I was happier with the madness.
I watched the bridge burn from the highest window of my forehead and pulled the shade on my third eye.
Did a freefall backslide into the anesthetic blanket of an over the counter prefab life.
Now I’m shotgunning smoke from the lips of poets. Blowing rings around the moon. Making Saturn from a hubcap, until the orderlies graft the remote control to my palm.
Now my heart is plowed by Hallmark card commercials in the methadone clinic of Must See TV.
I begin to reminisce about spending days with my mouth stopped shut by a wasp nest until I burned it out with cigarettes.
Shaking the Magic 8 Ball and having it tell me “Fuck No!” one day and “Hell Yes!” the next.
I was happier when I took the pain from a hip flask
Spilling rainbow oil slick snailbelly juice on my forehead
Like an anointing
Like a warning
My day planner choked with blood and shit and the cryptic symbols from the Babylonian curse she tattooed around my heart.
Out the window I see a new bridge, a crystal cat’s cradle of voices inter-cut with heartbeats.
So I overpower the warden and finally break free
It’s easy to do because the warden is me
I want it all back
The spinning carousel face
Russian roulette with a scorpion jukebox
Tequila tango of tongues in the back alley of my mind
Always a step away from the mad shit
The breakthrough an ever falling star
Happiness a train I keep missing in a dream
Every day dying in a Maserati car wreck of ecstasy
But I want it, even if it eats my heart,
I want it.
I want the poetry back.
All posts tagged poetry
I Want the Poetry Back
Antarctica
And she thinks to herself about
How much his sexual techniques are like the settings on her Black & Decker Blender:
Distinguished only by changes in pitch and intensity.
Yet they each had their own little name:
Grind, Frappe, Obliviate.
So too the bestiary of contortions in the copy of the Kama Sutra
She saw strategically placed on the nightstand,
Pages earmarked like a threat.
She feels her heat steal away from her body,
Condensing on the roof of his laboring chest.
“I’m in an oven,” she thinks. ”An oven that feeds only twice a week.
I’m the loaf of bread.”
He had mixed her up, kneaded her, pounded her for good measure
And then packed her in a box.
She sees the coastline of Antarctica in the cracks of his bedroom ceiling.
She imagines Lilith’s outraged scream falling across the oceans of ancient earth,
Encasing it in a womb of ice that lingers at the poles even today.
Tomorrow she plans to call some travel agents and sift them.
The one who gets her the best rate on a one way to Antarctica
Will become her new shaman,
Her Pathfinder across a log jam of spinning chakras.
He rolls her onto her side so he can try out page 34.
The crease in the pillow is a mountainside in Antarctica.
A mountain of clothing, she decides,
Remembering the range of laundry waiting by the washer at home.
One pile for the business girl, one pile for the Sunday girl,
One pile for the party girl, one pile for the artist girl…
In Antarctica, she wouldn’t need as many clothes,
Just enough to keep her self warm.
In Antarctica she would rebuild the temple of herself
Seal it with a gate that opened only for her
With a sign out front to warn visitors: “No thank you. I already have everything.”
Far away, she hears a blender work its way up the scale
Until the pressure blows off the lid.
“When I go to Antarctica,” she thinks,
“I’ll need to bring an ice pick.”
We Are All in the Process of Leaving Wal-Mart
Fragments of an unfinished poem…
I meet my twin in the office supply aisle.
He is clean shaven, which makes me consider my own place in this mirror universe.
He says, “I just got here. I can’t find anything I need.”
“Try the automotive section,” I tell him. “It’s a good place to start forgetting.
Buy everything for that road trip you’ll never take.”
In the toy aisle, a boy and girl exchange volleys of Nerf darts
labeled with the names of places enchanted by past lovers.
No one else sees the children and their phantom friendly fire.
I approach the express lane.
10 Items or Less.
Both a welcome and a warning.
Coming Out Poem #1
Someone screams in the room across the hall,
His fever blasting into me with a mad resonance.
So afraid, we are all so afraid of the mint green hallways,
This zoo that M.C. Escher built.
