872 Life poems

I have not disappeared. The boulevard is full of my steps. The sky is full of my thinking. An archbishop prays for my soul, even though we met only once, and even then, he was busy waving at a congregation. The ticking clocks in Vermont sway back and forth as though sweeping up my eyes and my tattoos and my metaphors, and what comes up are the great paragraphs of dust, which also carry motes of my existence. I have not disappeared. My wife quivers inside a kiss. My pulse was given to her many times, in many countries. The chunks of bread we dip in olive oil is communion with our ancestors, who also have not disappeared. Their delicate songs I wear on my eyelids. Their smiles have given me freedom which is a crater I keep falling in. When I bite into the two halves of an orange whose cross-section resembles my lungs, a delta of juices burst down my chin, and like magic, makes me appear to those who think I've disappeared. It's too bad war makes people disappear like chess pieces, and that prisons turn prisoners into movie endings. When I fade into the mountains on a forest trail, I still have not disappeared, even though its green façade turns my arms and legs into branches of oak. It is then I belong to a southerly wind, which by now you have mistaken as me nodding back and forth like a Hasid in prayer or a mother who has just lost her son to gunfire in Detroit. I have not disappeared. In my children, I see my bulging face pressing further into the mysteries. In a library in Tucson, on a plane above Buenos Aires, on a field where nearby burns a controlled fire, I am held by a professor, a general, and a photographer. One burns a finely wrapped cigar, then sniffs the scented pages of my books, scouring for the bitter smell of control. I hold him in my mind like a chalice. I have not disappeared. I swish the amber hue of lager on my tongue and ponder the drilling rigs in the Gulf of Alaska and all the oil-painted plovers. When we talk about limits, we disappear. In Jasper, TX you can disappear on a strip of gravel. I am a life in sacred language. Termites toil over a grave, and my mind is a ravine of yesterdays. At a glance from across the room, I wear September on my face, which is eternal, and does not disappear even if you close your eyes once and for all simultaneously like two coffins.

i Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest. i You, drowning between my arms — stay. You, pushing your body into the river only to be left with yourself — stay. i I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls. And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing to surrender. i Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade. Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn. Say autumn despite the green in your eyes. Beauty despite daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn mounting in your throat. My thrashing beneath you like a sparrow stunned with falling. i Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining. i I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once. i Say amen. Say amend. Say yes. Say yes anyway. i In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed. i In the life before this one, you could tell two people were in love because when they drove the pickup over the bridge, their wings would grow back just in time. Some days I am still inside the pickup. Some days I keep waiting. i It’s not too late. Our heads haloed with gnats & summer too early to leave any marks. Your hand under my shirt as static intensifies on the radio. Your other hand pointing your daddy’s revolver to the sky. Stars falling one by one in the cross hairs. This means I won’t be afraid if we’re already here. Already more than skin can hold. That a body beside a body must make a field full of ticking. That your name is only the sound of clocks being set back another hour & morning finds our clothes on your mother’s front porch, shed like week-old lilies.

Once there lived a man who had a valley-full of needles.  And one day the mother of Jesus came to him and said:  “Friend, my son’s garment is torn and I must needs mend it before he goeth to the temple.  Wouldst thou not give me a needle?” And he gave her not a needle, but he gave her a learned discourse on Giving and Taking to carry to her son before he should go to the temple.

My eyes lie flat in my skull, darkened, bruised lashes whip-stitched to swollen lids – sleep has once again been elusive. My organs weigh more than they did the day before, swollen with unhappiness, gorged on regret: tiny fists in my stomach pummeling the hanging ball of my heart.

All our roads go nowhere. Maps are curled To keep the pavement definitely On the world. All our footsteps, set to make Metric advance, Lapse into arcs in deference To circumstance. All our journeys nearing Space Skirt it with care, Shying at the distances Present in air. Blithely travel-stained and worn, Erect and sure, All our travels go forth, Making down the roads of Earth Endless detour.

