17 Sad poems

A blue sky drives me crazy today as my thoughts are so dark

I live with the small shame of not knowing the multiple names for blue to describe the nightsky over New Mexico to describe the light in my lover’s eyes. It is a small shame that grows. I live with the small shame which resides in the absences of my speech as I pause to search for the word in Spanish to translate a poem to my Father who sits there waiting who scans my eyes to see what I cannot fully describe who waits for the word from me the word that escapes me in the moment the word I fear has never resided within me. It is a small shame that grows when indigo and cerulean are merely azul and not añil and cerúleo.

The hard thing’s to sit without being noticed. Everything else will come easy. Three sips and the impulse returns to sit thinking alone. Against the buzzing backdrop of noise everything fades, and it’s suddenly a miracle to be born and to stare at the glass. And work (a man who’s alone can’t not think of work) becomes again the old fate that suffering’s good for focusing thought. And soon the eyes fix on nothing particular, grieved, as if blind. If this man gets up and goes home to sleep, he’ll look like a blind man that’s lost. Anyone could jump out of nowhere to brutally beat him. A woman—beautiful, young—might appear, and lie under a man in the street, and moan, the way a woman once moaned under him. But this man doesn’t see. He heads home to sleep and life becomes nothing but the buzzing of silence. Undressing this man you’d find a body that’s wasted and, here and there, patches of fur. Who’d think, to look at this man, that life once burned in his lukewarm veins? No one would guess that there was a woman, once, who gently touched that body, who kissed that body, which shakes, and wet it with tears, now that the man, having come home to sleep, can’t sleep, only moan.

I’ve been sad and can’t find a seasonal sequence. I go forward then my order reverses and it’s winter again two years ago, with that sticky ice that lost your footing as you gripped that container of Greek yogurt you brought to the doctor’s, even when you couldn’t speak; you only darted your eyes with a fear that continually registered in your pupil size. You clutched your sets of things. I am full of what are sets of things I know well then I go backwards and I don’t have any sets of things. I see your pink-stained washcloth from your wool coat. Your cerebellum tumor is inside with your other tumors but I don’t know it’s there yet neither do you. It appeared and controlled your brain and the things you couldn’t hold. I wonder what things really are, if they are just a set of symbols we sequence and then find purposeful. I wonder if they are like rituals that we learn for our brain. We have those for our body and those for our brain. I look at you — you are alive — and you breathe labored breaths then you died. There, in the hospital bed, when I let time lapse not knowing how to hold you. I let you die for seven days. Your daughter, bigger than I am, could hold you. She could use her muscles to grip you, but I couldn’t hold you, even though you lost forty pounds your last month. I couldn’t find the sequence because I reversed everything into its pain cycle and you didn’t want me to watch you die but I couldn’t understand how everyone could let it happen and I could too, but only if I could let it fall into its hole, its awkward sequence, around death; it’s not awkward it’s just not right. I could make as many intuitive decisions, and many logical sequences occurred around your treatments, but I didn’t know you were stepping out of sequence, and treatments are not producing remedies, and I left myself at the side of the hospital bed. You were in another light, exiting slowly. I thought the sequence of grieving would banish all the anxiety but it came back this year. I became debilitated. I have a debilitating anxiety that I thought was gone. 
I have too many anxious sequences now and they are blurring meaning. They are blurring my truths like time-lapses and I don’t rush to find the joy of the occurrence without looking for the traps, and my logic, and my stumbling out into another bed that places me in this now-future and you don’t see me because you are no longer alive with me and I can’t rectify this sequence. And I worry that when I love him he will die too. I can’t happen into its learning like it’s wisdom. It’s still deeply unconscious to hold this fear after I banished worry because I looked it in the eyes and it was real and I felt I knew what it looked like. It’s the unknowing learning that I was deeply afraid to imagine and yet it’s your empty bed, your empty closet, you’re empty of the spirited you that gave you to me, in that human way we come to rely upon and that shames us so. And every night of this thinking is a long night of this thinking. Do you fall into bed with us, and I have no idea of this? I’d love to think it’s so, and we have room for your sets of things.

