Assorted Poems Version 1

8/17/2019 Assorted Poems Version 1

1/10

Off /on weekends

My dry tongue was a tuneless trumpet,lashing involuntary cat calls

and spitting mannequin opinions,and the night was a broken vesselInto which I poured the sum of my shouts,and my throat was smearedin the silvery, smooth silk of a chain-smoked night.

But,my heart was quiet,gazingUp at the innite ceiling of some strange starlit tabernacle.

while We were moving upand downbut mostly sideways.

Te dawn’s blush red ngers Tore open the veil ofmy black and blue eyes,In the silence of a destroyed room,I woke upa mule for the morning’s weight,

trying to shake off a thin jacket of soot with a aching shoulder shruga dash of hot water,a dull, bent razor blade, And the sculpting teeth of a comb.My dormant eyes blindedBy the sickly lightof some still indiff erence. A breath-tipsy stutter,a drifting pause,

a shrill, stinging siren. And my eyes recoiledat the death of the day.


2/10

Brief Intermissions Te television crotches A makeshift quiltto defeat the breeze of our sighsResting on a table near a hospice bed

is a pill organizer as densely populatedas a rich man’s rolodex,and behind the peeling, ash-stained wallpaper, Te furnace hums ‘Om’in a chugging, waspy drone.

Here,a young girl presses a pair of plastic toy binocularsagainst a tiny, ngerprinted window, And meets the roaring blithe laughterof stray children tossing up

beds of untamed, brittle autumn leavesand tries to twig Why she’s gotta be the oneStuck in the silence of this sweating room.

In the kitchen, Dust utters like reies Two-liters of Code Red Mountain Dew Arranged like bowling pins, An unnished case of Miller Lite, And makeshift skyscrapers constructedFrom Little Caesar’s pizza boxes and dirty dishes.

Above his head,Hangs a handsome Jesus portraitLike Polaris in the nighttime sky.

Te crinkled, Luna-cratered walls are dotted with palm-leaved honeymoon photos,a couple of Olan Mills family portraits,and a rorschach of mold stains.In some half-forgotten corner, Te ever-glow of an aftermarket LCD TVGlistens with the sun rays of gray-scaled reruns

of some half-forgotten sixties sitcom.

And it isherethat we choke on this silence. Tis silence which we try to sanctify by beginning our sentences with “God willing.“ Tis silence which we try to stuff with gossip and talk about the weather. Tis silence which we try to chuckle away by half-heartedly joining in with the audience laughter.


3/10

And it isherethat he stares at the only sky he’ll ever see again,an opaque, off -white piece of dry-wall stretched taut

onto which he projectsthe gravely, coal-tarred burrows of a life unseen and unheard,Like water eddying,Rewinding and replayingthe shrinking vinegary blotchesof his collapsing triumphs and aching tribulations, And I wonder,

What can he say?

Tat he can expound at great length on the psychological drama of a Dostoevsky novel? T

at once he wandered through an Eden of Ivy green? Tat he donned the the handsome, tailored armor of a B.A., MFA, D.Lit, & C.V? Tat his career opportunities were the ones that knocked indeed? Tat he sailed through the city of Florence? Tat he marveled at the ceiling of the Sistine? Tat he swam the shores of Algiers? Tat he basked in the orid aroma of a snifter of Belgian-monk-brewed beer?

I ask,because despitethe idle sanctity

of my

dgeting convictions,Despite the heady books, And all that shit about the proletariat and bourgeoisie,the catching-up coff ee shop blues with distant friends, And the hours chiseling a soundaround the pitter-patter of a metronome click, And my White Pages of ex-lovers, And the clamorous nights of momentary eternity,climbing up cobwebs of bong smoke, diving down dark oceanic trenches of booze, And the swaggering, bar stool stories which followOf aky one-night stands,

and my encyclopaedic knowledgeof obscure punk rock bands, And how under the cold, smoky bible black sky,I’m shocked with the shivering jittersOf wondering why, God, whycan I not just stop thinking about her?