“Do you understand that you are in an urgent care facility?” the nurse asks.
I nod urgently. I do now.
The doors to this hospital are locked, but I don’t know that yet.
I vibrate and twitch and chase my words around, trying to gather them in careful piles, like autumn leaves in a constant wind.
I answered all the questions honestly, so of course I’m igniting rows of little red lights on their warning panel.
Yes, I wanted to kill someone.
I have created a situation for them. They are now in damage control mode.
Yes, I hear voices.
In fact, that’s what I came here to talk about if…
No, I’m not planning on killing myself.
The voices have names.
No, I don’t know where the scars came from.
Sometimes I get really confused and the phone just scares the shit out of me.
No, I don’t know what day it is.
I don’t mention the animals, or my sister, or the blackouts, or use the term “occult”;
Poor woman’s so busy with all the other blinking red lights.
She doesn’t know the terror of having to choose the One True breakfast cereal at the grocery store.
They’re always talking, you see.
Romero says we should just get the fuck out of there.
We can take her. “You get the ankles and I’ll get the wrists.”
The nurse studies her notes and then retrieves a doctor.
The doctor offers her help in exchange for my agreeing to take some pills.
Damage control. Damage control.
Bottled fog to squash the voices.
The pills will make the doctors certain they are speaking only to me.
I came here drowning and they are throwing me Life Savers candy.
Can it be a woman? I will only speak with a woman.
Men are untrustworthy, they scare me
Don’t tell me it’s an irrational fear; turn on a TV – it’s just common sense.
I’m afraid of demons too, but that’s probably because of all the exorcisms.
Taran says taking the drugs would be like suffocating your brother with a pillow because he talks too much. Kind of an extreme solution.
A child is sobbing somewhere, but no one else seems to hear.
I come out of “screen saver” mode
To find a new office with a new doctor. A man.
The stagehands are so swift and silent I don’t notice the set changes.
How many times have I done this?
The doctor says I’m “borderline,” on the verge of “going crazy.”
I ask him if that’s the proper psychiatric term for my condition and what warning signs I can expect so when I finally “go crazy” I know when to mail the invitations.
He just shrugs as he takes my money.
Every dollar is a thunderclap when you’re paying someone just to listen.
At home I find sketches of still life and landscapes.
They are all full of faces.
Someone has forged my signature at the bottom of every one of them.
Someone’s been feeding the cats. One less thing I have to do.
The prescription the doctors gave me has vanished.
Someone else has left signs of their passing up and down my arms and legs.
Technically, the wounds are self-inflicted.
I can’t deny those are my fingerprints on the knife.
My friends laugh nervously at my “mood swings”
And we laugh back at them with lonely, angry laughter.
I gave up trying to put the mirror back together since I don’t know its original shape
And honestly, I’m used to my reflection by now.
I dwell in a world of fissures, of dreams within dreams, of time reft and distressed.
The journal of my life has a chasm between ages 3 and 12.
Guess nothing was going on all those years.
Guess I had nothing notable to say.
You could say I have a photographic memory:
Because without the photos there’d be no memories.
I memorize numbers, the answers to complicated questions like
How long were you married?
How long have you lived here?
Haven’t I always been here?
“Am I asleep? Had I slept? Are they my bad dream or am I theirs?”
The first rule of Dissociative Identity Disorder is you do not talk about Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Fuck the rules.
I don’t worry that I’ll wake up as Tyler Durden;
I worry that I’ll wake up as myself
And where’s that guy been?
A lot of people have been asking for him.
He’s been making a lot of collect calls
And signing a lot of checks,
And running up a tab.
And he forgot we were playing hide and seek.
These have got to be the best hiding places because no one’s found us for years.
But we just want to know if it’s safe to come out now.
We just want to be found.
Yesterday, When I Was An Old, Old Poet
When I was a young poet,
I found the best method of writing
was to get dressed up like a French chambermaid,
stockings, garters and all,
and then to slit my wrists.
