872 Life poems

dear suicide how is the war? is it eating? tell me of the girls charging backwards into dumb tides death’s wet mouth lapping their ankles, knees, eyebrows. tell me of the sissies like drunk fireworks, rocketing into earth afterimage burned into river & cement memory. how is the war? does it have a wife? does she know how the bodies got in her bed? dear suicide i know your real name. i bind you from doing harm. i enter the room like a germ. i say your name, it is my name. the walls cave around me like a good aunt. the window hums. the door rocks me. the dresser leaves to go make tea. the room knows my name. it binds us from doing harm. dear suicide where are you keeping my friends? every cup i turn over holds only air. i jimmy open a tulip expecting their faces but find only the yellow heart. what have you done with them? yesterday i took my body off beat it on the front steps with a broom & not one of them came giggling out my skin yelling you found me! not one of them i called for was already in my hand. dear suicide you a mutual friend a wedding guest, a kind of mother, a kind of self love, a kind of freedom. i wish you were a myth but mothers my color have picked ocean over boat, have sent children to school in rivers. i known niggas who just needed quiet. i seen you dance, it made me hard. i would not deny you what others have found in the sweet mildew behind your ear. i know what happens when you ask for a kiss, it’s all tongue, you don’t unlatch, you suck face until the body is gone. dear suicide that one? i promised him i would kill for him & my nigga was my nigga & my word is my word. dear suicide, where are you? come see me. come outside. i am at your door, suicide. i’ll wait. i’ve offed my earrings & vaselined my face. i put on my good sweats for this. i brought no weapon but my fist. dear suicide you made my kin thin air. his entire body dead as hair. you said his name like a dare. you’ve done your share. i ride down lake street friendbare to isles of lakes, wet pairs stare back & we compare our mirror glares. fish scare into outlines, i blare a moon’s wanting, i wear their faces on t-shirts, little flares in case i bootleg my own prayer & submit to your dark affair. tell me they’re in your care. be fair. heaven or hell, i hope my niggas all there if i ever use the air as a stair.

My mother is scared of the world. She left my father after forty years. She was like, Happy anniversary, goodbye; I respect that. The moon tonight is dazzling, is full of   itself  but not quite full. A man should not love the moon, said Milosz. Not exactly. He translated himself into saying it. A man should not love translation; there’s so much I can’t know. An hour ago, marking time with someone I would like to like, we passed some trees and there were crickets (crickets!) chirping right off  Divisadero. I touched his hand, and for a cold moment I was like a child again, nothing more, nothing less.

can replace poetry in my life and one day surely it will

I will not speak ill of Jack Flick. I will rarely look at the scar he made on my cheek one summer at the lake. I won't speak ill of Jack whose freckles and gangly legs are gone. So is the drained face I saw when he saw what he'd done with a sharp rock nonchalantly skipped. I will speak well, for it was somewhat sweet to lie on the dock while Jack and his friends bent down and wiped my face with a sandy towel. I will speak well of them, for most are gone and the wound proved small. I will speak well, for the rock missed my eye. I can hardly find the scar. Jack went into the air corps, fought in one of the wars, retired, and lived less than a year before his tender heart gave out. I will speak well of Jack.

A king did not die, a president was not acquitted, a balloon did not fly around the world in twenty days, at 84 with white hair, Joe DiMaggio was not mourned. And air strikes launched street to street in order to bring peace, or a doctor convicted of doctoring death? No, and no, nothing happened, except flowers purple the year before bloomed white, but no viruses named after women spread across the globe, and the word “columbine” did not enter the consciousness of a nation. What about the bomb that made a mistake, or the famous son of a famous president mistaking the ocean for the sky? That year, the weather was unpredictable, that happened, and if anything else did, like shots fired at people praying, no one heard them, and if people prayed for war to become holy, those prayers went unanswered. In Turkey, the ground split open and the 17,000 who would die, let’s say, miraculously, they did not, not in 1999, the year two lifelong enemies shook hands and said there will be peace, but their palms never touched, why lie about that? Let’s say the child from Cuba arrived not an orphan but with his mother, who loved and did not sink into the sea. Let’s not talk about rampages, disasters, conflicts or coupes that never ruined a perfectly good year during which the sun shined on the moon, the earth, and six billion who, for once, got everything right and not a single thing wrong.

