poetry: 2002

confucian scholars would sit on their porches, sipping liquor, a brush weighted with ink, and sip liquor. once they were truly, utterly, absolutely smashed, they would write poetry. . . hmmmmm.

Drawing in Class 2-25-2002 When Snoopy is a vulture, his head hangs low, his frame a horseshoe. A cartoon becomes a symbol of inevitable doom, bad posture an allegory on mortality. The young man smiles at the cleverness of his over-analysis (he is a little boy slurping up the chocolate milk joy of a metaphor stretched beyond the bounds of the average man's mind. . . or literacy). The sound is barely a sound at all as the pen slips across the paper, a slug bleeding black slime. Straight lines (the tips slightly wider because of the pressure his thumb exerts in that first millisecond) meet ballerina curves until the random takes on a pattern, the chaotic a geometry. I look up and see my professor's (angry) eyes, gray-blue, glinting behind thick plastic lenses, and I smile at him. The Ohio Street Dream 3-26-2002 I. Purple roars out of the black. Whitethorn scratches lines in the night as a Beautiful death scars Nyx's soul. II. The air is cold and tight, But all I feel is her skin. Ice materializes in the fission-fusion blasts of Hell. All I see is a soft silhouette, black on blue-black. Antediluvian monstrosities bellow in agony, Emptiness that is drowned out by the sound of her breathing. Noah's Bane and earthworm souls saturate the sickly sweet air, But all I smell is her hair (strawberries and sweat). The Scientist's Hell 3-27-2002 I. Aristotle said that human beings are political animals. But the new old men tell me that politics is psychology. Psychology is biology. Biology is chemistry. Chemistry is physics. Physics is mathematics. I am math. This is the part where I pause, considering the ramifications of this statement, considering the fact that I am an empirical reduction, I am numbers. I am not like them, I am them. Equations the way little boys dream they look dance through my head like the orange-on-gray stripes of the candlelight on my wall. II. Beer slips down my throat and I curse because I am numbers I am God damned numbers why do I have to be DAMNED NUMBERS??? On Kate (A Self-Portrait in Other Terms) 4-20-2002 I know I'll never have one. What I mean to say is I'll never have a wife like her, like Kate. My friend (whose name is not here because I do not mention it) asks why, why won't I have a wife like Kate, why is it impossible, why is it not the nature of life and myself and God's fuzzy gray plan, that one part of truth designated (beyond my will) for me. He asks. I pause, as one should before speaking words which, right, wrong, or otherwise, smack of wisdom. (the pause continues as I take a pull of my beer) Because, I reply, women like Kate have the sense to see me for what I am from the beginning. . . I am a trap, a snare in Italian Renaissance garb. I am the man who looks perfect from a distance, but who, up close, is scaly and alien and unnatural. I am a reptile, a creature of green and brown, a species past its prime. I sing songs of times long past and cry in tones found in no human song. I am Eric the dinosaur. Kate. . . God, she is beautiful. Smart and funny and good and so, so beautiful. I could have (would have) married her the day I met her, there in the lobby of the women's dorm, her hands mingling with the fingers of a man I can't help but love like a brother, the day I proposed in what everyone thought was a joke. Everyone except for me. I pause again, sipping my beer. Yeah. So. A Poem For A Poem (Poem for Michael and Michelle) 4-22-2002 I. My back leans hard and heavy against the wood and metal of the chair. A white napkin covers my lap and belly (full of good food and just plump enough to make me feel jolly in a waist-coat sort of way). Michael pushes the cake into her mouth and then spreads it across her face. II. Somewhere a monk laughs in his head at the thought of it. His fingers dance and his lips purse over the clay flute. He is drunk, alone, and sitting under a wind-twisted cedar. For a moment he is a boy again, naked and playing in the alleys of Guangzhou ghettos in August. For a moment he is a bicycle, red and shiny and perfect and definitely not human. For a moment he is God and the Tao and All Under Heaven, perfect and omnipotent (good in the way the word was always meant to be used). Then he is alone again, drunk and alone, his toes wet with dew-laden mud, a red-brown pedicure gone astray. And he wonders, how is it that a man marries a woman. III. Irish beer meets memories of women whose names are like flowers, Downy gossamer scraps of botanical silk; gold and green and purple. The two blend with the eyes of a woman whose soul is crying, And a man writes a poem, desperate to be human. IV. I don't know why I put it on-line. I knew she'd see it. Hell, I even knew it wasn't accurate, it wasn't