there's got to be more below the surface
These are my mother’s hands:
wracked with worry, the veins
thick below the skin, soft
like worms in loam.
These are my mother’s hands:
holding my face, stunned
that I am still alive
to walk through another day.
These are my mother’s hands:
kneading the bread dough
for another Thanksgiving,
one more meal together.
These are my mother’s hands,
empty like bones in the ground.
(November 28, 2021)
I breathe in this world.
A rose blooms in the backyard:
Today is today.
(November 26, 2021)
Unintended, random like dice, or love
the stories fell into place, puzzle parts
as remembered, and retold as punch lines
to a deflected tragedy one night
late after almost all had departed.
You spoke into your anguish. I listened,
troubled in my failed attempt at reason,
for what you had said tore into my heart.
How can anyone know the genetic
strands of what we have said to each other?
where the safe world we have constructed shapes
us from the lies we have neatly explained
until the only truth we know is ours,
tangled in our hearts’ cold reliquaries.
(November 21, 2021)
He was dying slowly, and I
was impatient.
The bell, sewn on his pillow,
called and called.
All afternoon as it rang,
I would go to him.
He would whisper slurred words,
as I leaned into his deaf ears.
What do you need? What can I do?
Water? Do you want water?
He’d groan, his eyes lost
somewhere in the distance.
What do you need? What do you want?
As if I did not know.
(November 18, 2021)
to be here
to be happier
more often
than not
to laugh
without bitterness
to disengage
the past
cut loose
those chains
to drink less
to be less scattered
to be less
to not be afraid
to not be
here
(November 16, 2021)
thanks to They Might Be Giants
“What’s a soul,
and how do you build a bird house
in it?”
My soul ached then,
as he built a space
larger than the sky:
the bluest wonder widened
within, opening his nascent world
to dawn’s infinite chorus,
and I rose with the song
to a dance
I had thought forgotten.
When did I lose such trust
in the fragile
feathers of love?
(November 14, 2021)
I look out and see the sun;
I feel no warmth.
I do not want to be here,
but I have nowhere else to go.
I would say I’m unhappy,
but that implies happiness
existed as a measure
to gauge an amount of rain.
If I listed all my faults,
I’d have something to do.
Today was much like yesterday:
hot, dry, and lonely;
The sun slowly shimmers
the surface of the lake, like ice.
(November 11, 2021)
You begin with some mundane action,
which is not so mundane, of course,
as the poem progresses casually,
like a suburban park’s path,
along an implied narrative’s arc.
Then some fragile moment occurs—
perhaps a squirrel who, startled, stops
mid-path to stare for an instant,
it’s dark eyes questioning your life
before fleeing into the nearby brush.
Then you turn on an epiphany; and,
rising above the path and squirrel
like a Pentecostal dove on fire,
you signal your transcendent virtue
to all those who pause to understand.
So, the poem comes to a cliched close
softly condescending so as to not
offend any who might see themselves
mocked behind any veiled smirks
or metaphor they might find here.
(November 7, 2021)
I had a poem, Identity, in the second issue of Acropolis Journal. It was part of my collaborative project with my sister, a visual artist. I wrote a poem using each card of the tarot as a palimpsest, and she illustrated the major arcana. Here is a link to Acropolis Journal.
https://acropolisjournaluk.wixsite.com/acropolisjournal/kelly-neal-identity
Like raw clay upon a wheel,
I twist decades’ old regrets
to shape my truth with desire
to be some other than I am.
As if life’s embarrassment
could be stripped away, like skin
cut loose in great bloody skeins,
free from doubt’s infinite knots:
Tangled in old fishing lines,
I am trapped within myself.
The only recourse is guilt
inlaid along my arms’ veins
like intricate red nets flung
across a river’s slow wash.
(November 4, 2021)
(four haiku and a tanka couplet refrain)
The flames slip across
the old wood in the fire pit.
I think of you.
My life trails behind
before I step into it.
I’ve been here before.
I am always here.
Today, I lost who I am:
I tripped on a root.
I see who you were
when I fell in love with you.
Forty years slip past.
A mountain is a mountain;
a river flows to the sea.
(October 31, 2021)
For several days, I don’t write at all,
then start to worry I won’t write again.
Not that it matters to anyone else,
except me and the niggling voice within.
