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poetry: 2003 |
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i haven't written a poem about werewolves in while. the reason is, you see, that i get so angry, so sad, so deeply disconcerted, that i can't concentrate. and they end up being bad poems. sorry kids. sometimes too much really is too much. er. . . cancel.
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Knoxville, Tennesse 
At Neal’s Cabin
Indigo and chicory under yellow (yellow!) flick flack zick goes the bug-zapper zapping killing bitter black insects that bite sweet fat (virtually) hairless apes (should the opportunity arise, of course) and we play cards, or rather the beers play cards, alcoholic puppeteers knitting and quilting and sewing up a patchwork of medieval allegories embossed under-on-over slick white paper masquerading as cardboard but our voices are our own or rather they belong to the ghosts that will someday used to be us and they talk about women we don’t know anymore and a vermilion orb pretending to be a car and scars that never really healed and we/they/I lie about our/their/my life making it dramatic and exciting, the Hardy Boys recast and Vaughn describes the music and Sean looks at him not understanding because he is very very drunk but the Newcastle still remembers that he should discard the Queen of Spades and the overzealous specters of Mouseketeers (Annette and Cubby and that old fat guy) dance on a tarpaulin of curved glass across the room, pointillist masterworks in ballpoint pen and the whole world smells like wet brown leaves in November and I remember to pray for Momma’ twice.
Thp Thp Thp Thp thp thp thp thp thp thp thp thp thp thp thp whispers leather on concrete
Chchungk goes the door to the car in the cement box.
[that] can’t be (seen)(here). Green yellow red green
Imagine that you are behind a camera.
Fog. Tonight {my wet-nurse} is a river of sad Japanese instruments
For a moment (my feet on gravel) I am ancient, or rather, I am young, in West Virginia before it existed for me.
the realist's discourse i(you) am(are) nosferatu. (grin). fear me(yourself). look in the mirror. your teeth are not all flat. you are no herbivore. you do not graze. you are a(the) monster. small. weak. naked. scales are for dragons. grendel is a myth. so are nations. white red black & green are all one color in the dark. machiavelli is a rapper. hobbes is a cartoon tiger. bullshit. they are the only honest men that ever lived. ever. bleach cleans karma. there is no justice. honor is for the lovers of ribbon and metal. i(you) are all sharp edges. punch glass with other mens’ hands. emotion is a distraction. all things are instruments. to live is enough. to rule is better. you are never safe. god doesn’t favor (you). cut yourself. [know you will die. if you forget it matters, you are free.] revolution is what fools call evolution when people are dying. sheep leave their dead. men eat them. wolves mourn. men worship(ed) them. paint your face. sit in the woods. listen to the green. know you are an animal. forget your language. kill something. eat it. live. shriek-scream-bellow-roar-wail. be nothing. hide. know everything.
Buttermilk and the Hardy Boys I sit in the bar and contemplate my mortality but its not a bar but rather a fiction the by-product of my own brown-pea green-lavender mind the ironwood-and-stinkweed tangle of neurons (electric blue popswishpop) a medieval imagination drunk on singing dancing bears and Mickey Mouse Club flashbacks and Lee doesn’t know who the Hardy Boys are and the girl in the yellow tube top with red hair and green eyes who obviously doesn’t eat enough is smiling at me in the gas station and I wink but the wink is just to make her look again and wonder what I know and she smiles and I smile and I walk out because I am that guy that fellow that some women are attracted to by accident women who taste like buttermilk on your lower lip when your lower lip is on the curve of their back but they don’t seem to be attracted forever because I am a gateway drug walking marijuana and after me they need cocaine or barbiturates or both or they go into a seven-step program because they need to get their life in order because they are mortal and they must breed pass on the DNA pass on the complexities of their social-political-economic conceptualizations the ones that my professors study when they are not too busy kissing their wives, their lower lips quite happy and their hair tangled because of fingernails that are searching in that hair like Lewis and Clark but one of the two committed suicide I can never remember which one but they are dead and I wonder if their DNA is still floating around slipping through another woman’s fingers and I know this poem is probably at least a little sexist I mean I don’t want it to be sexist but being a man I find it quite difficult to write from the perspective of women and I make my students write the word human and I am a human you can tell because I have opposable thumbs and a complex cerebrum that I am gradually killing here in my imaginary bar with my imaginary friends while I think about Joe and Frank and women who taste like buttermilk and I drink my beer again and listen to the song about God and wonder how it is I have kissed so many women because I remember being the awkward little nerd who few people liked and fewer respected but now men and women and some dogs respect me and those who don’t still don’t have the guts to look me in my dark hazel eyes and tell me because the age of men willing to be honest and brave and powerfully indignant is done and over just like new Coke and democracy but for those of you who don’t respect remember this remember that I was voted most artistic, Stacy and I were, and artists are the only people with insights into God that don’t involve cruelty or vengeance but creation and shivers down my back make me want a girl leaning on it asking me to come to bed but she isn’t here but working too late or in another state or married or just in my head quiet and shy and an object for poems that I don’t share with other people and so I type long rambling poems and Walt Whitman shakes his shaggy Karl Marx/Albert Einstein hairdo back and forth embarrassed for me that I missed the point but I don’t care because I like Dumas better and if anyone could ramble with style than by-God it was Dumas. (I tactically pause to drink from my beer and consider a new line of thought) So, I bought an American flag the other day for twenty-eight dollars and ninety-six cents.
