43 Violence poems

this is true a man in an alley grabbed my arm this is true someone called me and left the phone dangling at the post office this is true a man stalked me someone tells a story someone tells a story to another person another person says I don't believe this someone tells the story again in an attempt to convince someone tells as disbelief is easy belief is difficult, supported by constraint but a woman knows a man stalked her knows this is true a woman knows her own address her own body her lost domain, her desires, her confusions someone tells a story there are things people can do to themselves they are: leave molotov cocktail on own yard set fire to own house leave a glass of urine on own porch leave envelope of feces outside own door send a butcher knife to self at work send letter to health department that self is spreading VD stab own back someone tells this story says this is true self turns on self the knife enters at a point that the self could not have reached but did someone tells and then repeats and she stalks herself several times to convince someone tries to enter into the information to pass words back and forth that have meaning fails, resorts to this is true this is true a woman calls her stalker The Poet this is true a woman describes a stalker in terms that describe herself this is true a woman stalked herself to kill herself this is true a woman is at times a man when a fish is hooked other fish don't see the hook thrashing seems crazy the hook could be the branding of a woman at a young age by a man or an older male neighbor spending too much time with a child or the boring nature of life in the story the hook is the artist's rendering of the stalker as described by the woman it is the woman in a man's face she does not know this man thrashing seems crazy later she realizes it is herself her knife her hook her own face she was always drawing male this is true as thrashing is not crazy when one is on the hook

We’re sitting in Uncle Sam’s Subs, splitting a cheesesteak, when Shelley says: I think I should buy a gun. I look up at her puffy face, and she’s staring, her hands shaking. On medication for schizophrenia, she’s serious. I say,Tell me why you need a gun. Her voice getting louder:You know why. No, no I don’t, I say. In case I need it. I might need it to shoot somebody. I give her a hard look —You don’t need a gun. No one is after you.

Some lunatic with a gun killed some people at an immigration center in Binghamton, New York. Liz Rosenberg and her family live up there and David, her husband, teaches in the middle school which is close to all the action (the way, in any smallish town, everything is close to all the action). I called Liz to see if everyone was all right and she was in her car driving to the elementary school to pick up Lily, her young daughter she brought back from China a few years ago. Lily was fine, but Liz wanted to move her outside the question of how to make sense of the broken pieces of “someone” with a gun walking into a public space and then firing. There’s something called (I learned from a news report the day of the shootings at Virginia Tech) The Talking Day which refers to the day immediately following the day when something wildly violent happens. No one quite grasps the reality of the situation and everyone spends that first day talking about what happened and reliving it as language— not so much to understand the violence but to make a kind of recording of it: talking about it, letting go of it, putting it down. And so I imagine it must be with Liz and Lily and David in Binghamton, New York today: letting “something” go. Liz is in her car after having just picked up Lily at school and driving back home through a town that suddenly makes no sense and she is telling the story about what happened when a young man walked into a building with a gun. And for Lily, who’s had a pretty serene, un- violent United States time so far and whose endless joy has made her an adorable chatterbox, tomorrow could be her first talking day. Or, if not tomorrow, some other day. We live in a talking day world.