Though I have never caught the word Of God from any calling bird, I hear all that the ancients heard. Though I have seen no deity Enter or leave a twilit tree, I see all that the seers see. A common stone can still reveal Something not stone, not seen, yet real. What may a common stone conceal? Nothing is far that once was near. Nothing is hid that once was clear. Nothing was God that is not here. Here is the bird, the tree, the stone. Here in the sun I sit alone Between the known and the unknown.

—Now let me tell you why I said that. Try to put yourself into an experimental mood. Stop right here and try to review everything you felt about that line. Did you accept it as wisdom? as perception? as a gem, maybe, for your private anthology of Telling Truths? My point is that the line is fraudulent. A blurb. It is also relevant that I know at least a dozen devoutly intellectual journals that will gladly buy any fourteen such lines plus a tinny rhyme scheme and compound the felony by calling that a sonnet. —Very well, then, I am a cynic. Though, for the record, let me add that I am a cynic with one wife, three children, and other invest- ments. Whoever heard of a cynic carrying a pack for the fun of it? It won’t really do I’m something else. Were I to dramatize myself, I’d say I am a theologian who keeps meeting the devil as a master of make-up, and that among his favorite impersonations he appears, often as not, as the avuncular old ham who winks, tugs his ear, and utters such gnomic garbage as: “Nothing is really hard but to be real.” I guess what the devil gets out of this—if he is the fool he seems to be—is the illusion of imitating heaven. If, on the other hand, he is no fool, then his deceptions are carefully practiced and we are all damned. For all of us, unless we are carefully warned, will accept such noises as examples of the sound an actual mind makes. Why arc we damned then?—I am glad you asked that. It is, as we say to flatter oafs, a good question. (Meaning, usually, the one we were fishing for. Good.) In any case. I may now pretend to think out the answer I have memorized: We are damned for accepting as the sound a man makes, the sound of something else, thereby losing the truth of our own sound. How do we learn our own sound? (Another good question. Thank you.) —by listening to what men there have been and are —by reading more poets than jurists (without scorning Law)—and by reading what we read not for its oration, but for its resemblance to that sound in which we best hear most of what a man is. Get that sound into your heads and you will know what tones to exclude. — if there is enough exclusion in you to keep the pie plates out of the cymbals, the tin horns out of the brass section, the baling wire out of the strings, and thereby to let the notes roll full to the ear that has listened enough to be a listener. As for the devil—when he has finished every imp- ersonation, the best he will have been able to accomplish is only that sound which is exactly not the music.

Oh, what am I but an engine, shod With muscle and flesh, by the hand of God, Speeding on through the dense, dark night, Guided alone by the soul’s white light. Often and often my mad heart tires, And hates its way with a bitter hate, And longs to follow its own desires, And leave the end in the hands of fate. O, mighty engine of steel and steam; O, human engine of blood and bone, Follow the white light’s certain beam— There lies safety, and there alone. The narrow track of fearless truth, Lit by the soul’s great eye of light, O passionate heart of restless youth, Alone will carry you through the night.

The fields are white; The laborers are few; Yet say the idle: There’s nothing to do. Jails are crowded; In Sunday-schools few; We still complain: There’s nothing to do. Drunkards are dying— Your sons, it is true; Mothers’ arms folded With nothing to do. Heathens are dying; Their blood falls on you; How can you people Find nothing to do?

After Paul Chan Biggum Wallah, Biggum Wallah, why so glum? You in heaven, na, be happy. You are Hip Hop’s Grand Panjandrum in white foxy mink snuggly over your Bluto belly, & this fleet of white Cucci Gucci Hummers is for you, ji. Like a short-order cook slinging hash browns, you slinged so many rhymes propho-rapping you will die, now faput. Dead. Why so chee? Ayaya, you in heaven for white people. Wrong ear-sucking heaven. Heaven does stink like mothballs, bibbit & whatsit, you smell wet dog? Milksop chatty angels with their Binaca grins, twibble: “No Hennessy just seltzer, please,” before they sing your hits a capella. Shataa, Baagad Bullya, very last straw, this Angrez-propogandhi. Silly as a cricket in pubes. Biggum Wallah bringing up demands, yar. A smashation of clouds part to reveal the uretic sun and swatting away chweetie pie cupids, looms Fatmouth God, frowning like rotten turbot. But Biggita is VIP, sold records in millions tens, so God sighs, relents & the Kleenex sky melts to Op Art swirls of Cherry Coke red, burning upup white magnolias into a chain-link planet of asphalt & black cell phone towers. This more like it, sepoys, all hoosh & video girl boomba-lathis drinking lychee lassis. But where is your number 1 rap rival nemesis? Where is 2Packi?