there's got to be more below the surface
I can no longer see
consequence. I walk home
and everyone has changed.
I feel the same now as
I did when I was nine:
ignorant and naive—
and unaware of both.
Like crows among the dead,
I worry our future.
When I take my glasses
off, rooms blur with motion.
I find comfort in that
like our bed’s warmth after
you have left for the day.
(March 21, 2023)
In almost-spring, the trees green
the bare branch tips barely while
others feign death like lovers
reluctant to leave bed’s warmth.
I resist most change until
it has already occurred.
It rarely changes that much,
that I must not plan dinner.
Although time’s rituals resist
alterations, the stitches
still fray from everyday use.
I am not much different.
Yesterday was warm and wet;
today cold, windy and clear.
To say
one loses faith,
assumes
quite a bit:
foremost one has
a faith to lose,
more so
than just a given.
Variables exist only
the moment before
the dice settle
on the green felt.
A sentence ends
with nothing left to say.
(March 13, 2023)
I know what you will say—
So, I speak instead to change
the direction of your subject
before you think to speak
Too often I use language
as a shield to deflect
the slashing barrage
of each day’s small talk
I natter through scripts
only I can hear, tumbling
variations into possibilities
from the obscure to the germane
Social cliches constrain
conversation from becoming
too much to hold us together,
and too little to tear us apart
(March 7, 2023)
Along the horizon,
light dusts the sky
in translucent
oranges and reds.
I’m here, not there,
on the back steps
sipping coffee
trying not to break,
and in that moment
remove myself enough
to see the moment
as always enough:
morning light through trees,
with a chorus of birds.
I let the cat in—
then let her out once again,
thus my life proceeds
My students read books,
alone with their thoughts each class,
we learn what we do
I must write a poem
I must write every day
Today, this is it
I’ll write a haiku:
they are simple enough, though
simplicity’s not
I have taught for years and years
I’m still not sure what happens
(February 28, 2023)
“corpses are set to banquet”
–Ezra Pound
the dead are fed
without fear for
without awareness
without consequence
the dog licks
the negligent’s hand
as easily as
the master’s
the servers smirk
taking the plates
away
who knows
what is served
at the end of the day
(February 26, 2023)
I despise my life—
the knife twist memory
each slight
slit across tendons
to fell with guilt
the dynamic
each moment compels
into the next
here now I hold
a third
flick it into the air
to release
with hopeless trust
it will be caught
(February 25, 2023)
Striving for happiness,
we worry so about
the then and when
that now’s forgotten
in the world’s swirl.
Like a child’s top,
we wobble wildly
gaining balance,
losing equilibrium,
forgetting the moment
the top gyrates
into a stillness;
it seems unmoving
even as it spins,
and spins, and spins.
(February 21, 2023)
“to combat the resistances of language you must keep talking”
–Anne Carson
I write most everyday. Since the end of last August, I have filled up two 150-page notebooks, completed close to 80 short poems. I have written, if not so obsessively as now, since I was 15. I write poetry, with the occasional venture into essays like this one. I have trouble with narrative, one event leading into another befuddles me, as does conversation between people. So I do not write fiction. Yet, I do have an interior running commentary on the narrative I am living, snipes and admonitions on my life as it unfolds. To push back against this cruel eviscerating voice, which adheres tightly within my skin, I write. I write to explain the world to myself, to explain myself to myself, to resist the world, which is lain upon me by the world. I write to resist the temptation to settle into myself without a thought. I am uncomfortable in most social situations. It’s discomforting when others try to define me, or attempt to interpret me from my writing. Yes, I am aware that all writer’s expose their minds in their writing. Even writers of fiction expose themselves through their fictional characters. Nietzsche wrote that in the end we only experience ourselves. Yet, I believe there is also a separation from oneself, a leap into the universal other, which occurs when one writes: a transubstantiation of individuality into a larger third person narrator, who watches and observes with more objective, more just, eye. Of course, I also know this is pure bullshit. I am as clotted with my biases and situation as anyone. But it is through writing, through the transformative nature of writing, where a third space can open, and one can enter along with whomever can follow into a changed world, a different, perhaps better place, if only for the time it takes to read the poem. And to keep from being defined, trapped even in these new spaces, I continue to write, to find a way to exist with myself.
(February 28, 2017)
My friend’s mother loved
to draw lines for people
to differentiate forms
of love; to justify
the margins; to define
what was proper and allowed
in the eyes of her god who
said to love one another.
So many words she used
to hone the finer gradations
of such a simple task:
an act of empathy, love
your neighbor as yourself;
We only have each other.