I know, time to think will quiet the voice
which fills the silence like an open wound;
for Time’s a negligent god, not caring
if I pick up any of the dry bones
she casually drops as talismans
on this twilight path I long to travel.
So, I tear out my heart as sacrifice
to the twisted beast who is my other:
will it satisfy this constant hunger,
and let grace fall on me like winter rain?
It’s like seeing old pictures of yourself
long after the camera’s cold click. You
have a sense of familiarity,
a recognition that you were once there
in that moment, but not of the moment
before, or after. The lines have taken
on depth as their specificity blurred,
the colors clarity fading through time
into generalized gestures, and
you stop short, stunned at your oblivious youth,
the clear lack of fear, the unacknowledged
audacity that spoke with more wisdom
then, than you ever knew you had, and have
since lost like someone waking from a dream.
(October 21, 2021)
This is me:
laconically bored
sitting in the stands
watching from above.
This is me:
focused on the moment
tracing a rune
across the killing floor.
This is not a mirror,
a simple reflection,
rather, a dissection,
a slow flay, where
skin peels off
in thin sheets until
only raw red bits
of sin cling to bone.
I am a myriad,
shattered.
I am a scar,
angry and raw.
(October 14, 2021)
Beneath the bed, I hide
my sack of broken secrets.
They leak into my dreams
like drops of rain sift slowly
through limestone to form
deeper pools, darker caves.
I wake to put them on again
still damp, clinging to my skin.
Through the day, they etch
their strangled blue runes
onto my hollow bones
with a cold acid. I become
a flute to my fears, a crescendo
of trills like dying birds.
(October 8, 2021)
We drown in our waste,
as history fragments, like
ice shelves to the sea.
(October 1, 2021)
“till we turn to see
who you were, who you are, everpresent, vivid
luminous dust”
-Denise Levertov
Like wolves feeding on a fresh kill
steaming in the snow, each dead second
is pulled apart. No matter the effort,
time disallows the past to continue
fully formed. The future devours us
leaving little tufts of fur and bone bits
to decorate our current troubled paths
and explain away our broken sorrows.
I am hungry for something I don’t know,
a freedom from imposed obligations,
an escape to a place I am not known.
Yet, where I am, and who I’ve been tangle
like the strings of old puppets in a crate,
waiting for someone to haul them away.
(September 28, 2021)
There was always a way; a way he knew
to map an idea out of the landscape
lying before him like an unfinished
puzzle; some way to reshape creation
with a simple jig. His mind danced about
the problem, as he rose and sat, sat and
rose to walk across the yard cursing his
thoughts for not seeing it: so simple, so
obvious. He’d lumber back to the bench,
pick up the pieces of wood and begin
to cast the abstract into the concrete.
Beneath his broken hands, he would divine
a new pattern from the pattern inscribed
in the broken palimpsest of the wood.
(September 26, 2021)
Happiness
—after Jim Harrison
The wine and whiskey, I am certain,
do not compliment the anti-depressants,
as well as I wish they would; yet, “all this time
counting the mind, counting crows”—
I pour a new glass with a touch of ice
to begin this conversation:
Hell has come to us as a heaven
we will never know, like Sappho’s apple
dangling slightly beyond our fingers
which grasp only at still air.
Where do we go when things fall apart?
In 1978, Buddha’s birthday
was three days after my eighteenth.
I was a crumpled bag of emotion:
my father had died two months earlier;
I was in love (and still am) with the girl
I would marry. I moved, two months later,
125 miles to the north, leaving my hometown
forever, yet still trailing all my doubts and fears
behind like crows along a fence line
who caw and flutter, marking
their constant presence with darker eyes.
We think we can escape ourselves,
ignoring the crows flying in and out
between the twisted oaks nearby.
We flee burning madly as we go;
yet, we can only be ourselves,
and, most days, that is not enough
to keep our fears balanced tightly
like circus clowns spinning plates
atop long fragile poles through the night.
(September 15, 2021)
the darkness festers
into the night, then lingers
through the waking day.
(September 12, 2021)
“but in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself”
—Albert Camus
Any tremble
through the trees
contrary
to the first
wind, the
next wind,
or no wind:
always afraid,
so afraid
to simply be,
with no
definition,
with no
place to go,
no
walls left to build,
no excuse
left to believe,
no end;
then again,
no end.