I was immediately faced with a decision:
Write an apologetic note that attempted to explain this scene
to the sad soul who discovered it,
Or to write something that would obliterate their vision.
I often used my own blood to write.
There was plenty of it.
Now that I am old,
I find that every moment is an awkward tragedy
begging for explanation.
This tattered recliner, a table perpetually set for two,
a row of shot glasses, a box of empty envelopes.
It pleases me to be the caretaker of this spiritual
refuse trapped in sidewalk cracks,
pushing a broom through the many chambers
of this museum mortared with my spit and sinew.
At the ubiquitous yuppie way station
I take my medicine:
A dark mug of koffeine, with cigarette butts floating like marshmallows.
My eyebrows snarl at the fragile thing in my favorite seat,
Sending her scrabbling away for human company.
At last I am alone with the blank page, ever awful, empty and expectant,
a fanfold stack of polygraph paper, just waiting for me to spill the first lie.
I have made it my business to tell monstrous, loquacious, perfect lies.
In this way my sins pay for themselves.
I’m just trying to suffer quietly around sips of koffeine
and perhaps accidentally write the most despicable blue collar love poem
this side of Indiana,
when some young Turk cracks open a sonnet on the edge of the bar,
challenging me to a duel,
waving the jagged rhyme at my face.
So young, and already a poet! Goddamn this world.
I decide to go easy on him, a kindred spirit in this country of vampires.
I say to the young Turk,
“When the Child was 57,
he discovered an old shoebox on a high shelf in the garage.
Inside he found all the time he had wasted.
Being a neighbor to dotage,
he placed the box into the hands of his son
who devoured it greedily and set sail for Berkeley
with Imogene, the girl he did not love.”
The young Turk doubles over in grief, ink spraying from his lips.
I turn back to the page, now covered in crisp glyphs of blood.
Later, I encounter a girl scout outside the supermarket.
She brandishes a tin cup and asks me if I could spare some jism.
They’re cloning poets to raise money
for a trip to Cairo and didn’t I have a moment to blow a wad?
I tell her I came at the office and shove past.
When I see the young girls at the supermarket,
my joints creak like the strained masts of a withered salt-soaked clipper.
I am reminded of those days before sleep had been invented,
before intoxication had a patent.
My dreams drifted above the landscape as mighty leviathans,
their spines formed from entire mountain ranges.
But now, I am perplexed by the array of oatmeal
here in the cereal aisle of the supermarket.
Behold the artist in his twilight, squinting at cryptic nutritional information.
I find no poetry in these consumable halls
until I reach the checkout
and see the young man laying down
roses, condoms and a bottle of Jaegermeister.
I could die tonight certain that there was still romance in this world.
That night, while I am occupied with filling cracks in the wall
with haiku,
the phone rings and I hear the red apple voice of a lost son,
ancient wine still dripping from his lips.
“I am in love,” he says.
“Tell me what secret poetry will seal her heart forever.”
I instruct him to get a butter knife and cut out his intestines.
He would have no further use for them.
Next he should empty his bank account and buy her a dress sewn in Valhalla.
Then stretch his heartstrings across a cheap pawnshop violin.
Give these gifts to her.
It is best to get the formalities out of the way as soon as possible.
The man I believed to be my son gushes his thanks and says goodbye.
I study the cracks in the wall,
the table set for two,
the violin that had been returned to me so soon.
I sit down in the tattered recliner, notebook in hand.
Reaching beneath my sweater, I touch the pendulum that swings there,
slowly bringing it to rest.
It will be millennia before they discover me,
cradled inside this brownstone,
encased by the glacier of a new ice age I have felt encroaching
since the day my tears turned to ink.
My face will be lashed down in a rictus
overlooking a final ejaculation of verse.
They shall see where my soul burned into
the last period I would ever write,
exiting at the end of my epitaph:
I was a poet and I drank deeply.
