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poetry: 2001 |
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everything has been said before, nothing left to say anymore. when its all the same, you can ask for it by name. -marilyn manson
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Driving to
Richmond I am an epileptic in a strobe light transformed into a universe, transfixed by the momentary relationship of eyes and headlights and glass. The road slides under me. Iron gray, steel blue, and gun black pocked by patches of red-brown clay and dirt, it goes on and on and on and on, always going on, leading me past Richmond and into Rome, past Rome and down into Athens, out from Athens and into Jericho, where the walls came tumbling down. Walls made of red-brown clay and dirt. My car is a remora clinging to an 18-wheeled hammerhead. My head nods up and down to the sound of Irish rock and roll as my little brown minivan weaves down the interstate, reeling in the wind and the traffic and battlefield of black ice. In the backseat I hear the Holy Spirit tell a joke to the ghosts of my grandfather Gatherum and Galileo and I hear them all laugh, laughing hard as I try to pay attention to the road and the headlights and the glass. The world is a Cubist painting. Joe's Poem A man named Joe has cried with me a hundred times, far too much for two men so young, so foolish, so damned young, but he has, and he will, and when we are dead and forgotten, our souls will sing sad Gaelic drinking songs and long Sinatra ballads into the purple night forever, doomed from here to eternity, quietly laughing all the way. I think he may be the only normal person I have ever known. The Sad Prayer
I want to believe in Noah's Arc again.
Please. The Last Boy Scout My eyes close and open in time to the distant (close) music as we drive down the road, as the alcohol runs through my blood and my mind, altering my understanding of the world, shifting my perceptions into sixth gear, pushing my soul into a state of honesty that it cannot deal with, crushing me under its weight as my mind reminds itself of all the women and all the wars that I didn’t fight but that I wanted to fight (though I was guilty of fighting, for my sad foolish heart fought them time and again, beating fast with adrenal and spit at the thought of each) and I want those women and wars and all that goes with them, but I have nothing, nothing but the scars from the Boy Scout trail and I know I am the last Boy Scout, the last knight clad in khaki and Lord Baden-Powell cries and I cry and the world goes on because hey who needs Boy Scouts anyway? Carter Fold A black-and-white cotillion slides silently past my window
Deus ex Machina Take
I walk into the long, thin valley while heavy metal bands blare into the night, the stars pulsing in time to the back beat, the moon, a cragged, ragged, jagged rip in a black velvet painting of Elvis strung between giants and mountains. As the mujahdin chant my name and the flags sing angry songs in the stone-hard wind, I smile, noticing only that the trees are made of rubber, like badly drawn Flintstones backdrops, and the Cheshire Cat dances a jig. Katy's Poem Pianos and drums and violins fill the room
Samantha's Poem Somewhere
Any minute now Sam
Talking to Beatriz I sit and sip wine
When the World Ends Lights flash all around me and I don’t know where I am as the light orange mushroom cloud dances in a radioactive promenade, cement melting like chocolate ice cream in August, iron flaking like dandruff from a genuinely unattractive, high school-aged woman wearing inordinate amounts of leather. Goodness, is that a gong coupled with Kami drums, or is the world ending? I am not sure as the walls collapse around me, falling and flying and frying into nothing and everything. If If I had a mirror,
Friday Night Writer's Block Shortness. Brevity. I type the words and don't know why, only wondering why I keep typing, typing and typing and typing when I know I should stop and go for a walk or talk to Beatriz or read or whistle or watch television or take a shower or fry an egg (with cheese) or perhaps even try drawing on the pad in the back of the house beside my bed, try sketching with charcoal or ink, try finding truth in another medium, one that allows me to be honest and real and not curse so damn much. Remembering Jenny Rainbow sherbet clouds hang low over the road as I drive through the late spring evening, the air heavy with the tangy wet taste of freshly cut grass, my body desperately trying to determine whether it should shiver from the cold or sweat from the heat and my mind racing back to a little blue pickup and the crater-pocked parking lot of the Chilhowie Theater where the girl with the brown hair and the quiet laugh first looked at me so many years ago and then I remember that I don't know that girl anymore and my chest tightens slightly, as if two ropes were pulling my skin taut, as if my body was trying to become smaller and younger again, but my body can't become smaller or younger again, and I don't drive a little blue pickup anymore. I remember her eyes. Bluefield
The hummingbird dreams of gaudy red flowers (the kind you only see at Christmas in K-Mart) as I dream of gaunt gaudy women dressed in red gauzy dresses dancing in huge brick buildings that rise silently above a place called Bluefield, my home, the kind of place that should only have its name written on old typewriters, slowly, clack-click-click-clack-KA-ching Because otherwise you don't have to think about it, whatever that means. Self-Portrait as Gollum I had someone tell me tonight that I talk in riddles that answer questions just right, And I felt like Gollum.