(September 12, 2021)
“what I lack is myself”
—Susan Howe
The door’s full like words
in an open mouth,
blotting out the space
it opened onto.
An entrance becomes a wall,
an allowed space disallowed,
as keys and locks
become ritual.
Such small sacrifice
the tongue becomes,
burning clear
any lost syllables.
Nothing’s left to say;
everything’s unsaid.
I’m lucky not to drown,
second by second, as I
walk down the street—
what with all the lies
and recriminations
I mouth, then swallow,
like a gluttonous beast
devouring itself wholly.
Perhaps it’s fate not luck
which keeps me afloat? But that
requires some god to blame,
and explain the curses directed
daily over rosary beads, like
mendicants to a self long lost.
(September 5, 2021)
There is no causality, no maze
to transcribe into memory,
simply a chance to breathe
near the bottom of the stairs;
and, like a mouth singing
arias, I crack open the bones
in my chest to find a way
into the warm flesh, to dip
my worn fingers slowly in,
to feel the heart’s contours
define the next last moment,
to map another return into
the ocean’s lost metaphor.
(August 25, 2021)
Tomorrow I go back on contract for my 33rd year of teaching. Last year was one of the worst years because of distance learning and the lack of contact with my students. The Students are always the best part of teaching, and for the last eight years (starting my 9th) at Ann Richards, I have had the best students ever, every year. Last year it was important that we teach remotely. The students, their families, my fellow teachers, my family and friends were at risk to this horrible deadly disease. We stayed at home and did what we could through a screen full of little boxes, because we had to. This year there is a more deadly, more virulent version of the same disease, and even with the vaccine, which a too large group of people refuse to take, and with no vaccine for the under 12 group…. which means ELEMENTARY CHILDREN….. It is more dangerous than ever to go back. Yet, here we are.. going back into the classroom. Cases are already being reported at my school, and the district where my wife teaches, and across Travis county. I fear for what will happen over the next few weeks and months, as we go full bore back into the schools.I fear for my students. I fear for my grandchild who is starting in a pre-k program. I fear for my family. And all of this is not necessary, we could stay remote. At the very least the elementary schools should stay remote, until the under 12 children can be vaccinated. I don’t understand what is the end game of the politicians like the Texas Governor, who seem to want children to die. What is the benefit to them? I want to believe in a hell, so the people who are forcing this to happen have some place to go.
“Props and other disinherited
paraphernalia are never enough.”
—Susan Howe
My hands cradle my face,
covering my dead eyes.
Worn thin like ragged cloth,
I am tired of my life:
Before sunrise I wake,
slowly move down the stairs,
and start again. Morning
rituals of coffee
keep the old dramas near,
private. I want to wail,
long howls into the dark.
Instead, I feed the dog,
whose tail wags happily
as she eats her kibble.
(August 9, 2021)
A nostalgic old man,
whose whispers adhere
to the flames’ tongue,
tells his one story again.
You are charmed.
So the chains slip
into your veins,
your heart, your lungs.
The air thickens your breath,
until every song you hear
is the only song you hear,
then you can no longer dance.
And the fire burns down,
for nothing’s left to say.
(August 6, 2021)
With disdain,
he turns
from the mirror,
leaving
himself
behind
like a cicada’s husk
caught
on a tree’s bark.
(July 29, 2021)
Yes, poetry burns in feral anger—
a knife flash fast at the shadowed church door
cuts through a dank cassock’s folded black cloth,
twisting quickly below the priest’s fat rib.
Yet, the mundane’s slow-etched eddy of truth
leaves its testament in the margins
of the more violent rush and tumble
relevance churning in the crowed streets.
My life is easily enough dismissed
with the trivialities of the day
dropping their dead petals across my path
like roses in ecstatic agony.
Yes, poetry burns in feral anger—
and burns and burns throughout the dullest day.
(July 26, 2021)
Night Terror
“When are we not in a dream?
…when are we not skeletons?”
—Sy. Hoahwah
I don’t remember
the dream before,
I cracked my head hard
against the wooden night stand;
the fine grained ephemera,
which held the dream together,
burned like flash paper into the air.
A lightning ball exploded
my darker vision, as the dream,
too agile to cradle, threw me
deftly from sleep onto the floor.
