Poemunity — your poem community

1 Since the irrational “because I said so” start, they’d had their differences: color that isn’t really color, spin that isn’t spin because attitude’s best when it has no content. Ask a physicist what “charge” is; he’ll say your question makes no sense. 2 Word had it that if they surrendered their feckless ways and their lives with no end, if they joined up, they would get a head, something to speak for them: The head says, “I don’t want to die.” Says, “I am all alone here.”

1 Discomfort marks the boundary. One early symptom was the boundary. The invention of hunger. I could use energy. To serve. Elaborate systems in the service of far-fetched demands. The great termite mounds serve as air-conditioners. Temperature within must never vary more than 2 degrees. 2 Which came first the need or the system? Systematic. System player. Scheme of Things. The body considered as a functional unit. “My system craves calcium.” An organized set of doctrines. A network formed for the purpose of ... “All I want is you.” 3 was narrowing their options to one, the next development. Soldiers have elongate heads and massive mandibles. Squirtgun heads are found among fiercer species. Since soldiers cannot feed themselves, each requires a troupe of attendants. 4 Her demands had become more elaborate. He must be blindfolded, (Must break off his own wings) wear this corset laced tight (seal up the nuptial cell) to attain his heart’s desire. Move only as she permits (Mate the bloated queen each season) or be hung from the rafters. How did he get here? 5 Poor baby, I heard your hammer. The invention of pounding. “As soon as it became important that free energy be channeled.” Once you cared to be set off from the surrounding medium. This order has been preferred since improvement was discovered. The moment one intends to grow at the expense. When teeth emerge Demand for special treatment was an early symptom

proceeds by chance and necessity becomes nonrandom through randomness builds complexity from simplicity nurtures consciousness unconsciously evolves purposelessly creatures who demand purpose and discover natural selection

I’m sitting at Nathan’s, reading a biography of Darwin who, right now, is dissecting a barnacle “no bigger than a pinhead (and with two penises)”: he’ll work like this on barnacles, his wrists supported by rigged-up blocks of workshop wood, for eight years. Nathan is reading too, in the worn-down banged-up “daddy chair”: those philosophical poems of William Bronk’s. What’s most delightful is that Tristan, eleven, and Aidan, ten, are reading, each of them enmazed in a fantasy novel that squeezes them by the attention-bone behind the eyes in its thimble pool of pineal juice and drizzled endorphins. Tristan cared enough to cry when he finished his previous book and its battle of shadow and radiance was over. Each of us: his individual book; and yet the silence is communal. This is a natural state at Nathan’s. Holly, however, is reading the Sunday paper and so serves, without saying a word, to remind us how natural it was for Raeshawn Nelson, seven, to fall while running and burn out his eye on the disregarded meth pipe, or for Anna Rietta, nine, to have come home from school and excitedly been the **!star!**, each day, of the homemade porn her parents peddled as “young fun” over the Internet. This was what they knew, and all they knew, and so they entered it as comfortably as Tristan does his opened world of sorcerors and valiant knights and fancy-talking beasts, since use x frequency = familiarity. That’s the strict, imperious math of everybody’s insular subuniverse. Sherena asked me what this thing “vermouth” was (she pronounced it “mouth”) and ordered quiche as if it were the brother of “touché”; but then she needed to explain to me why C-C was the “bottom bitch” and what a “T-girl” is and how to put down money on Ice’s book at “the county,” by which she meant jail. And those years when Darwin parsed the slimy fiber of his barnacles (discovering the species where “the female has no anus” and the one with “tiny parasitic males [that were] embedded in one female’s flesh like blackheads”), “squinty . . . laborious,” were among the final decades of hundreds of years when a woman in China would suffer ritual foot binding, at five, the bandages limiting growth until the toes were bent and curled (the toenails growing into the balls of the feet) and the arches broken. This resulted in the desirable “shrunken plums” and “three-inch golden lilies” sought by marriage brokers. Traditionally, a prospective mother-in-law would check below the hem, and reject any feet over four inches long. Entire generations of women could only mince and hobble. And this was natural, this was the air and the light and “the-way-of-things-forever” that you woke up to every day . . . as natural as the implicit laws in Aidan’s book, by which a bear converses with a girl in growly mutual-speak, and a boy of sturdy heart and his wingéd horse ascend their sky with the unremarkable grace of birds in ours. That’s ordinary Newtonian physics there, and Aidan subjects himself to the rules of flying horsemanship, and the code of those of innocent spirit about to war with wyverns and the wormfolk, and the governing instructions of gods with the heads of wide-eyed animals . . . and even now, Sherena texts my phone to say that WEATHER GOOD and SHINE GOT BULLET IN LUNG FROM POLICE

As a fond mother, when the day is o'er, Leads by the hand her little child to bed, Half willing, half reluctant to be led, And leave his broken playthings on the floor, Still gazing at them through the open door, Nor wholly reassured and comforted By promises of others in their stead, Which, though more splendid, may not please him more; So Nature deals with us, and takes away Our playthings one by one, and by the hand Leads us to rest so gently, that we go Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay, Being too full of sleep to understand How far the unknown transcends the what we know.