Californian Muse The universe is a warm black sleeping bag that wraps around me in a way, a fashion, a manner that I wouldn't describe as tight but it sure as hell (or is it Hell. . . I'm never quite certain) isn't loose and as I talk to Mariko and ask her to be a Muse she laughs at me in the most pleasant way and I remember being in my mother's arms back so many (few) years ago when she, the happy woman with the pink cheeks, was the whole universe, wrapping around me like a sleeping bag. Poem for the Girl There is a girl at my gym with auburn red hair and a smile that you only catch by accident (like a fly foul by Roberto Clemente by the River so damn long ago) and I sometimes, sometimes. . . Sometimes I really, really want to talk to her. But I don't. You know, Cause I really want to. After the Wedding
I am walking through a door painted
I am a paleontologist in my mind, and I study the red paint, those layers of scarlet pigment and viscous glue, seeking some clue (some hidden fossil, the imprint of a fern in sandstone or a fragile arthropoidal carapace sleeping in glassy golden amber). Everyone has left the church now. Except the door. Except me. The door glances about it, looking first to its left, then to its right, careful to whisper low as it speaks with me. Eric, says the door, Eric, what do you want to know? What do you need to hear? I want to ask the door how many yards of silk and linen, bleached hoary or dyed in jet, have been carried lightly by it, and why it thinks they have, and does it think I will ever walk past it, a woman clad in the soft white product of caterpillars' hindparts, her soft hands clutching tight to my arm, wanting, at least for that day, for that moment (the moment when ferns fall into the silty water, when ants are caught in sticky-sweet tree sap), wanting, God, wanting. . . (a pause, a sigh, like the pause of Muppets when they sing very sad songs) wanting only me. Benson, NC I. If corrupted angels become demons, perhaps fireflies are fallen too, but they are stars, life incarnate, trapped in the frame of insects, yet still delightful in their humiliation. II. There are no fireworks, no gleaming networks of flame and light scattered across the wide purple-black sheet someone stretched between the low reddish hills and the pines in the grove to the east. But there are fireflies, tiny globes of green and yellow that dance across a patch of unmown brown grass and a disfigured gray parking lot. Little girls run around that parking lot as I sit and watch and sip cold sweet brown iced tea from a white plastic cup that squeaks when my thumb moves against the water that drips and drops down the side of that cup slowly, rolling down my arm, dodging and engulfing fleece and fibre, tiny elephants all of water, rampaging through a forest of thin brown hair. One of the little girls slips in her efforts, holding too hard, squeezing too close, wanting too much, and the firefly dies, crushed or suffocated or simply scared to death and she cries because she, in her youth, in her innocence, thinks that must be the most horrible thing in the world. Maybe she is right. A Short Treatise on the Relationship of Art, God, and Maelstroms I try to draw a picture, but the picture doesn't draw. Not well at least. There are circles and lines and blotches of color that blend with other blotches of color, but no picture, no design, no composition. Nothing is presenting itself. And I contemplate violence. Why do I contemplate violence? Because it surrounds me. Because it envelopes me. Violence is God's wrath, a gray flood teeming out from endless empty(?) black holes into a world of order that God has made and now disowned, his world, thrown down like a child's blocks in a maelstrom of water and blood (which is thicker than water, or so old Italian men like to say in black and white movies). But human beings are not blocks, and God is not a child. At least I don't think so. Maelstrom. A very good word. Mael. Strom. Maelstrom. Yes. A very good word. (A sip of wine.) Dammit. I just. . . I just want to draw.