Not existing fully in the fluidity
of sleep, nor the concrete warmth
of the morning window’s light,
I held my head in my hands,
eyes shut, as the lightning flash
faded, leaving only the muscles
in my neck to burn like trees
broken during the night’s storm.
(July 16, 2021)
Flying free
through the blind night,
bats,
with their high lyric cries,
justify
the walls around them.
(July 19, 2021)
“When are we not in a dream?
…when are we not skeletons?”
—Sy. Hoahwah
I don’t remember
the dream before
I cracked my head hard
against the wooden night stand;
the fine grained ephemera,
which held the dream together,
burned like flash paper into the air.
A lightning ball exploded
my darker vision, as the dream,
too agile to cradle, threw me
deftly from sleep onto the floor.
Not existing fully in the fluidity
of sleep, nor the concrete warmth
of the morning window’s light,
I held my head in my hands,
eyes shut, as the lightning flash
faded, leaving only the muscles
in my neck to burn like trees
broken during the night’s storm.
(July 16, 2021)
I bend to pick up a small bit of trash,
and I think of him crossing the room
to pick up a random piece of paper.
For decades now that one small gesture,
a moment of casual insignificance,
is all that remains of an old man’s life.
(July 12, 2021)
(after J. Ruth Gendler)
Acceptance makes hot tea
for you on cold blustery days.
Acceptance waits for you
to decide who you are—
She makes no judgement
based on arbitrary rules.
Acceptance knows she is stronger,
because she knows the difference
between herself and Acquiescence,
who is too afraid to be different.
Acceptance sits near an open chair
knowing you will find a way home.
She likes to listen to your voice
as you take delight in new ideas.
She does not care they are not hers.
With the gentle reassurance of love,
Acceptance takes your hands
as if they were fresh cut flowers.
(July 1, 2021)
Where words we would have said
were swallowed, like sailors sacrificed
to the waves, possibility slipped shut.
If only we could have heard the words
we sang in secret to each other;
if only we had not died there,
feeding like fabled monsters
upon our embittered flesh;
if only we had relented
to the siren’s cold seductions,
then the screams in the waves
which smashed upon the sea wall
would not be lost to the blind pulse
of froth and spume across the wreck.
(June 30, 2021)
then, an ever present now
The shuttlecock flits nimbly across the loom with a soft clacking beat. “For every time I’ve told this tale, I’ve told it twice again,” she implies with a sigh as she begins. She speaks of patience and home, and slow unsolicited seductions, as time unravels across the floor like red pools of forgetfulness at her feet.
He watches her hands shift the threads as if playing upon a lyre. He thinks, “There are so many ways through the woods; so many rivers and creeks to cross; so many hollows and caves to wander lost, always different, always the same as the ones crossed before.”
For years and years as he wandered, he watched the waves pulse repetitive hallucinations and horrors towards a horizon he could no longer see. Unearthly monsters churned the waters feeding one upon the other; the past devoured the past with a ceaseless hunger for more. While elsewhere late at night, she walked the halls without a light, leaned against a shuttered door, and listened to the incessant voices muttering their plots and plans for a life she abhorred.
As the story faltered to its close, there was no soft landfall upon the strand, no wreck scattered upon a beach; no violence in their reunion, nor familial embrace. What had grown between them, tangled like olive tree roots upon a cliff, could not be troubled enough to be called love, if it could be called anything at all.
The shuttlecock flits nimbly across the loom with a soft clacking beat. “For every time I’ve told this tale, I’ve told it twice again,” she implies with a sigh as she begins. She speaks of patience and home, and slow unsolicited seductions, as time unravels across the floor like red pools of forgetfulness at her feet.
He watches her hands shift the threads as if playing upon a lyre. He thinks, “There are so many ways through the woods; so many rivers and creeks to cross; so many hollows and caves to wander lost, always different, always the same as the ones crossed before.”
For years and years as he wandered, he watched the waves pulse repetitive hallucinations and horrors towards a horizon he could no longer see. Unearthly monsters churned the waters feeding one upon the other; the past devoured the past with a ceaseless hunger for more. While elsewhere late at night, she walked the halls without a light, leaned against a shuttered door, and listened to the incessant voices muttering their plots and plans for a life she abhorred.