real in that way that reality should be. But I knew it mattered, mattered in that way that war matters. Christ she was angry, and I. . . well, I didn't think she'd forgive me. But it mattered, you know? Sometimes that's all you know. V. The seed clings to his sweater. Somehow it will make it to his house. The seed will fall off in his kitchen. A woman with a broom sweeps. The seed is in the dustpan. The dustpan is emptied into the creek. Water carries the seed for three minutes and forty-one seconds. The blue 1989 Ford Ranger's wheel throws up the gray-white gravel. Plopsh. The ripples push the seed onto the bank. A week later there is something green. No one knows how it got there. I suppose it wouldn't matter, Except that it does. Poem for a Girl I am Fairly Certain Has a Boyfriend (Six Minutes in Knoxville, Tennessee) 4-23-2002 I. It starts in that hollow between your guts and your soul, a cannonball in a balloon hanging from your throat, pulling your jaw tight and sucking your mind into your bloodstream, quicksilver in boiling water. II. It wasn't when she stood up to speak. It wasn't the way she smiled at me seven different times in six minutes. It certainly wasn't the way she looked, so soft and smooth and perfect, alabaster under sunset. It wasn't the way she moved under the purple cloth, lines under lines under lines. It wasn't her eyes (Quiet symphonies of cold deep water that make old men's chests tighten). Well, maybe it was when she smiled at me. Seven times in six minutes. III. Have you seen the way her fingers run across her neck when it flushes red? I have. A Simple Operation (Two Days) 5-2-2002 Breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and breathing and . . . My eyes open wide as thin metal spiders work their way into my throat, my little boy's (old man's) soul roaring through my fingers as I grip the side of the bed, cold skin sticking to colder vinyl (purple-green-white on institutional aquamarine). The world is a maroon stain on my chest and white light so bright that it isn't really white. Rust-plastered wolf howls paint thick acrylic strokes across my eleven year-old mind and I would scream if I could but I can't so I look at Dr. Harris and pray that I can keep my mouth open (I can still taste the powder and latex of his gloves) and I wish I was in the forest with my brother pretending I was someone important but I am not I am on a table and I can't even tell anyone that I am very, very cold. DAMMIT I AM COLD. And the sound comes again. God. I. It starts like a prayer. God. Notice I use the word ‘starts.' God, you sonufabitch. We need to talk. A Somewhat-Former Protestant's Study of Catholic Iconography 6-25-2002 Purple-gray paint drips off the plaster statue of Mary that sits on my desk. On the beat my eyes slip across the sinewy line of the artificial virgin. On the back-beat I breath deeply of the heavy metallic smell of dirty washwater. I consider using a sexual metaphor for the way the dirty-wet brush slips across the stucco skin of the Mother of God. . . but I know that such a metaphor, while accurate, would be entirely inappropriate. My Mother, after all, was Christian. Listening 6-25-2002 The screen is a two-dimensional angel, a religion hiding behind piles of white paper and black remote controls. Two rectangles, poised on either side of their phosphorescent sibling, sing. Their song slips through mesh and wire, crossing unmeasured (but not unfathomable) distances. Vibrations weaving into other vibrations, a basket of sound. The basket is purple and green and invisible and wraps itself around my head, a cartoon bell resounding around the head of the over-zealous, mustard yellow dog. I am a drunken snake-charmer, entirely unaware that my dream is not a dream. A snake older than Adam but younger than God squeezes my soul, breaking ribs, stealing the vapor from my lungs nudging it slowly up my esophagus (I remember my mother icing cakes), whispering honey-flavored pleasantries into my bright red ears, and I smile, the cool-dry coils comforting me in my self-imposed ignorance. Poem About a the Woman on the Ferry (Between Ireland and the Isle of Man) 7-18-2002 A woman with black hair picks up a piece of paper. She pauses, lightly biting her lower lip in a way that makes men notice her. Brown eyes drink in cobweb letters that I can’t read from five seats away. She shifts her legs, then slowly, carefully, with the skill and prowess of a master craftsman, She tears the letter up. She tears the letter up, then stacks the pieces into a perfect pile. A woman with black hair pauses, examines the small, perfect pile. She is a philosopher, Hegel in a black skirt. She has gleaned meaning from the scraps, found resolutions hidden between the slips of paper. She smiles the way old men do when they remember the wars their ancestors lost. She throws the letter away in a plastic grocery bag. She is a shaman