Dean Young

Fly from me does all I would have stay, the blossoms did not stay, stayed not the frost in the yellow grass. Every leash snapped, every contract void, and flying in the crows lingers but a moment in the graveyard oaks yet inside me it never stops so I can’t tell who is chasing, who chased, I can sleep into afternoon and still wake soaring. So out come the bats, down spiral swifts into the chimneys, Hey, I’m real, say the dream- figments then are gone like breath-prints on a window, handwriting in snow. Whatever I hold however flies apart, the children skip into the park come out middle-aged with children of their own. Your laugh over the phone, will it ever answer me again? Too much flying, photons perforating us, voices hurtling into outer space, Whitman out past Neptune, Dickinson retreating yet getting brighter. Remember running barefoot across hot sand into the sea’s hovering, remember my hand as we darted against the holiday Broadway throng, catching your train just as it was leaving? Hey, it’s real, your face like a comet, horses coming from the field for morning oats, insects hitting a screen, the message nearly impossible to read, obscured by light because carried by Mercury: I love you, I’m coming. Sure, what fluttered is now gone, maybe a smudge left, maybe a delicate under- feather only then that too, yes, rained away. And when the flying is flown and the heart’s a useless sliver in a glacier and the gown hangs still as meat in a locker and eyesight is dashed-down glass and the mouth rust- stoppered, will some twinge still pass between us, still some fledgling pledge?

People looking at the sea, makes them feel less terrible about themselves, the sea's behaving abominably, seems never satisfied, what it throws away it dashes down then wants back, yanks back. Comparatively, thinks one vice president, what are my frauds but nudged along misunderstandings already there? I can't believe I ever worried about my betrayals, thinks the analyst benefitting facially from the sea's raged-up mist. Obviously I'm not the only one suffering an identity crisis knows the boy who wants to be a lawyer no more. Nothing can stay long, cogitates the dog, so maybe a life of fetch is not a wasted life. And the sea heaves and cleaves and seethes, shoots snot out, goes to bed only to wake shouting in the mansion of the night, pacing, pacing, making tea then spilling it, sudden outloud laughter snort, Oh what the heck, I probably drove myself crazy, thinks the sea, kissing all those strangers, forgiving them no matter what, liars in confession, vomitters of plastics and fossil fuels but what a stricken elixir I've become even to my becalmed depths, while through its head swim a million fishes seemingly made of light eating each other.

who somehow have found a sip of water, on this day in the past four syndicated series involving communication with the dead were televised and in this way we resembled our own ghosts in a world made brief with flowers. To you, our agonies and tizzies must appear quaint as the stiff shoulders of someone carrying buckets from a well or the stung beekeeper

Thank you whoever tuned the radio to rain, thank you who spilled the strong-willed wine for not being me so I’m not to blame. I’m glad I’m not that broken tree although it looks sublime. And glad I’m not taking a test and running out of time. What’s a tetrahedron anyway? What’s the sublime, 3,483 divided by 9, the tenth amendment, the ferryman’s name on the River Styx? We’re all missing more and more tricks, losing our grips, guilty of crimes we didn’t commit. The horse rears and races then moves no more, the sports coupe grinds to a stop, beginning a new life as rot, beaten to shit, Whitman grass stain, consciousness swamp gas, the bones and brain, protoplasm and liver, ground down like stones in a river. Or does the heart’s cinder wash up as delta froth out of which hops frog spawn, dog song, the next rhyming grind, next kid literati? Maybe the world’s just a bubble, all philosophy ants in a muddle, an engine inside an elk’s skull on a pole. Maybe an angel’s long overdue and we’re all in trouble. Meanwhile thanks whoever for the dial turned to green downpour, thanks for feathery conniptions at the seashore and moth-minded, match-flash breath. Thank you for whatever’s left.

The ugly duckling remained ugly its whole life but found others as ugly as itself, I guess that’s the message. Smoke rises from the heads in the backyard. Do you think if I hang around here long enough someone will proffer a muffin, one skulking shadow to another? Soon, my shoes will be part of the populous dirt. Have I learned all the wrong lessons, the ones you shouldn’t know until the last dew-clogged lawn is mowed and the sun goes down on the ruined battlements? Why was I given a toy train if not to stage stupendous wrecks? Sure, I can walk by the sea holding a hand with as much melancholy as the next fellow, substituting the cries of slammed waves for the droll adumbrations of distraught skeletons, the day taking on the sheen of a stone removed from the mouth and skipped between the breakers jubilant and sunk.

