Category: writing

Open Throat

And knotted now.

Only when quiet will it start, where the song finds a fingerhold. Else its knotted mass of conflicting notions, freeway traffic, madness tracking madness, keeping time where messages rain, but who calls? Where is her clarifying voice? Hiss of traffic lulls us sleeping, onward. Again. The next drip of text not to be missed, but somewhere a river shines still (does it, still?) and the birds know it (where and if it is). They call a swelling at the chest, it moves behind the cracked lips, parting now, to–––

To until. Again. An abrupt gravity tugs back at the throat. This sound is not what was there before, rising. Now it’s a swarm of speckled amnesias, screeching.

Hot Mess

Heart on display.

How much I aspire to be cool and collected, contained. But this skin is too thin. She barely holds me in. Sometimes I wonder if she even tries. I think she’s up to something else sometimes, conspiring with my aching knee and the way I bleed. And bleed. And with this shaking hand. To this tentative form I might complain, why do you betray me? But while I am mostly dumb, even I can recognize the wrong in that note. Of all her acts, betrayal of my life has never been one. She’s like an excited child with something just made and far from ready to be displayed to any standards of the moment, but she doesn’t know this like she doesn’t know sleek or cool or style or mood she is tone deaf to the codes of any given art and she only wants to give me––

to give me away

like the child with construction-paper hearts, fresh cut in love and decorated with such glee that the glue hasn’t even dried yet and the glitter is falling all over the carpet, and she wants to to pair these with flowers she found on the side of the neighbor’s apartment, the ones she doesn’t know enough to call weeds––and she is so eager to give them away––

like she is eager to give me away

to anyone who is
near, like Here!
Like, Take this! It’s for you!

And I sit here, cool only when I keep her from the assembly she wants to give me to, in love––the hot, messy, extra, weedy, bleeding abundance of this embarrassing form–– knowing that as soon as we go out there she is going to try it again.

And I hear.

Revolutions of Form

Being in the meantime. Now.

It is dark except for the low light of the lamp, and something rumbles nearby, in a fissure between seen and unseen. Then a screeching note, followed by wingbeat near the window across from where I sit. Noting how I dreamed again of you in trouble, and me trying to get somewhere in time. But where. Like so many of these dreams, I can only describe its geography as an urgent atmosphere of too-bright light, noisy with crowds and a sense of executioners above us. As I run to find you, there is a scope somewhere, a running form in its crosshairs, and the crowds are rivers of us, and for each other body in the crosshairs I am part of the crowd in the desperate dream where we feel the insignificance of this flesh against the thing we mean to prevent in time.

And what do I do now with this sense, but sit and spin in it, in these fifteen––no, ten––minutes before I have to move again, out again to where the screeching flies, to the place of urgent details and not enough time? I note again the feeble voice crying stop, how it sounds like one that started crying a long time ago, long enough to lose the urgency of the initial scream, near expired like the droning whine of an infant soon to fall exhausted back to sleep.

Dear Poet

On this dreaming.

You can put a question to it, define some central arc. With a working x-ray, you can find the skeleton, hold it up. Strange balloon, there is something beyond these, a milder sun to know you whole and mirrored in its sky. Don’t fly to it yet, love, it is not yet time to know the altitude of that dormant mountain you’ve selected as central metaphor. Wait. You may find that instead of a symphonic saving it means some other mischief, that it proves a certain madness you only suspected was yours when you chose to suspect you were only dreaming too hard, chasing some symbol to seal this torment shut. Where was the white rose, the singing bird, the rest at the end of your long nights of questions? O wild spider, no one hears you cry. Lacking tears, you seem only ever to make more spiders. There they go again, animating shadows. Look.

Time Being

In language.

What tongue I may have inherited has long since dissolved upon landing. So now the constant challenge is naming while conjugating past and present at once. To walk naked into this astonishing force, a mind not mine from which I am nevertheless breathed among all others––this congregation of dreams, any number of which may condense under pressure, returning to rain a new forecast.

Tickets, Please

The cost of admission.

You asked about colleges attended, your hulking mass above us, blocking the light. We knew the move for what it was, a banal violence. Hello, wolf, we thought, noting the borrowed sheepskins. How many others had used it to move us from the pits where we waited for the musicians, our kin, to begin? Tickets please. Tickets. The announcement punctuated by the swing of some blunt instrument pulled from a holster at the hip. And on the train where we rode to visit our mother who was dying for lack of credentials to prove she was worthy of the care needed to live. Tickets, please.

When you asked me about colleges attended, I was seated among others on the ground. We were sharing blankets. Many of us were children, some old enough to have acne; others to have the scars of acne and miscellaneous burns; still others had creaking bones and the tired eyes of the old. When you came to ask me for university credentials––tickets, please––you did not notice. How we had removed our shoes, each of us, recognizing holy ground. This was our school where we sat in the dirt on shared blankets at the feet of dead poets.

It is impossible to argue the exile from certain states of being, but we knew to listen for the music of a torquing tongue arched at just the right angle to halt the bone-crunching gears. It was only a moment, but it was long enough to notice the sound for what it was when it resumed. Your question, too. And we laughed with the ghosts when you left us, and went back to school, and you continued to mutter under your breath about the ignorance of some people, and we waved.

Corpus

And collective.

The words were what was happening to us, lapping and lolling their tides. The shock of being enmeshed in a work of art. If someone had asked what my life was then, one answer would be: anywhere but this body. Another: any felt where beyond its limits––both of which, I see now, would have betrayed certain narrow assumptions about the limits of a given form.

Histories in Gold

Records of conquest.

Once, amid covenant of salt and lamps to burn every evening through quiet, into dark, one had the idea to cut the groves. He suggested this to others. He knew what vanities to stoke, whose appetites were violent enough to take pleasure in the raid, as though doing so would bring a final calm, an end to the torment of those despairs and passions that would strike at midday and midnight. 

But what followed were empty pleasures, and now these hungers were of greater volume. From there, they built the walled cities and armies of men to protect them, and these grew notions of valor that were married to the work of weapons and attendant armors, of seizing and attendant claims, might and its supporting rights. With these, they enacted many plunders; called these Victory, claimed them Saving, recorded as the Project of Civilization. 

There was much claiming in those days, of the spoils of war. Over time it became unfashionable to call out the spoils; stating the obvious was something only a dullard would do. But the claim of the owners was birthed in violence when they ran off with the sheep, and when the salt loses its flavor over time, who remembers those first trees?