If I had enough cages to keep all the birds I’ve collected over the years then I would have to open a shop because there’s only so much room in a two-bedroom walk-up for 48 birds, not to mention the dancing bears and the frogs, or the different varieties of fish, the one species of flea, and I almost forgot the proud dogs and the lone mule, the profane one who entered my life to curse at scribes and pharisees; and maybe he’d let the mouse I found forever dying at the end of a poem ride on his back like a whiskered Christ and if not, maybe my yeti could do it when he’s not downtown working security at the store or teaching the parrots how to say brotherhood in grunt and how to comb out the tangles and mud from his hair whose sweat reminds me of that bearded collector of  beasts with the ark who would have no doubt understood how I feel, that prophet of change under whose spell I want to confess that I’m a Christian of   the Old Testament, that my grandfather hung all his goats upside down, their throats over a bucket, and slapped their chests like that other Nature Boy who strutted around the ring like a peacock with his feathered hair that stayed immaculate even on the nights he lost to our hero Wahoo McDaniel who never played the heel, he who hailed from the lost tribes of Oklahoma, who made us want to be chiefs so much we wore pigeon feathers and circled each other inside a green square of water hose until someone finally rang the bell that was never there and we sprung toward each other like animals in love or at war.

Nature, that washed her hands in milk, And had forgot to dry them, Instead of earth took snow and silk, At love’s request to try them, If she a mistress could compose To please love’s fancy out of those. Her eyes he would should be of light, A violet breath, and lips of jelly; Her hair not black, nor overbright, And of the softest down her belly; As for her inside he’d have it Only of wantonness and wit. At love’s entreaty such a one Nature made, but with her beauty She hath framed a heart of stone; So as love, by ill destiny, Must die for her whom nature gave him, Because her darling would not save him. But time (which nature doth despise, And rudely gives her love the lie, Makes hope a fool, and sorrow wise) His hands do neither wash nor dry; But being made of steel and rust, Turns snow and silk and milk to dust. The light, the belly, lips, and breath, He dims, discolors, and destroys; With those he feeds but fills not death, Which sometimes were the food of joys. Yea, time doth dull each lively wit, And dries all wantonness with it. Oh, cruel time! which takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have, And pays us but with age and dust; Who in the dark and silent grave When we have wandered all our ways Shuts up the story of our days.

Let’s say I’m Captain Cook, setting sail to drift until currents push me into a certain lane, certain highway with its humpbacked traffic bobbing along. My young aren’t strapped in the back flinging Cheerios into the crevices like a game of darts but moored in the house with my patient wife so I can seek my destiny here— And I have no destination, not the Friendly Center or aquarium—I journey only to find a usable route. I’m stewing the bones a fourth time to leach any last savor for my broth— not gumming pirate birthday cake with seafoam-colored frosting, nor placing my order at the drive-thru (no, not a Frosty, not a McRib)— Place-names are still to be scrawled, new-minted to mark this passage, its weather and bits of luck. The usable route’s a velvet highway I’ll trace to parchment—a new day, a new world, not the GPS lady recalculating— These words held in my mouth, these words a way to inscribe we are not lost in a vast expanse of lostness.

move if you  can makeout  her  mouth sort  of miming  to B.B.  happy birthday and handing  him a  bottle which is to  illustrate the progress of civilization up to  the  present  day  that I  was  there  when bought  in Greek  four packets  of Karelia's Virginia and brought back a big bottle fit for treason, stratagem, and spoils knocking  the ball against the  little house where  I was  born beginning to see  that  "two ugly  make a pretty"  moving  upwards  of  a  crooked  village road  not  ten  miles  from the mud  baths we read about as well as a foundry, coal-breaker, machine-shops, and light-house

The hinge of the year the great gates opening and then slowly slowly closing on us. I always imagine those gates hanging over the ocean fiery over the stone grey waters of evening. We cast what we must change about ourselves onto the waters flowing to the sea. The sins, errors, bad habits, whatever you call them, dissolve. When I was little I cried out I! I! I! I want, I want. Older, I feel less important, a worker bee in the hive of history, miles of hard labor to make my sweetness. The gates are closing The light is failing I kneel before what I love imploring that it may live. So much breaks, wears down, fails in us. We must forgive our broken promises— their sharp shards in our hands.