(February 19, 2023)
I’m trapped
in broken brambles
awaiting the wolves
approach. I hear
my shadows,
forms within forms,
ripple slowly
through empty trees,
like dry leaves
on an absent wind.
Banished
to inconsequence,
I hover on the edge
acting
as I had a part beyond
this tacit whisper.
These walls contain
all the ghosts who speak
of love and duty:
like dead lover’s memories,
dark conversations ensue.
(February 16, 2023)
I know where I am she said
just look out the window
I know I remember
the bricks of the wall she said
I’m not crazy she said
not like old Uncle Rudolf
I remember him there
I remember the walls she said
I was just a child she said
but I knew what’s what
I know where you’ve put me
I know where I am she said
The State hospital she said
I am not crazy I know
I was there once as a child
I remember the walls she said
I want out of bed she said
I want to go home she said
I’m tired all the time she said
I remember the walls she said
I remember the walls
I remember the walls
I want to go home
I remember the walls
(February 3, 2023)
A mouse skitters along
the baseboard, stops,
then waits, apprehensive;
her whiskers alive
to the slightest air.
Shadows blossom on the walls.
Fear pads through the room,
aware of nothing but itself
growing inside others
like a worm in a rose.
What with so many cuts
and small pricks upon
our faces and fingertips,
fear bleeds into the air
like flowers from god’s mouth:
fear flourishes on nothing,
feeds on nothing, blooms
from the nothing we carry
like bags of broken glass
spilling into our hands.
The mouse sits still
surrendering to the fear,
surrendering to the waves,
knowing she will lose herself,
knowing she will drown.
(January 31, 2023)
The med-tech said the MRI showed I had had three events— I remember two. A friend asked me a few months later if I had forgotten anything. I asked, how would I know? Another, whom I met for the first time months and months after the events, asked if I had aphasia since I was always searching for words as I spoke. If I had always done this, or was it a result of the stroke? Again, how would I know? I don’t remember being at a loss for words in the past— does that mean I have memory loss, or that it did not happen? I could ask people who knew me before, but then that would be their memories of me, not my own.
This is what I remember of that night. My in-laws were over for dinner. We were seated around the kitchen table. I don’t remember the children there, but they would have been, or should have been. I vaguely recall a roast pork loin in a cream sauce on the table, but that could have been another night with different people talking about different things. I was drinking a margarita. I had just taken a drink, savoring the salt and tequila as I placed the glass on the table. It was then that the first event I remember occurred. I felt odd, out of sequence somehow. My vision blurred briefly, as if I had just woken up. The world looked as if I was peering through a smudged lens of a camera. I rubbed my eyes, but my vision remained gooey.
I still felt odd. So, I excused myself, and retreated to an overstuffed chair in the living room. Very quickly my vision cleared, and I felt normal again. I returned to the table laughing about how weird the whole thing was, and finished my plate. After dinner, Lisa and her parents went outside to sit on the porch. I cleaned up a little, then went into the front room and sat down in the Lazy-Boy in the corner. As I sat there the words from Pound’s Cantos we had painted above the front door: “To be men, not destroyers” went from one line to three as if I were looking through a prism. That was more than a little weird.
Lisa called the nurse line. And after we described what had occurred, he said it sounded like a stroke, but not too bad of one since I felt normal. He said I should come in to the after-hours clinic in the morning and see a doctor. I wondered if I would wake up in the morning.
The hospital was a comedy of errors. The after hours doctor sent me there as soon as she heard my symptoms. We arrived, talked to a receptionist, who sent us up stairs for a room. The floor nurse had no idea why we were there, and sent us back downstairs. Finally someone in the ER escorted me back to a bed. They stuck wires and tubes all over and in me. Lots of machines beeped and blipped. Then they sent us home.
Over the next few months I had a series of tests: my heart, my blood, my head (MRI), my arteries. I saw the amounts the insurance company shelled out rise to the tens of thousands. Luckily I had insurance through teaching, or we would have been hard pressed to pay it all. Then after all of that they sent us a letter to describe what had happened. Lisa demanded that we see the neurosurgeon who signed off on the letter. We went in; and according to all the tests, and the gobs of money the insurance company paid, he told us the results. Yes, I had had a stroke. Yes, I was really young to have had a stroke (45). No, they did not know what caused it. Yes, it could happen again. No, there was nothing I could do to prevent it. Take a baby aspirin everyday. That was it: take a baby aspirin everyday. Like the punch line to an ancient joke that no one laughs at anymore: take a baby aspirin, and don’t call me in the morning.
(January 29, 2023)
We could not see the Mediterranean
sky from the dive bar off the alley.
