75 Darkness poems

In a world where all the heroes are pilots with voices like God he brought her a strand of some woman’s hair to wear on her wing. She looked sideways at the ground silent behind the cloudy film covering her eyes knowing she would be his forever. They cruised the city nights each one spiralling away from the other but always coming home to gather stories. Dark streets bright tavern lights drunks filled with beer in the gutters. The flicker of stars shaped like a hunter’s arrow bent stars that twinkled like babies’ eyes. No babies for them. She was an outcast. He a loner. A perfect pair. Winters had made him wise and he avoided the single nests of summer. He told her about things she could see. How the dismal cover of clouds roils and explodes and the ground aches like an old woman’s knee. How wood rots against the tide good for hunting grub. How to fade and fall back into the wind. He translated her pulse into near-language. Their poetry so personal even Peterson’s Field Guide could not tap it. Only a stray hunter saw it. Shook his head once thinking it a trick of wind and wing then turned his eyes north to search for the simple flight of Brant or Canadian. Those patterns he could easily understand. That last night they drank from the river. Sucked its delicate cusps of mold sang anti social songs as if they were humans. When he flicked his handsome head to catch the drift of wind she even managed a single tear. She waited through days and nights of grief. Circled the city less then settled on the wires. The metallic conductor captured her eyes. She remembered how he proudly sang her name as he pranced from pole-top to KV line. One last fluff of feathers. One sigh for all the unnested summers. One single scratch one electrical surge of power of love. Then she fell smiling. A trick he had taught her.

A doll's hair concealing an eggshell skull delicately throbbing, within which maggots in voluptuous unrest jostle and shrug. Oh, Eileen, my big doll, your gold hair was not more sunny than this human fur, but your head was radiant in its emptiness, a small clean room. Her warm and rosy mouth is telling lies—she would believe them if she could believe: her pretty eyes search out corruption. Oh, Eileen how kindly your silence was, and what virtue shone in the opening and shutting of your ingenious blindness.

Fire ran horrified from its ashes. In the afterglow, cinematic shadows fled from flesh and blood. Scars appeared, followed years later by their wounds. Blinks of red dinged relentlessly, but there was nowhere to stop for the train pulling its wreckage.

"When I hit her on the head, it was good, and then I did it to her a couple of times,— but it was funny,—afterwards, it was as if somebody else did it... Everything flat, without sharpness, richness or line. Still, I liked to drive past the woods where she lay, tell the old lady and the kids I had to take a piss, hop out and do it to her... The whole buggy of them waiting for me made me feel good; but still, just like I knew all along, she didn't move. When the body got too discomposed, I'd just jack off, letting it fall on her... —It sounds crazy, but I tell you sometimes it was beautiful—; I don't know how to say it, but for a minute,everything was possible—; and then, then,— well, like I said, she didn't move: and I saw, under me, a little girl was just lying there in the mud: and I knew I couldn't have done that,— somebody else had to have done that,— standing above her there, in those ordinary, shitty leaves... —One time, I went to see Dad in a motel where he was staying with a woman; but she was gone; you could smell the wine in the air; and he started, real embarrassing, to cry... He was still a little drunk, and he asked me to forgive him for all he hadn't done—; but, What the shit? Who would have wanted to stay with Mom? with bastards not even his own kids? I got in the truck, and started to drive, and saw a little girl— who I picked up, hit on the head, and screwed, and screwed, and screwed, and screwed, then buried, in the garden of the motel... —You see, ever since I was a kid I wanted to feel things make sense: I remember looking out the window of my room back home,— and being almost suffocated by the asphalt; and grass; and trees; and glass; just there, just there, doing nothing! not saying anything! filling me up— but also being a wall; dead, and stopping me; —how I wanted to see beneath it, cut beneath it, and make it somehow, come alive... The salt of the earth; Mom once said, 'Man's spunk is the salt of the earth...' —That night, at that Twenty-nine Palms Motel I had passed a million times on the road, everything fit together; was alright; it seemed like everything had to be there, like I had spent years trying, and at last finally finished drawing this huge circle... —But then, suddenly I knew somebody else did it, some bastard had hurt a little girl—; the motel I could see again, it had been itself all the time, a lousy pile of bricks, plaster, that didn't seem to have to be there,—but was, just by chance... —Once, on the farm, when I was a kid, I was screwing a goat; and the rope around his neck when he tried to get away pulled tight;—and just when I came, he died... I came back the next day; jacked off over his body; but it didn't do any good... Mom once said: 'Man's spunk is the salt of the earth, and grows kids.' I tried so hard to come; more pain than anything else; but didn't do any good... —About six months ago, I heard Dad remarried, so I drove over to Connecticut to see him and see if he was happy. She was twenty-five years younger than him: she had lots of little kids, and I don't know why, I felt shaky... I stopped in front of the address; and snuck up to the window to look in... —There he was, a kid six months old on his lap, laughing and bouncing the kid, happy in his old age to play the papa after years of sleeping around,— it twisted me up... To think that what he wouldn't give me, he wanted to give them... I could have killed the bastard... —Naturally, I just got right back in the car, and believe me, was determined, determined, to head straight for home... but the more I drove, I kept thinking about getting a girl, and the more I thought I shouldn't do it, the more I had to— I saw her coming out of the movies, saw she was alone, and kept circling the blocks as she walked along them, saying, 'You're going to leave her alone.' 'You're going to leave her alone.' —The woods were scary! As the seasons changed, and you saw more and more of the skull show through, the nights became clearer, and the buds,—erect, like nipples... —But then, one night, nothing worked... Nothing in the sky would blur like I wanted it to; and I couldn't,couldn't, get it to seem to me that somebody else did it... I tried, and tried, but there was just me there, and her, and the sharp trees saying, 'That's you standing there. You're... just you.' I hope I fry. —Hell came when I saw MYSELF... and couldn't stand what I see..."