At a college in Dearborn, Michigan, I read a poem about watching girls at camp hold their breaths under the showers so I could see their breasts swell. Some people call Dearborn a hub of “terrorist” activity. I’ve placed the word terrorist between quotation marks because “Arab” or “Muslim” or “people who look like the terrorists we fear” is what they mean. In the poem about the camp I also use quotation marks around the words “pussy” and “chicken-shit,” but for different reasons — I’m waiting in line to jump over a dam into a river where other boys have drowned, and I hesitate, until someone shouts “pussy” and “chicken-shit” and you don’t need me to tell you what I did, what I had to do. A famous poet says for a speaker to express authority, he must possess three virtues, one of which is passion. After the reading a young man approached me. He turned out to be the younger brother of someone I knew and wrote a poem about, a lifeguard who saved a drowning girl. The child pulled from the pool could have been a boy — I don’t remember, it doesn’t matter. I care about what I’m saying — that matters. Passion is a deep-seated conviction, says the famous poet. You need to believe that I believe. I told the young man in Dearborn about his brother saving a life, as if he didn’t already know. He listened, politely, until I stopped talking and then he said I was out of line and had acted inappropriately. How, I asked. He said I shouldn’t use words like that. Which words, I asked. He was getting flustered. I asked him again. I wanted him to say “pussy” and “chicken-shit.” He said I should not use words like that in front of women. By “women,” he meant Arab and Muslim women. Maybe he meant all women. I don’t know, I didn’t ask. A lot of Arabs and Muslims live in Dearborn. That’s why some people think of it as a hotbed of Islamic terrorism. The phrase “a hotbed of Islamic terrorism” should probably appear between quotes every time people use it, even if they are Arab or Muslim, like me. The other virtues a speaker should possess, says the famous poet, are discrimination and inclusiveness. By “discrimination” he means the speaker should come to his position without ignoring but considering opposed positions, and finding them wanting. By “inclusiveness” he means the speaker immediately sees connections between the subject at hand and other issues. Also, the speaker needs to make the reader believe he is doing his subject justice, that he is relating it to the world. This makes his voice communal, speaking not for any community but with the goal of making communities, the first of which is that of speaker and reader. The young man speaking on behalf of Arab and Muslim women told me that my poems were “indecent” and “immoral,” that I should be ashamed, that I was a terrible Muslim. “Go fuck yourself,” is what I wanted to say, but — maybe he was right — so I smiled, I thanked him for listening, and I told him I loved his brother, and, “Please, will you say I said hello.”

Eleven bombs had gone off the previous night, most of them in this neighborhood, which is called Teusaquillo, and it is one of the pleasantest in Bogotá. —Alma Guillermoprieto Flowering sietecueros trees: How easily we married ourselves to the idea of that bruised light outside the window, capillary fibers of the linen, stained wood of the door frame. Deepening hallway. Beyond the stucco portal, crushed purple. At night, tinnitus we thought, the ringing after an explosion, a frenzied inner ear axle squeal, until I placed my stethoscope's bell on the purpled ceiling: Bats at roost under the terracotta tiles, each squeak a vector between mountains, sicarios ricocheting through the dark. "If you press your skull between the pillows, it's like a lullaby." At dawn our windows imploded from the street. Before the glaziers knocked, a breeze: Blood-sweet draft of begonias rising again from the iron grillwork of our little yard.

So we told him to tell those dudes to meet at the park, on a Friday night, 7 o’clock, and they would get the surprise of their lives. I was working a shift at the grocery store, the stiff apron covered in flour and scarred with dirt, wet from the spray nozzle a crooked crane in my hand. One of us had borrowed an enormous Cadillac. Racially inclusive casting to some, hiring kids from the neighborhood to us. What I remember was how much I wanted to go. It wasn’t so much that we were going to beat the shit out of fake roughnecks from the burbs who had no clue what they had coming. It was because I wanted to be one of the ants in a swarm. All my life I hid in the library reading about Greek heroes smiting their enemies. My best friend in the bunch was trying to convince me to skip out of work, even if it meant getting fired. I owed this minimum wage job nothing. My paychecks mostly went to my mom anyways. This was the critical moment in the hero’s journey and you’re going to miss it, he told me, though for sure he did not use those words. Of course I did not go — not because of cowardice, but for the much more boring reason that it did not seem proper for me to break the promise I made when I took this shitty job, to be there when I said I would, to clean what I would clean, break down what I would break down. They drove to that park as the dusk broke like a bloody egg over the nearby lake, blasting Ice Cube the entire way, his song disparaging Koreans seemingly not bothering the one Korean in the crew, and the suburban boys never even showed up. I am guessing they just smoked a bit and shouted over the too loud music and fit back into the warehouse of a car that could carry their stupid boy bodies over the roads, a Cadillac become Pegasus, none of our dreams having wings.