A neon-blue sign on the wall flickered
and flowed over us in pulsating waves.
We willingly began to drown, tangled
in the laconic kelp strangling
our naive hearts in a nascent love.
The twins behind the bar laughed
at our tumbling and fumbling;
as, like sea glass on a foreign shore,
we danced in the neon-blue light.
(January 22, 2023)
Rising each morning,
he finds himself
falling into memory
and its patterned rituals.
Most days do not cohere;
stories slag off as he walks
unsteadily down the stairs.
He does not fragment,
like a shattered mirror,
so much as crumbles
like cheap concrete
into piles of disaggregated
data— isolated numbers
floating in the air. The dust,
briefly, rises into the sun,
then settles like a benediction
across a landscape of sin.
He finds comfort in his ruins,
where the darker horror hides
in the ashes of the mundane.
(January 21, 2023)
Over time, I have learned
from youth’s cacophony
the world blurs to silence.
I can only hear myself
in slurred muffled whispers.
I am not who I was,
nor who I meant to be
had I but persisted,
rather a shadow of both
beneath a darkened sky.
(January 16,2023)
By the time I wake, I’m worn out.
I try to convince myself I slept,
because I have no memory
of being awake. All night’s dark
moments resemble each other;
until incrementally, day breaks
shadows cleanly across the wall.
I can see I am awake. Yet still,
I’m unsure I have slept at all.
My thoughts too are like this now:
ideas and images enter, then part
with only a hint they were there,
like a lover’s perfume on the sheets
hours after she has left your arms,
returning once again into his.
(January 7, 2023)
.
The time devoted to it:
futile prayers to a dead god,
or mere self-indulgent pap?
Either way—not much more:
no moon; no red rose;
no stolen kiss in the hall,
just thread bare cliches
to drape across trite sentiment,
like chairs in abandoned rooms.
(December 13, 2022)
Silence and echos suffice
for few needs remain.
They do not speak through us.
Although we speak of them
in convoluted circles
with misplaced words,
and tangential voices,
as if we somehow knew more
than them about the language
required to navigate the stars.
(December 9, 2022)
Even without the spoken word
as transcript, I fall through
context as if from a tree,
cracking branches and ribs,
finding solace in dislocation.
Alternatives are pointless
to parse, being unspoken.
Yet, a story’s happy ending,
too often, exists elsewhere.
Negotiating past conversations
into a tremulous present,
I am always somewhere else.
Rarely, am I here:
outside the tangled bramble.
(December 8, 2022)
To rebuild the fables
after they have fallen
requires patience
to find what persists
in what remains.
A mother whispers
a song above a crib;
an old man remembers
his first taste of love;
we speak to each other
slowly across the night.
Within memory’s spaces
simple words are spoken
night after night after night.
(December 6, 2022)
like notes in a tattered Stravinsky score
starlings stand on taut electric lines and
murmur about the secrets of the world
as if a sheet the wind has snapped free
from the line out back they lift as one
and shimmer across the crisp morning sky
(December 5, 2022)
I am the books I have not read—
perhaps begun, or perhaps not, then
abandoned like a sack of kittens,
to stack on side tables until relocated,
years later in a flurry of decluttering
before a holiday, to a shelf where
the petulant spines whisper, beneath
the dust, their clucking disappointment
with lost possibility, and false claims
of the myriad loose threads which lead
directly from the maze I only thought
of entering, when instead I opened a book.
(December 1, 2022)
1.
Where are you going?
You’re already here.
Now, let that go—
but stay
without
staying.
2.
It is easier
to be the authority
and pronounce
bits of bated wisdom,
as if you know
anything more than now.
3.
Listen, you are here:
the pulse of wind through the trees;
a loud distant sneeze.
(November 30, 2022)
I wish I were drunk,
but I am not—
There are no soft edges left.
Rage waits. Boys, with guns
bigger than them, walk
casually into classrooms
and churches to kill.
The house is cold;
the Mexican blanket is not enough.
Plague festers the air; and,
we breathe deeply. Savoring
the fear, we watch the street
humming darkly to the wind.
Again, we say what’s been said:
the same muttered rituals,
with the same fruitless results.
The world is broken, and I am
tired of this sober life.
Bit players, we dance awkwardly
in the blurred background
without lines to speak,
nor character enough to change.
(November 29, 2022)
Look, Sunshine,
the strippers at the club
are like the aurora borealis, but
never would I presume to tell you
the beauty of a jiggling moon.
I have too many privileges to grind
to toss that kind of monkey wrench.
Beauty,
after all, is the truth we pursue; and
never would I presume to tell you
how to pass a lonely afternoon.