And contemplate this: the heat-treated hairdos of next-door neighbors, the roseate nosebleeds of fuckboys in hoodies; your own face, rinsed in the mirror, the sweet green sweat you’re riddled with in mornings, a rock pool reflection under algaecidal light. You are going nowhere. This poem yokes you, to the pain you are chronic and adipose with; to the desk, to the chair, to ergonomic purgatory. And to the body, its spasms and its rhapsodies, three-part harmonies, one-chord wonders.You will never be whole. The voices.His voice, broadcast on your remedial frequency, making its way through a rubbishy dusk, the streetlamps beaming fizzy glow like Lucozade. You will never be whole. Vomit o’clock and the brain is Kraken, white and shaking. Open the window, pry the chipboard from the window; fill your punctured eye with stars. And contemplate this: Saturday night and the dirt purrs with it; cars, litter bins, pit bull dogs. A girl with high Yorick cheekbones drags a false nail down the scratchy surface of a bri-nylon sleeplessness. A man rides ignorance like a white horse, kicking mirrors from parked cars. You have the itch under your skin. Insectile dysfunction. Lust, with its own murky gravities.You will fail. You have not made a friend of this city and you will fail. Cup your eyes like coins. Addiction holds such simplicity. Check your used-car contours in the broken glass. You are going nowhere. They cannot nail you to a pronoun, hot mess of cravings and behaviors, tainted frailty, old meat’s rancid rainbow. Ugly. Contemplate. Consider:your lilies, toiling like deaf ears, tearing the tired night a new one, stirring a sulfate dust in your veins. Your eyes are blue with pseudo-scientific toxicity, with chemical expectancy, a dread that dries a smile like paint. Your blood is on fire, full of bellicose adrenaline, nitrate and neon; brighter, even, than the hoary fluorescence of angels. It is so late. And you are pining the rhinestone shine of a lost narcotism. Now trauma’s your ergotamine. Trauma, your ergot, your argot of rye. Awful thought that treads the brain’s rank breadth. Silence. Pray silence. Pray the dark room away, the candles, the pious vibrations of flame; the dim bulb with its gospel of moths, one hundred pairs of gloved hands clasped to powder. Marooned in your gooseflesh, one hand does not know what the other is doing. It’s three a.m., the mind’s alive like frostbite, a cold burn that blackens things. Your graphite smile could shatter. Thoughts of him have poisoned you, rust in the blood. You have not eaten for days, you mottle, run your own hands over your oxidizing thighs, watch the bruises ripen to a landmass, a landmark, a brave new world, a here be dragons. You listen to yourself, creaking like rope; your body, its canned laughter repeating mean and low, throwing out thought according to the malnourished algorithm some devil has devised. You clutch and sway in a crêpe air and you want-want-want what you’ll never have again: sleep; his image breaking across your scrubbed flesh like surf. Contemplate this: this is forever. There is no movie montage where you’ll shop yourself to transformation. You will never be whole. And grief is not a line we walk to wellness; the tidy smirk of therapy, the therapized, the girls licking flakes of gold- leaf pastry from a Pret a Manger croissant, saying you should take up yoga

By then, of course, they’d done plenty in the name of recklessness — their word as well, though incorrect, for wilderness. Ah, scutchweed, rushlightitude, if not, why not, strowbegone, nor sheep, fa la, shall graze. The way, incredibly, for most it’s still enough to have noticed a similar weather pattern between regret and the windy plains of remorse, like that must make them the same, or should, or at least no more different than a fetish for being eaten alive and whole is, apparently, from the desire to leave loneliness behind forever — a reasonable desire, I suppose, but in the end a useless one, since actual loneliness isn’t leavable: love distracts from loneliness, it doesn’t crowd it from view    ...    some could almost see this, eventually; others chose not to. Some — the luckiest — arrived at, then clung to, that point in love where to be understood entirely stops being the main thing, or a thing at all, even. They could let the nights unfurl before them, one after the other, each a seemingly vast underworld of damage they didn’t have to talk about, not anymore, they agreed it was there now, they hovered over it, what light there was was their own.

we make midnight a maquette of the year: frostlight glinting off snow to solemnize the vows we offer to ourselves in near silence: the competition shimmerwise of champagne and chandeliers to attract laughter and cheers: the glow from the fireplace reflecting the burning intra-red pact between beloveds: we cosset the space of a fey hour, anxious gods molding our hoped-for adams with this temporal clay: each of us edacious for shining or rash enough to think sacrifice will stay this fugacious time: while stillness suspends vitality in balance, as passions struggle with passions for sway, the mind wends towards what’s to come: a callithump of fashions, ersatz smiles, crowded days: a bloodless cut that severs soul from bone: a long aching quiet in which we will hear nothing but the clean crack of our promises breaking.

Kissing the bankteller outside his stairs In Brighton, MA I cannot lie. I felt the hope That we once felt, if only for an instant O the lovely bankteller, like a moose he Rode my spirit quite outside my clothes And chrysanthemums sprouted I assure you Out my nipples when he kissed them. And the pureness of not knowing him at all Was really what we all feel when we enter this earth. There is a newness to the best things that cannot Be excelled and old things like old love die and rot. There are old ideas in the world that should be forgotten There are old ideas and old phrases that should at least Be recycled for others There are old plans now that should be new. There are old thoughts in your head, my reader, and let them die. Follow me, I am the crusader of the new My spirit is a plastic rod that channels all our births. And in the mouths of the little beasts, we shall find the great Ocean that spits up black bugs all glittering on its shores. You know there is an anthem to the ages. There is an anthem of the ages. This is that anthem This is that anthem

In a dream, a young Baraka slaps five with my father. They ask when I last got some pussy or whooped someone’s ass? On one side of the street are the black poets (their closed memberships, spider-fingered hand-shakes, invitation-only parties) tossing my journal with my father— Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit! I’m soft-spoken. He’s bullhorn. I believe in breaths. We’re both sensitive. I do not deserve to be his son. I didn’t suffer like my father. Don’t fit in any boxes with bars. Never served time (except once at Bellevue for 17 days). I retreat in ambiguity. Live between the lines. Prefer shadow to light. I do girl push-ups. Write on the mirror with my mother’s lipstick. I’m nothing like my father. I spend my recesses reading When the People Could Fly, Black Skin, White Masks, & Metamorphosis. I visit Harlem with my 35mm in search of jazzmen. I’m paranoid. My palms stay moist. Long before I wake from this dream, there’s your voice & Baraka’s, the broken limbs ghosting our family tree, you and Baraka mouthing to me:This life. . . is a . . relay . . race . . . and in a single hand motion—Catch! And that look on your faces. The pause. The lean in. The reveal.