As the story faltered to its close, there was no soft landfall upon the strand, no wreck scattered upon a beach; no violence in their reunion, nor familial embrace. What had grown between them, tangled like olive tree roots upon a cliff, could not be troubled enough to be called love, if it could be called anything at all.
To connect to some constellation,
we curve toward our angle of light,
intwine our limbs
across any lattice we find.
For only in reflection
are lines straight,
a simple step followed by another,
where all our lies are justified
into sclerotic prison walls.
We turn our faces to the sun
like mirrors tracking distant stars,
where there are no explanations
for our desires, where absences
appear unanticipated
like the sadness of angels
momentarily entering a room
only to leave without speaking.
How do we know
to stand before the door
knowing it will open?
How do we know
the door is there?
(June 17, 2021)
He plods down a street,
head bent, watching
the ground as if afraid
some detail will be enough
to tumble him into hell.
Every moment’s an edge
as each letter in each
word inscribes the air
cleanly, like a tattoo
cut freshly into skin.
(June 9, 2021)
The mud thickness
on my shoes,
as I plod along
singing.
I bend slowly
into the earth;
my voice swallowed
by the wind.
Except for names
of the dead faces,
I remember most
versions of the past;
the storied details
reassure me
that what I knew,
I know.
Despite other’s
revanchist revisions,
I hold to a path
which will lead me home.
(June 8, 2021)
The wild mustang grape vines
its way along the fence line,
further obscuring boundaries
between what is said,
and what is perpetuated.
The past is of no consequence
beyond familiar stories to bolster
today’s latest interpretation,
which momentarily coalesces
to cloak in ambiguity
the Absence as it festers
in vague nostalgic shadows.
(May 30, 2021)
How do we maintain a balance
between apart and a part?
Lean too far one way, one lose’s
humanity, too far toward the other,
and one loses one’s soul.
I am I, as you are you;
yet, I am also you, as you are me,
as well. There is no other way,
other than each other. The hope
of god’s redemption lies with us.
(May 30, 2021)
Outside, a butterfly flits
across the sun-dipped tips
of black-eyed Susans
swaying in the wind:
While inside, I struggle
with what to write.
(May 21, 2021)
Along convoluted back trails
misted in vague familiarity,
we wonder in our ruins,
grown strange and inevitable
across dry rivers and dead grass.
Former landmarks fall to rubble,
become base for new towers,
new ways, not ours.
Then as if by accident,
as if with purpose,
we arrive each moment,
near-sighted and deaf
to regale in our misfortune,
repeating yet another iteration
of the story we all wear,
like chains forged from dust.
(May 20, 2021)
yet another day
with another grey sunset,
my glass is empty.
(May 13, 2021)
I fear silence
for it leaves me
to my words.
Their whispers
mouth
my periphery,
like minnows
tear a worm’s
flesh from
the steel hook
glimmering
in a creek’s
slow eddy.
(May 11, 2021)
with spring’s violence flowers burst
into bloom from winter’s death
as chimes toll slowly in the tree
mere weeks ago ice creaked
tightly along the chase tree’s
twisted branches as the chimes
hung limp and people froze
to death alone at home
(May 9, 2021)
when listening to someone speak
each word takes root
along the tendrils of the unsaid
a pattern emerges
branch grafted on old wood
flowers to mourn the newly dead
(May 8, 2021)
certainty’s a razor’s edge
pressed lightly across skin
i draw a line along
the length of my arm
tracing a blue vein
a way in a way out
(May 4, 2021)
from “an untitled serial poem”
grey and cold all day
the year begins again
cedar pollen drifts wildly
I can feel the shredded bark
deeply behind my eyes
trying to cut a way out
I’m not surprised but fear
all that has changed enough
to become a normal day
as wolves claw and slaver
at the door
(January 2, 2020)
note: I am starting a series of 140 poems, the length of each poem will be a set number of syllables determined by a random number generator. each poem/stanza will organically arise from the previous poem/stanza in the series in the manner of a renga without following the traditional renga’s syllable parameters. Additionally there is another requirement put upon every tenth poem/stanza in the series which will connect it to another “ten” poem/stanza following abstractly the traditional rhyme pattern of a Shakespearian sonnet. This is the second time I have written a longer poem following this self-imposed system. The first was called “Sonnet: a renga” This is the beginning poem/stanza of the new series.
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