Stare hard enough at the fabric of night, and if you're predisposed to dark—let’s say the window you’ve picked is a black postage stamp you spend hours at, sleepless, drinking gin after the I Love Lucy

It’s dark in here, the dark inside of a man in the dark. It’s not night. One hears crows overhead, dawn fowl caws, the shod soles again treading their sunlit plots above. One grows dotish-fond of such things. Long live the things, their ways, their roots pushed goatish & gray through the skull, in this earth that gaily spins though one has crossed its smutted green threshold to reign in a crate. We have done no wrong, my friends, & yet we find ourselves soiled, sold, carbonized teeth in a moss-riven jaw. Once I sat on a stool as my grandmother told me of heaven. She cleaned fish for our living. I saw how her rusty black knife unseamed the sunset in each belly—coral, ochre, carmine, raw, lice-infested sunsets in a pail. So many nights. Night in the kitchen shack, night at the crumbling edge of our milk-pond province, a blade, lone cricket raving in the lawn.

1. the flat end of sorrow here two crows fighting over New Year's Party leftovers. From my cell, I see a cold hard world. 2. So this is the abscess that hurts the nation— jails, torture, blood and hunger. One day it will burst; it must burst. 3. When I heard you were taken we speculated, those of us at large where you would be in what nightmare will you star? That night I heard the moans wondering whose child could now be lost in the cellars of oppression. Then you emerged, tall, and bloody-eyed. It was the first time I wept. 4. The long nights I dread most the voices from behind the bars the early glow of dawn before the guard's steps wake me up, the desire to leap and stretch and yawn in anticipation of another dark home-coming day only to find that I cannot. riding the car into town, hemmed in between them their guns poking me in the ribs, I never had known that my people wore such sad faces, so sad they were, on New Year's Eve, so very sad.

Cruelty has a Human Heart And Jealousy a Human Face Terror the Human Form Divine And Secrecy, the Human Dress The Human Dress, is forged Iron The Human Form, a fiery Forge. The Human Face, a Furnace seal'd The Human Heart, its hungry Gorge.

The dark that’s gathering strength these days is submissive, kinky, silken, willing; stretched taut as a trampoline. World events rattle by like circus trains we wave at occasionally, as striped, homed and spotted heads poke out their windows. Feels like I’m wearing a corset, though I haven’t a stitch on. Burn the place setting I ate from, OK? and destroy the easy chair I languished in. Let birds unravel my lingerie for nesting materials. Fingers poised on the piano keys, I can’t think what to play. A dirge, a fugue? What, exactly, are crimes against nature

Protruding, rebelling against the lips, the long, pointed, ill-fated fang stared at me, (in spite of awkward attempts to hide it). Stealing adolescent glances, I dreamed it pierced me, pushing deep in the base of my neck. I bit my lower lip, flushed, but not before blushing under its spell. Yesterday, Yesterday when he smiled at me, with teeth in perfect alignment (dentistry can work miracles), I turned my apostate face, and squinting, pretended to watch passersby.