(November 22, 2022)
This is my story:
a prelude to nothing
beyond this moment.
This is my story
as I tell it today
unrevised, unfiltered.
This is my story:
different than yesterday,
different than tomorrow.
This is my story
I must tell to myself
each day, every day.
This is my story;
I have not told, yet.
(November 16, 2022)
A student tells me
she cannot hear an
inner dialogue.
How lonely she must
be to have silence
as her only thought.
A flame burns without
a flicker, alone
in an empty room.
It illuminates
itself and the walls
along the light’s edge:
nothing can be seen;
there are no echoes.
(November 13, 2022)
“there is no absence
that cannot be replaced”
—Rene Char
She sits in a hole in the room
where time drifts like dust motes
through sunlight. There is no time
anymore for resentment, or anger,
to fester their dark intentions.
Everything fades. The half-life of names
expands absorbing our vague desires
in the absolution memory grants
with each revision. She is tired now.
Patchwork obligations, like cages
without keys, contain her reasons.
In her way, she is dying, as are we all—
an obvious cliche, yet rituals
daily provide us with parameters
where we feel most comfortable.
Life is painful enough. Outside the air
clutters with snow, and rime forms
along the fence line. She watches the door.
Once, long ago, someone knocked, then left.
(November 12, 2022)
You ask what I want.
I have no answer
that is not abstract:
Happiness, less drama, less stress;
no flagellant memories
laced in guilt and blame;
time to think;
time to move about the house;
time to take for our life.
time to remember:
who I am;
who you are—
to find ourselves
together again.
(November 9, 2022)
“To see a world in a grain of sand/and a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour”—-William Blake
An eternal pause
which opens in a moment
then vanishes
(like a leaf fall breaks
the still flow
of the autumn air;
or a stutter step
in a dance
almost breaks rhythm;
or a match flares
an aura briefly
as the wick takes flame)
is where we are,
always.
in the dream this time
I wrote a line to start
then again inevitably
I woke to remember
nothing but the sense
that something had left
something consequential
something now absent
like the vacancy we fill
each time we move quietly
through an empty room
something that’s always there
outside the dream I write
myself through the delusion
that I have something to say
beyond my mundane day
beyond my awkward cliches
beyond my last glimpse of land
where gulls screech to the wind
their sneers of mockery and desire
where I’m stripped of my words
and left alone with what I am
a tongueless mouth gasping
for air beneath a dying sea
(October 20, 2022)
Mist moves through the trees
which loom overhead.
The why of my way
trails vaguely behind,
catching on branches
like tufts of soft fur,
clinging to the briar.
The negligible
wind falters then dies;
and, the air thickens
as the earth reaches
for the distant sky
like a supplicant
to an absent god.
My cliches wander in
with a negligent ease.
They have no compunctions
with rude visitations.
Like a tabby stalking
a yard of a neighbor
who fed her once
years and years ago,
they simply stray from
the page’s periphery:
an easy image
returned to repeatedly,
providing a brutish clarity
to a violent mendacity.
(October 6, 2022)
He sits in a wooden chair
in the center of a locked room.
The chair is bolted to the floor.
The room is bare, but for a light
hanging above him like a sword.
The light is dim, without a shade.
He is not wearing a blindfold,
but he might as well be—
for there is nothing to see
beyond the industrial gray walls.
No one has come into the room.
He is not sure how he arrived,
only that he is here now, alone.
If he listens he can hear his breath
otherwise the room is silent
as if all sounds are absorbed
into the walls before they enter.
he sits with his back to a locked door,
or what he assumes is a locked door,
for he has not attempted to open it.
Every now and then a light flickers
beneath the door as if a warning
to him in a code he cannot fathom
even if he were able to see it.
The room is cold, not overly so, but
enough to cause his nose to run.
He would like to wipe his nose
but his hands behind his back are tied,
as are his feet to the chair’s legs.
He doesn’t know how long he has waited,
nor how much longer he must wait,
nor what he is waiting for exactly:
just that he waits in a chair, alone,
in a room; and, he is just like you.
(October 4, 2022)
Somedays I am here
more than most:
Thin flesh over fragile bones,
unable to hold a thought
from dream, I wander
from room to room
metaphorically lost
in a house I once knew.
My hand on a window,
I feel the winter sun
briefly at my fingertips,
before the shadow falls
between the bare branches
lightly laced in ice.
(September 30, 2022)
the sadness grew
its tendrils
through the rooms
of their house
casually
laconically
until
it touched
and troubled
their lives
staining all
in a yellowish
brown smudge
as if an old
mattress
tossed to the side
of an abandoned
dirt road
(September 27, 2022)
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