When the fog burns off and the air's pulverized diamonds and you can see beyond the islands of forever!—far too dramatic for me. It hurts something behind my eyes near the sphenoid, not good. I prefer fog with fog behind it, uninflammable fog. Then there's no competition for brightness, no Byron for your Shelley, no Juno eclisping your Athena, no big bridge statement about bringing unity to landmasses. All the thought balloons are blank. The marching band can't practice, even a bird's got to get within five feet before it can start an argument. Like dead flies on the sill of an abandoned nursery, we too are seeds in the rattle of mortality. A foglike baby god picks it up, shakes it, laughs insanely then goes back to playing with her feet. I have felt awful cold and lonely and fog has been blotting paper to my tears. My dog is fog and I don't have to scoop its poop with my hand in a plastic bag. There are sensations that begin in the world, the mind responding with ideas but then those ideas cause other sensations. What a mess. We stand at the edge of a drop that doesn't answer back, fog our only friend although it's hell on shrimpboats. There, there, says the fog. Where, where? You can't see a thing.

We cannot push ourselves away from this quiet, even in our sprees of inattention, the departing passengers stubbing out their smokes, arrivees in tears, lots of cellophane, the rumpus over parking. Wind scrapes leaves across the road, first flashes of snow, it is dark then it’s really dark. Forgive me for not writing for so long, I’ve been right beside you, one of the vaguer divinities blocking your way with its need to confess all its botched attempts at love, what started the whole mess. I love this place, its absurd use of balustrade, the chairs that dig into the spine, motorcyclists propping their drunk girlfriends in the sun, men playing timed chess with themselves, the guarantees and warnings that entice us to the brink of what they warn about. But we can do no more than pass through these rooms and their sudden chills where once a plea was entered almost unintentionally that seemed at last to reveal ourselves to ourselves, immaculate, bereft, deserving to be found.

Like everyone, I wanted my animal to be the hawk. I thought I wanted the strength to eat the eyes first then tear into the fuse box of the chest and soar away. I needed help because I still cowered under the shadow of my father, a man who inspected picture tubes five out of seven nights, who woke to breakfast on burnt roast except the two weeks he’d sleep on a Jersey beach and throw me into the gasoline-sheened waves. I loved him dying indebted not knowing to what, thinking his pension would be enough, released not knowing from what, gumming at something I was afraid to get close enough to hear, afraid of what I was co-signing. So maybe the elephant. The elephant knows when one of its own is suffering up to six miles away. Charges across the desert cognizant of the futility. How can I be forgiven when I don’t know what I need forgiving for? Sometimes the urges are too extreme: to slap on the brakes and scream, to bite the haunch of some passing perfume, so maybe my animal is the tiger. Or shark. Or centipede. But I know I’m smaller than that, filling notebooks with clumsy versions of one plaint, one pheromonal call, clamoring over a crumb that I think is the world, baffled by the splotch of one of my own crushed kind, almost sweet, a sort of tar, following a trail of one or two molecules, leaving a trail of one or two molecules.

My books are full of mistakes but not the ones Tony’s always pointing out as if correct spelling is what could stop the conveyor belt the new kid caught his arm in. Three weeks on the job and he’s already six hundred legal pages, lawyers haggling in an office with an ignored view of the river pretending to be asleep, pretending to have insight into its muddy self. You think that’s a fucked-up, drawn-out metaphor, try this: if you feel you’re writhing like a worm in a bottle of tequila, you don’t know it’s the quickness of its death that reveals the quality of the product, its proof. I don’t know what I’m talking about either. Do you think the dictionary ever says to itself I’ve got these words that mean completely different things inside myself and it’s tearing me apart? My errors are even bigger than that. You start taking down the walls of your house, sooner or later it’ll collapse but not before you can walk around with your eyes closed, rolled backwards and staring straight into the amygdala’s meatlocker and your own damn self hanging there. Do that for awhile and it’s easier to delight in snow that lasts about twenty minutes longer than a life held together by the twisted silver baling wire of deception and stealth. But I ain’t confessing nothing. On mornings when I hope you forget my name, I walk through the high wet weeds that don’t have names either. I do not remember the word dew. I do not remember what I told you with your ear in my teeth. Further and further into the weeds. We have absolutely no proof god isn’t an insect rubbing her hind legs together to sing. Or boring into us like a yellow jacket into a fallen, overripe pear. Or an assassin bug squatting over us, shoving a proboscis right through our breast plate then sipping. How wonderful our poisons don’t kill her.

Must Sean Penn always look like he’s squeezing the last drops out of a sponge and the sponge is his face? Even the back of his head grimaces. Just the pressure in his little finger alone could kill a gorilla. Remember that kid whose whole trick was forcing blood into his head until he looked like the universe’s own cherry bomb so he’d get the first whack at the piñata? He’s grown up to straighten us all out about weapons of mass destruction but whatever you do, don’t ding his car door with yours. Don’t ask about his girlfriend’s cat. Somewhere a garbage truck beeps backing up and in these circumstances counts as a triumph of sanity. Sleet in the face, no toilet paper, regrets over an argument, not investing wisely, internment of the crazy mother, mistreatment of laboratory animals. Life, my friends, is ordinary crap. Pineapple slices on tutu-wearing toothpicks. Those puke bags in the seatback you might need. The second DVD only the witlessly bored watch. Some architectural details about Batman’s cape. Music videos about hairdos, tattoos, implants and bling. The crew cracking up over some actor’s flub.