interring her not-old-enough-to-be-dead son into a polyurethane sepulcher (I hear drums). Neurons dance and pink lungs swell, pressing a soft chest into a soft dress and the two rise slightly, while her eyes glace at the aisle in an attempt to remember the way he held her when they said goodbye and meant it (for the first time) and the white paint sparkles in her eyes expand and spread until slowly the slip down her cheeks, a tiny flood, God’s retribution for someone’s sins (whose I can’t say). A woman with black hair straightens her hair and wipes her cheeks. She does not do this once. She is a machine, repeating her actions time and again For three hours. I wish I could have given her a long, quiet hug, the kind where the girl’s neck is on your chest and her chin deep into your shoulder, the kind which lets her know its alright to cry. I wish I had known her, could have comforted her, let her know her stoicism was beautiful and horrible. But I couldn’t. I was five seats away. Loch Ness 8-4-2002 Brown-black water smacks quietly, a baby punishing a not-bad puppy, an impressionist red sandstone beach against a backdrop of hills the disposition of newly mown grass. The colors slip and slide into each other like slightly overzealous woodwinds, clarinets and saxophones rising above one another then slipping back into the venison stew of the greater (impromptu) symphony that is Scotland when the Grey is tired of winning. The teenager with the red-hair makes fun of the nerdy single man from Aberdeen who's tucked his ungodly bright (aqua) Hawai'ian shirt into his even brighter red boxer shorts. The not-a-man-boy insults the socially backward man's beard (unkept), despises his glasses (broken), and loudly protests the man's fascination, his unwillingness to deny the possibility that there is a mystery there, somewhere, quiet and beautiful (in the most horrible of ways) Lurking. All good mysteries lurk. Somewhere there is a little boy reading an article in one of many magazines specifically designed for little boys. He is laying on his carpet, legs crossed and raised in the air, eyes only half seeing the black New Times Roman words on the slick white paper. If you could quietly walk up behind this little boy, your footsteps muffled in the thick plush and covered by the clatter of pots and pans as his mother prepares dinner, you would see somewhere on that page a photographic reproduction of an artist's rendition of a creature modeled (without the binding strictures demanded by the instructors of courses in illustration of paleontological anatomy and physiology) on a plesiosaur, a long-necked turtle with teeth like a name-brand chain-saw. And if you were God, or perhaps a particularly talented psychic (see late-night television on science-only cable networks for details), you could look further, deeper, well into the tangled mass that is a little boy's mind and there, trapped between his soul and his neurobiology, you'd find that same creature, only now it would not be trapped beneath glossy layers of ink and reconstituted wood pulp. Now it would be free, swimming quickly through dark waters, snatching up fish and eels and the occasional diving bird in its lightning-fast jaws, swallowing them whole, surfacing for a moment than sweeping with an underwater movie swoosh into deeper water. . . To lurk. The tear tastes salty as it reaches my lips (once described as "flirty" by a number of women seeking to entertain themselves) and slips between them with the help of my tongue. I pause and consider it, as most people do when encountering this sort of situation, and then I turn, negotiating the ruined walls of the castle I have seen in so many photographs before, my heavy feet thumping against the stone while my heart thumps in kind within the (glossy) fetters of my mind because I know that I am an adult and not a little boy laying on the carpet reading magazines written for little boys and I know this because I was not in awe, not astounded, not nervous or delighted, but rather I was quiet, at peace, enjoying the beautiful lake, but this isn't a lake it is a loch and a monster lives here That I wasn't even looking for. Talking to Clayman 8-10-2002 I am a walking, dancing, talking, singing, all-nude, all-American, nightmare with G.I. Joe patented Kung-Fu grip. That, said Clayman, is funny shit. Knoxville, Tennessee (Ant Lions) 8-10-2002 The light is waning as I sit myself down hard into the chair made of thick green plastic. I am heavy and it creaks and leans to the side significantly. In the red-brown dirt beside of me ant lions go about their ant lion business, which is primarily the continuous act of trying to recover from the white water torrent of my own spit, a foamy tsunami that reminds me both of praying mantis eggs and of Tyler Kidd (who made fun of my inability to spit properly for the better part of my freshman year in college). Jean-Jacques Rousseau