knoxville, tennessee
A Poem Written in the Floor of Trevor’s Apartment in Abingdon, Virginia at Two in the Morning While Watching Canadian Rock and Roll Videos and Considering My Relationship to the Divine and, Though it Remains Unmentioned, My Own Inability to Maintain a Successful Relationship With a Woman, Which as Anyone Will Tell You is the Only Reason Anyone is Up at Two in the Morning Who is Not a Truck Driver or Short-Order Cook at the Omelet Shoppe in Abingdon, Virginia I sit here in the floor of my brother’s apartment seeking truth wondering if Gabriel will wake me from my sweaty un-air-conditioned sleep on the inflatable blue mattress with the tom-cat yowls of trumpets and saxophones and oboes and French horns and assorted other species of vocalizing crockery, whether epiphany is eminent, whether truth is coming, whether the voice of God, sterilized and padded with stained blue-gray moving van quilts, will answer the prayers I still whisper before eating oysters or squirrels or strawberry liquorices and the sweat tastes like salt and I think of what’s-her-name, Lot’s wife who was turned into the stuff for looking back, probably because she had left something beautiful behind, something given to her by her grandmother, or a flower she had dried and hung up over her dresser after her senior prom, or maybe that Polaroid of her brother in blue swim trunks and her in a pink jumper with a daisy on the pocket at the beach one day in June but regardless there she is, a 5 foot 4 inch pile of salt still clutching a purse full of wet-naps and gum and loose change. The Devil scratches his long ass’s ear with long brown and yellow claws and smacks his lips loudly. He is watching me type over my right shoulder, his hairy chin on my neck, his bad breath thick in my nose like the stench of vomit behind a high school football stadium’s bleachers the morning after the big game. He is watching me type because even he, with all his power and titles and minions (dancing with costume shop pitchforks in the parking lot by my minivan) he still doesn’t understand God or why he is here. He is watching me type because he is waiting for his own epiphany, his own answers to the really important questions, you know, the ones that have only one word. But neither of us have them, so he contents himself by whispering cruel words about ghosts I knew when they wore skin and spitting on the carpet. I wish that bastard would quit following me home from work.
Johnny Cash Saved My Soul I am a squid wrapping five-fingered tentacles around the fake-leather steering wheel of a car slipping like a child through its mother around and about and in and out of the mountains in Bland County tonight and I am not a Chinese scholar and my world is not ancient but tonight it is and tonight I am and tonight the angels come and whisper in my ears through the car stereo words from a song by a man from Kentucky named Johnny Cash and I know that my whole life I have been waiting to hear him tell me that God is trying to apologize everyday for making me but knows that by making me at least there is was shall be something worth apologizing to and I rail and reel and feel drunk though all I’ve had is soda and salad on the table in Laurel Fork and I want to tell everyone and don’t have the guts to say I know I understand I am a man I have heard God I have heard God I have heard God and he is good oh god oh God you are good and I cry god (God) you are good and years of doubt pass and I understand why Job never cursed you because you are like us and we are like you we are all sad we are so sad and so good so damned good so damned great so majestic so simple so so so so so God I love you I finally love you again and I forgive you for taking my Mother finally I forgive you and tonight here in Bland County we are reconciled and I look around me for the banner and you run your ancient fingers through my hair and whisper wait, wait for the strength it will come and I will lead you to fulfill the oaths you made when you were a child and I look for the blue and it pours out of my soul and into the universe and I am free at last from the anger and I know the little boy my friends used to love is back thanks to Johnny Cash. |
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work by eric d. smith, please write to ericdrummondsmith@hotmail.com. thanks, e.-