Painting White bristles slip into black paint.
The Woman on the Cover of National Geographic Between four yellow lines, one going up, one down, one to the left, another to the right, there was a woman. The woman was from another country, a place where they do not speak my language. For her God has a different name, for her running water is something new. I do not know her. I do not know who she is. I will never meet her. She is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Poem for Unca' Steve Calluses disguised as hands pluck the stiff silvery spider-webs that crawl up and down the length of the mandolin and the coyote disguised as a man closes his eyes and purses his lips, finding songs in his soul that were written by men who wore long plaids in Scotland before Scots spoke English, hearing words that were whispered in Florentine pubs while Machiavelli was hanging on the wheel and Galileo stared blankly through ungainly plumbing of glass and copper at tiny white Christmas lights that are still burning tonight in the last real place, somewhere in New Mexico (where the cowboys all died). The mandolin is brown. Shakespeare Every
Every single time I meet a girl, it goes wrong. Sometimes I need her. I am alone.
Perhaps dead (bald) English playwrights are right. Perhaps it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved before. On the other hand, perhaps they are liars. Maybe Shakespeare is alying bastard. Maybe (my voice is clear now) he is trying to justify his own failures. MAYBE (my voice is loud now) he is as weak as the rest of us, writing words that sound philosophic and rational and romantic all for the sack of covering up that weakness! MAYBE HE IS WRONG (I throw my glass against the brickwork. It breaks.)!!! No one can see my eyes in the dark, when I hang my head, when the shadow of my brow (soul) hangs over them, behind the thin glass panes. Everyone is staring at me, the freak, the sober man they think is drunk, the obnoxious jerk who threw his glass on the floor and refused to speak to the waitress. They try to see my eyes. I know they try to see my eyes. But they can't. Bastards. I hate the reindeer games.
Shoulda' She can't even look at me with her red-stained eyes hidden beneath a sheen of salty liquid glass. What do you want from me? She asks. Her pink lips quiver gently (like feather in the wind). I want . . . I cannot think. . . I want. . . I cannot talk . . . what is wrong? I knew what I wanted to say before, I knew, it was there, in my head, but now the words are gone and she is gone and as the door closes I know I should have said that I just wanted her, her, to come to my room and sit in my arms and drink wine and talk quietly and watch cheesy movies in the dark on my big green couch until she said she didn't think she should drive and I said that maybe she should stay and she said well, maybe and I could see her lean forward, her eyes dancing in the way that beautiful women's eyes dance when they are drunk and saying one thing but meaning something else and she leans in until we cannot breath until we cannot move until breathe and air and souls are mingling in the space between our lips and we close that space and our lips (not wet, not dry) meet and . . . Tha-klack. The green door shuts. Knoxville, Tennessee One day God created everything out of nothing and then yawned as it all danced around him, changing and growing and imitating him and a billion years passes like ice melting on the July sidewalk and the girl with tortoiseshell rimmed glasses walks past and I almost fall down because she has melted (like ice on the July sidewalk) into the air, oxygen blending with perfume and soap and vanilla-something-or-other until my red blood cells ache from her (they are tired, tired from carrying her into my guts and my mind and my fingertips which just want to feel her ears turning warm from hormones in her own blood but they won't because she is gone and I can't smell her anymore and I don't even know her name). The Poem About Why I am Writing Poetry on a Saturday Night Sometimes I wonder, quietly to myself,
And then I realize,
Even to myself. |
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