I was not beaten but the boy beside me was. He broke stride, stumbled, the sticks circled over him, corralling him into their world. I met his eyes and lip-read “run,” a whisper engulfed in sirens. I slowed down in an unknown neighborhood, a street of watch repairers, tinsmiths, tailors sitting cross-legged in dim windows staring at lacquered Singers like men whose eyes are lost in a fire, and I ducked past them glancing sideways in deep pity because I’d been a step away from freedom.

As I punch the time-clock, I know men will be gunned down at dawn in a distant continent, someone will dart into a café with a bomb nestled in the belly, by the roadside a woman will moan over the body of a man, shrunken, stretched on the earth, that God will finger the forehead of a dying country, all of it funneled through the news on TV. But tonight, instead of tuning in, I’m going to kneel beside the window, recognize myself in the croak of the crow, high above the black tree of winter, claws hooked and rough, wings swept back and hunched, face masked with exhaust. I’m going to try, even if I fail, to see myself whole, complete in the cry, in the beak of the crow.

A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon; The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune; Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew, And watching his luck was his light-o'-love, the lady that's known as Lou. When out of the night, which was fifty below, and into the din and the glare, There stumbled a miner fresh from the creeks, dog-dirty, and loaded for bear. He looked like a man with a foot in the grave and scarcely the strength of a louse, Yet he tilted a poke of dust on the bar, and he called for drinks for the house. There was none could place the stranger's face, though we searched ourselves for a clue; But we drank his health, and the last to drink was Dangerous Dan McGrew. There's men that somehow just grip your eyes, and hold them hard like a spell; And such was he, and he looked to me like a man who had lived in hell; With a face most hair, and the dreary stare of a dog whose day is done, As he watered the green stuff in his glass, and the drops fell one by one. Then I got to figgering who he was, and wondering what he'd do, And I turned my head — and there watching him was the lady that's known as Lou. His eyes went rubbering round the room, and he seemed in a kind of daze, Till at last that old piano fell in the way of his wandering gaze. The rag-time kid was having a drink; there was no one else on the stool, So the stranger stumbles across the room, and flops down there like a fool. In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway; Then he clutched the keys with his talon hands — my God! but that man could play. Were you ever out in the Great Alone, when the moon was awful clear, And the icy mountains hemmed you in with a silence you most could hear; With only the howl of a timber wolf, and you camped there in the cold, A half-dead thing in a stark, dead world, clean mad for the muck called gold; While high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? — Then you've a hunch what the music meant. . . hunger and night and the stars. And hunger not of the belly kind, that's banished with bacon and beans, But the gnawing hunger of lonely men for a home and all that it means; For a fireside far from the cares that are, four walls and a roof above; But oh! so cramful of cosy joy, and crowned with a woman's love — A woman dearer than all the world, and true as Heaven is true — (God! how ghastly she looks through her rouge, — the lady that's known as Lou.) Then on a sudden the music changed, so soft that you scarce could hear; But you felt that your life had been looted clean of all that it once held dear; That someone had stolen the woman you loved; that her love was a devil's lie; That your guts were gone, and the best for you was to crawl away and die. 'Twas the crowning cry of a heart's despair, and it thrilled you through and through — "I guess I'll make it a spread misere", said Dangerous Dan McGrew. The music almost died away ... then it burst like a pent-up flood; And it seemed to say, "Repay, repay," and my eyes were blind with blood. The thought came back of an ancient wrong, and it stung like a frozen lash, And the lust awoke to kill, to kill ... then the music stopped with a crash, And the stranger turned, and his eyes they burned in a most peculiar way; In a buckskin shirt that was glazed with dirt he sat, and I saw him sway; Then his lips went in in a kind of grin, and he spoke, and his voice was calm, And "Boys," says he, "you don't know me, and none of you care a damn; But I want to state, and my words are straight, and I'll bet my poke they're true, That one of you is a hound of hell. . .and that one is Dan McGrew." Then I ducked my head, and the lights went out, and two guns blazed in the dark, And a woman screamed, and the lights went up, and two men lay stiff and stark. Pitched on his head, and pumped full of lead, was Dangerous Dan McGrew, While the man from the creeks lay clutched to the breast of the lady that's known as Lou. These are the simple facts of the case, and I guess I ought to know. They say that the stranger was crazed with "hooch," and I'm not denying it's so. I'm not so wise as the lawyer guys, but strictly between us two — The woman that kissed him and — pinched his poke — was the lady that's known as Lou.

Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under, Cozening the pillow of a lawful kiss; Who, therefore angry, seems to part in sunder, Swelling on either side to want his bliss; Between whose hills her head entombed is; Where like a virtuous monument she lies, To be admired of lewd unhallowed eyes. Without the bed her other fair hand was, On the green coverlet, whose perfect white Showed like an April daisy on the grass, With pearly sweat resembling dew of night. Her eyes, like marigolds, had sheathed their light, And canopied in darkness sweetly lay Till they might open to adorn the day. Her hair like golden threads played with her breath O modest wantons, wanton modesty! Showing life’s triumph in the map of death, And death’s dim look in life’s mortality. Each in her sleep themselves so beautify As if between them twain there were no strife, But that life lived in death, and death in life. Her breasts like ivory globes circled with blue, A pair of maiden worlds unconquerèd, Save of their lord no bearing yoke they knew, And him by oath they truly honourèd. These worlds in Tarquin new ambition bred, Who like a foul usurper went about From this fair throne to heave the owner out. What could he see but mightily he noted? What did he note but strongly he desired? What he beheld, on that he firmly doted, And in his will his willful eye he tired. With more than admiration he admired Her azure veins, her alabaster skin, Her coral lips, her snow-white dimpled chin. As the grim lion fawneth o’er his prey Sharp hunger by the conquest satisfied, So o’er this sleeping soul doth Tarquin stay, His rage of lust by gazing qualified; Slacked, not suppressed; for, standing by her side, His eye, which late this mutiny restrains, Unto a greater uproar tempts his veins. And they, like straggling slaves for pillage fighting, Obdurate vassals fell exploits effecting. In bloody death and ravishment delighting, Nor children’s tears nor mothers’ groans respecting, Swell in their pride, the onset still expecting. Anon his beating heart, alarum striking, Gives the hot charge and bids them do their liking. His drumming heart cheers up his burning eye, His eye commends the leading to his hand; His hand, as proud of such a dignity, Smoking with pride, marched on to make his stand On her bare breast, the heart of all her land, Whose ranks of blue veins, as his hand did scale, Left their round turrets destitute and pale. They, mustering to the quiet cabinet Where their dear governess and lady lies, Do tell her she is dreadfully beset And fright her with confusion of their cries. She, much amazed, breaks ope her locked-up eyes, Who, peeping forth this tumult to behold, Are by his flaming torch dimmed and controlled. Imagine her as one in dead of night From forth dull sleep by dreadful fancy waking, That thinks she hath beheld some ghastly sprite, Whose grim aspect sets every joint a-shaking. What terror ‘tis! but she, in worser taking, From sleep disturbèd, heedfully doth view The sight which makes supposèd terror true. Wrapped and confounded in a thousand fears, Like to a new-killed bird she trembling lies. She dares not look; yet, winking, there appears Quick-shifting antics ugly in her eyes. Such shadows are the weak brain’s forgeries, Who, angry that the eyes fly from their lights, In darkness daunts them with more dreadful sights. His hand, that yet remains upon her breast (Rude ram, to batter such an ivory wall!) May feel her heart (poor citizen) distressed, Wounding itself to death, rise up and fall, Beating her bulk, that his hand shakes withal. This moves in him more rage and lesser pity, To make the breach and enter this sweet city.