. I'm mailing this letter to your parents' address, which is also the first place I'll come looking for you. I have some confidence that, with economic matters as they are, you haven't been able to find your own digs yet. But who knows: you have friends, you have ingenuity. Regardless, it's a place to start.
I hope I beat this letter to you for my sake. There is some concern that, upon its receipt, you will run from me.
Love, despite everything,
Michael
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)