Tetelestai
Surveying 31 days of scars
An infirmary for words
Just shoot them as they sleep
I cannot bear their needy countenances
for another day
I gilded my tongue with water from the black flask
Now everything I say is the absolute truth
Even my dream self points a finger
Muttering sideways to its brothers
At how changed I am
The stain of words prints my bedsheets
with a map of meanings
I am too weary to decipher
I must break all my fingers
Before they scoop out my eyes
So tired of seeing everything
in the light of my own heart
Emergency Condom Hidden in Wallet Haiku
bought new snow shovel
i look out window every day
not a flake in sight
Sisters of the Storm
I have met the love of my life, the girl of my dreams, and my soulmate.
They are three different women.
My love burned out my eyes as I watched her fall
I wandered, hands outstretched, in search of her in the country of jagged glass
Our greetings no longer Amiable, our stares strange,
I still remember the sweet blood on my cut hands, some of it was mine.
Another I met in an afternoon vision, folded note slipped sideways past my ribs,
Warning me of a red fire boiling in from the east.
My men barely had time to lash me to the mast
The last knot snug just as the golden voice rained aching over my heart.
I remained ever an island to her, she a sunset strangely settling in the east again.
A span of time and circumstances cut between us and I fear I cannot Bridge it.
My soulmate stirred beside me in sleep when our names were the alternating beats on a drumskin stretched between the teeth of gods hunkered in secret parley until one sneezed and one laughed and the skin snapped, a canvas whipping in the wind, paint crying over the map of all the child-smudged continents from where they would send for our varied parts only to scatter them over and over from the cliffs of the moon down to clay-slick river valleys where red monkeys sift the water for the syllables of the incantation that will make us whole.
Her voice is the sea foam call Beckoning Again from the cave where fire children raise pinky fingers to write messages in mercury. For her I will always answer, will always fly and fall, shudder and be still.
The three will never weave me a skein of promises, a blanket under which I can sleep untroubled
The three will never confer and trade secrets
The three will never compare their familiar bruises
But when they cry out from each horizon they are a chorus and their song finds a common center
They are the Sisters of the Storm and my oceans boil when they draw near.
On the Moon
Somewhere on the moon is a picnic basket.
You leaned against the black monolith
and I leaned against the crashed capsule.
We ate a meal of heart-shaped sandwiches.
It is so bright on the moon that your pupils turn to pinpricks
and the stars vanish.
So you can understand why it was hard to see you
against the monolith,
against the infinity draped along the lambent lunar curve.
We put on our star goggles to see clearer.
I showed you the fire the wise men followed.
You pointed out the comet that would boil away the oceans.
We watched the earth appear.
When I tried to put it in my pocket,
you stopped me,
saying it would only end up on my shoulders.
You gave me the mountains of Tibet, instead.
“Start small,” you said.
The line where the light side meets the dark is so distinct
it looks as though it were painted there
with the ashes of every hopeful campfire.
We danced back and forth through light and shadow
like a car weaving at high speed down a forgotten highway
where laws were too lazy to get up off the porch.
After a while I grew to love being dizzy with you.
On the moon, even the most serious things
weigh less than a golf ball.
In our hurry to catch the train back to Earth
we forgot the picnic basket
and several other heart-shaped things.
I still see them now and again, as though through a telescope.
The secret of the moon is that there is air there,
but only for a time.
My Voice
I will not apologize for the train wreck
You brought all that baggage
Now you sort through it
Because now I’m hunting for my voice, see
I got tired of all the parallels
So I uprooted tracks to grow ladders out from stairwells
My voice might be up here in these mountains
Echoing between griffons’ nests
Or nestling between a goddess’ breasts.
Goddess?
No, I’m getting confused again
Just two soft hills I passed when I used to take the train.
I will not apologize for stealing the bed sheets
You taught me to make a parachute just in case
When what I needed were sails to visit space in my starship
My voice twists tongues with the sun, hon
It don’t parlez vous you and your moon talk
So bright and quiet, but visited by shadow
You know, the dark train that could
But I should not concern myself with lunacy
While my voice still calls to me
From the lip of God’s coffee cup
Take a sip and stay up to see the griffons landing on the street with me
As I come flying home.