lays limp in my hand, a dead paper bat picked up by a little boy whose mother would be aghast at his general lack of adherence to the commonly accepted procedures of sanitation which govern typical human existence. The sky here is never black; tonight it is a lavender-pink hospital blanket stretched over a chicken wire universe, the afterbirth of a hundred thousand clever devices utilizing the interaction of Nobel gases with electrical current passing through naked metal to produce light and I sit and consider life and my hat and the women who I have said the word ‘love' around who are all getting married to men who are not me and I am not sad but not particularly happy. I spit on the ant lions again, then go around back to get an apple off the tree and along the way wonder about the man who planted the tree and how he died and will the ant lions recover from my little boy cruelty and then I feel guilty and so I solve the problem by whistling loudly (out of tune) and thinking about Tyler Kidd making fun of me my freshman year in college. The Robot Poem 8-11-2002 I am looking for the robots. I am looking for the machines. I am rummaging through junk yards and flea markets in search for the place where flesh melts into aluminum and carbon steel. I am a pilgrim in denim sackcloth seeking a clink-clank-clunk Issac Asimov flourescent orange enlightenment from the imperfect sons of Japanese automotive engineers. Metal fingers wrap around the minds of children who design them on scraps of construction paper with crayons and magic markers while their mothers wish they were drawing birds or flowers until the Neanderthal and wax musings of toddlers give way to the blue and white schematics of men with thick glasses in universities funded by militaries supported by nation-states and multinational corporations. I wonder how robots feel about slow-dancing. Knoxville, Tennessee (The Old City) 9-1-2002 I. A cartoon character has pushed my soul to the street. He has stolen my pale skin and paler bones and slightly (completely) excessive amount of body fat. He roars (squeals) into the night; an angry wizened goblin in a young man's husk. He is angry at the fact that we didn't even kiss, not really. Oh, we touched lips, there, in front of the gaping crowd, in front of her friends and mine, in front of the waitress who flirted with me a little before She arrived and a lot after She left. But we didn't kiss. Not really. II. I want to take my right hand and run it up the side of her face. I want to run my left hand down her back until it reaches the place where four curves converge (Einstein dances). I want to lower my head until I look into her eyes from just above her own (my chest tightens). I want my chin to be close enough to her mouth to feel her breathing (hot) quickly. I want my right hand to move up, brush her ear, sink into her soft hair. I want my lips to brush up, down, up against her lips. I want to hear her make that little sound that women make when they are about to kiss someone for the first time and accidently find themselves to be alive. I want to push my lips onto hers, I want her lips to be damp, because she has licked them, just a little, 20 seconds before. I want to breathe her in, feel her body slip closer to mine, hard and soft and warm and cool all at once. I want to feel her hand (ceramic-and-silk on Brillo pads) on my cheek. I want to feel her lower lip slip into my mouth and know she trusts me. I want her to taste like strawberries and saliva. III. God I love being human (says the goblin in my skin). a poem 9-16-2002 ovals (on loneliness) 9-17-2002 appalachia 9-19-2002 fish 9-19-2002 concert in moon gap 9-19-2002 catherine's poem (talking to ch in charleston) 9-24-2002 XY (Warpaint) 10-10-2002 A steel-blue-gray sky vomits cold-brown-gray-metal(rain). I kneel, a man [(in prayer)(?)]. I reach behind my back. My hand is greeted by pebbled wood and canvas. My hand wraps tightly around the handle and the Sound of slick smooth-strong-(black)metal (a woman's fingers, wet, on a xylophone) Makes my teeth sting. Thwip-POP(shwof). Metal ravages the earth (again). Brown clotted blood seeps from the cut. I rub thick clods of brown on my wet face; I am a creature of warpaint and camouflage and baptismal oil. If you were there, you wouldn't have seen my eyes. I didn't[((don't)(won't))(can't)] have any, only black holes. I am a skull. Cold-brown-gray-metal(rain) cuts My face [physical (political) geology]. White canyons. I raise the blade, feel it, love it, need it And swing. Eric Drummond Smith 10-10-2002 I am not a man. This is the fundamental underlying principle of my existence. I am a biped. I am a hominid. I am an ape. I am a primate. I am a mammal. I am not a man. I am a chordate. I am an animal. I am an eucaryote. I am alive. I am a complex assemblage of lavender-pink musculature and boiled egg white tendons. I am not a man. I am a