Mist clogs the sunshine. Smoky dwarf houses Hem me round everywhere; A vague dejection Weighs down my soul. Yet, while I languish, Everywhere countless Prospects unroll themselves, And countless beings Pass countless moods. Far hence, in Asia, On the smooth convent-roofs, On the gilt terraces, Of holy Lassa, Bright shines the sun. Grey time-worn marbles Hold the pure Muses; In their cool gallery, By yellow Tiber, They still look fair. Strange unloved uproar Shrills round their portal; Yet not on Helicon Kept they more cloudless Their noble calm. Through sun-proof alleys In a lone, sand-hemm'd City of Africa, A blind, led beggar, Age-bow'd, asks alms. No bolder robber Erst abode ambush'd Deep in the sandy waste; No clearer eyesight Spied prey afar. Saharan sand-winds Sear'd his keen eyeballs; Spent is the spoil he won. For him the present Holds only pain. Two young, fair lovers, Where the warm June-wind, Fresh from the summer fields Plays fondly round them, Stand, tranced in joy. With sweet, join'd voices, And with eyes brimming: "Ah," they cry, "Destiny, Prolong the present! Time, stand still here!" The prompt stern Goddess Shakes her head, frowning; Time gives his hour-glass Its due reversal; Their hour is gone. With weak indulgence Did the just Goddess Lengthen their happiness, She lengthen'd also Distress elsewhere. The hour, whose happy Unalloy'd moments I would eternalise, Ten thousand mourners Well pleased see end. The bleak, stern hour, Whose severe moments I would annihilate, Is pass'd by others In warmth, light, joy. Time, so complain'd of, Who to no one man Shows partiality, Brings round to all men Some undimm'd hours.

It seems like I'm growing more and more like a clown. First of all, I'm always sad. Secondly, all my knives are made out of rubber. Thirdly, it's like my house is on fire. No, I'm definitely becoming more like a clown. I have a tendency to want to put on clown clothes. As soon as I put the clown clothes on I feel faintly happier... Another sign is that I constantly feel like I'm alone in a dressing room. Most of the time I feel amused. Anyway, the only thing good about the circus is the tigers. I realize that I could get both legs cut off by the circus train or get frightened by an elephant. But it's very depressing to sit around in a clown suit and think about death. Sometimes I don't feel happy unless I'm in my clown suit. And I enjoy hitting people on the head with a foam club. I really do... When people see me they realize that it looks very sophisticated to wear a clown suit and smoke a cigarette. This is how I get all the ladies because they think I'm very droll. People don't understand how you turn into a clown. You turn into a clown because you feel more and more like putting on a clown suit. When you're around people you sense a kindliness. It makes you so nervous you can't stay calm. Which is why it feels perfectly normal to wear orange pants. Plus, it's very subversive to wear bow ties. You can't imagine how jolly everything is. And the fright wigs... I don't want to be a clown but I'm sure to be one. My mother was a clown.

My heart is bleeding. It bleeds upward and fills my mouth up with salt. It bleeds because of a city in ruins, the chair still warm from sister's body, because it will all be irreproducible. My heart bleeds because of baby bear not finding mama bear and it bleeds to the tips of my fingers like I painted my nails Crimson. Sometimes my heart bleeds so much I am a raisin. It bleeds until I am a quivering ragged clot, bleeds at the ending with the heroine and her sunken cancer eyes, at the ending with the plaintive flute over smoke-choked killing fields. I'm bleeding a river of blood right now and it's wearing a culvert in me for the blood. My heart rises up in me, becomes the cork of me and I choke on it. I am bleeding for you and for me and for the tiny babies and the IED-blown leg. It bleeds because I'm made that way, all filled up with blood, my sloppy heart a sponge filled with blood to squeeze onto any circumstance. Because it is mine, it will always bleed. My heart bled today. It bled onto the streets and the steps of city hall. It bled in the pizza parlor with the useless jukebox. I've got so much blood to give inside and outside of any milieu. Even for a bad zoning decision, I'll bleed so much you'll be bleeding, all of us bleeding in and out like it's breathing, or kissing, and because it is righteous and terrible and red.

I tell people i'm over it which is mostly true and partly something i need to keep saying until it's all true

For a while i couldn't get dressed everything felt wrong the colors wrong the weight of fabric wrong now i get dressed most days before noon that's where i am that's honestly fine

I'm fine thanks how are you yeah it's been a while i'm doing really well these are the things i say when someone asks in passing and really wants the short version