god. Universes are dandelions to me, small, delicate, fleeting. I am dirt. I am the child of earthworm feces. I am not a man. I am a particularly quick tadpole-shaped cell with a Y chromosome. I am a robot. I accept my place in the world unflinchingly. I operate, I perform, I obey. I am not a man. I am a little boy who coughs till his voice changes. My nose always bleeds. I am a kilt-wearing gorilla. Scotch whiskey burns my throat and I curse the day I left the forest. I am not a man. I am a painting. I am a poem. I am a novel. I am a screenplay. I am a line. I am Frankenstein's monster; Erasmus-Machiavelli-Leonardo-Kungfuzi-Dürer-Hobbes-Aristotle-Warhol. I am not a man. I am Eric Drummond Smith. American Sacrilege 12-16-2002 I turn up the music loud and drink the caffeine and the light grows low and the wolf that lives in my chest (between my heart and my brown-broken lungs; a tickle whispering of Hell) smiles because tonight he will be in charge and he bides his time, debating whether it will be wine or liquor or beer or pain itself, alone [stimulant] and he thinks of blades and teeth and evil-beautiful things and runs his claws up and down my spine and I shiver with joy-hatred because the wolf is powerful and in me and is me and loves me and hates me and that is complex especially since the wolf is not a wolf but a metaphor for the part of my soul that lives in my hypothalamus and testicles and chromosomes and green-purple-(snot)yellow glands and teeth and nails and hair and I yell out loud because I can because I do not care if my neighbors hear me and are afraid, or worried, or annoyed because I am Eric, I am the wolf that used to frighten me, and as I drink down the wolf, as the wolf drinks down Eric I wonder at the hate that still lives in me from the days when boys in wool jackets with leather sleeves would torment me and I remember them and my sons will know how to fight, they will never be without their own wolves and I hear a gurgle as Christianity passes-out from chugging too much communion wine and I am immense. Headless Horseman 12-16-2002 Run screams my mind run and run and run until you forget to breathe until your heart doesn't matter until your soul is trying to catch you and I hear the hooves and the road is yellow-gray-blue ugliness and I know this even though it is dark and I run and I run and I trip and I roll and I run I run like an animal, like a deer already shot, my soul is behind me and I run and the hooves and thunder (hooves not thunder hooves) and I run and I run and I run and the house is there yellow lights and the people see and run and the man shoots and the hooves hooves hooves hooves oh God oh God I run I run the trees are black on black ugly old ugly women unsheltering there are no leaves god God god GOD and I run and I run and I run and I run and the door is locked oh god they locked the door but I don't stop to ponder how cold the brass felt on my hand as it wrapped slipped held pulled pulled twice but I do run I run I run and the gravestones pass on my right with little white flowers in the grassbesidethemandIrunohgodIrunIrunandIduckunderthefenceandmysoul pushesmefrombehind(Idonotnoticethebriarsandbramblesandthornsgreen greenblackcuttingmypalewhiteskinbecausetherearehooveshooveshooves)and I am in the field and then the sound comes breath over breath white-on-white-on-white-on-black and I turn because I am done running. I see it. I run again. Monologue on Playwrights 12-16-2002 There are only a few characters in any good play. That is because if you put too many characters in the same play, the author is unable to build them, create them, make them, develop them, nurture them, torture them, kill them, breed them, hurt them, love them, hate them, age them, amplify them. Playwrights of any skill must be sadomasochistic. They must desire, no, they must be driven to crucify what they love, the paper-and-ink-and-glue imitations of their mothers and fathers and lovers and friends, they must want to shred them to ribbons, they must wear blood-stained leather masks disguised as horn-rim and plastic. They must love everything so much that they hate everything so much that they love everything so much that they hate everything so much that they love everything so much that hate everything so much that suddenly and without warning they find themselves free, unhuman, dishuman, inhuman, superhuman, ultrahuman, something different, something better, something worse, something Aristotle predicted and feared and I scream-roar-laugh-cry because I know they are like God but not gods, they are women and men and children torn from their species, aliens, monsters, magnificent in their creative ugliness, breathing hard onto red-brown mud like me when Brinson and Wade threw me down the hill in February and it was wonderfulhorriblehuman. Scarab (A Woman's Eyes) 12-16-2002

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