4/10

Despite all of this: won’t my room still reek of the same silence?Now, whose sharp, silver sickle scratches against my shoulder

And reminds me thatDeath is real.So, so real. And that I am buta single drop of rainin a howling & ceaseless storm, And that from the moment I am spit out from that cloud,Ifall only tocease to fall.

And,I’m torn between whether that isMore reason for achieving, seeing, possessing,caressing, & loving,Or kicking up dust and muttering,“Fuck it. What’s the point?” And, I wonder whether itsa regal, benevolent God who controls my landingor if this is all simply An atomic dice-roll violently crashingfrom the invisible hands of chance.

But this is all just idle daydreaming,isn’t it?

Because in front of me I see,clothed in the rags of a sagging, Duck Dynasty t-shirt,His receding hairline like the exposed roots of a dying tree,His leathery skin a clock-carved fossil,His face ushed in a warm mist of morphine, Te withering carcass of a good man.Raised up in the caress of a tired wife, Whom, with lockjaw eyes, remind each other,

Tat all things fall and fade and forever pass, And what could he sayExcept,“Honey, I love you.”


5/10

Good Lord

Good Lord,Give me some kind of reason To shake them hard-tossed debts

Of thisSun-stained, blood-bought season.

Two Suns whipped them through deserts roughGood Lord,Didn’t You mend their broken cup?But why not mine, Tis time?

Good Lord, Would you let me see It?

‘fore themseven seals tear up And Jane’s red wine oods my dry kiss.

Has Your glass sea done shattered up?Can the Pottermend this broken cup I’ll hold outout to You Who do You choose?

Good Lord,

Jumped on the rails to a dusty blurred line.Cranked up my guitar’s roar, And my nger’s hailed in cut time.

But, don’t time always tame her taste?Good Lord,‘cause I’ve never felt so late As whenI reached to kiss youIn the upper room.


6/10

Innervisions

Calm, whispering kinda kidFelt another nudge of the ol’ lovesick blues,Snatched Rumi off his bookshelf

but got bored after a couple of pages.

“In the silence of love, You will nd the spark of life.”

“Or, the ashes of disappointment,” he griped.

Mind sprints blitzkrieg And before you know it,He’s dodging bulletsin the Battle of Britain,

Tinking that the world is damn near gonna end.

But alas,he survives.

Downs a couple of milk stouts,Flops on his bed, And jots in his new Moleskine‘bout ‘how the cars stroll pastLike tumbleweed.’ Ten bogs his head for some shiny, golden-ticket hues

To pen those trippy chipped grain patterns he seeson the hardwood oors.

St. John was bunkered up in the next room.Found out he knocked up another girl And prolly pranced around in a carouselOf about a million Oh-my-God, what-the-fuck-am-I-going-to-do’s.

Te kid only caught one vaguely pant its way inbut he couldn’t make out what it was he heard.He was too busy tunneling down

a pink-walled foxholehe likes to call the ‘creative process.’


7/10

Writer’s block escorts his handout on a nighttime ramble. Te breeze moves him likea good memory’s velvet ngers.

He wonders for a minute at Orion and Taurusand about God and the universe for a minute more.Feet bowing a concertoagainst the diamond asphalt pavement.Innervisions spiralingaround his bright-blue Sony cans,and he taps his tipsy toes to

“Don’t-you-worry-about-a-thing.”Moments like these, with the clean-as-a-whistle sky,the street-lit sadness,

the grooving electric piano,and the breeze wheeling up the cornelds.he likes to call ‘spirituality.’

After the wind numbs his ngers,he’ll sneak in like a mouse,dust off his shoes,trample right on upstairs,gliding by St. John’s bedroomon the wings of In A Silent Way.

Midway through “Shh/Peaceful,”he’ll bust open a King James Bible,cast nets for inspiration,andafter he’s caught his dinner,let and fry up inin a tongue-tied sizzle‘bout howhe’s ‘a chain shackled to rusting hope – wading in gaping heart coves,chasing the the Doppler echoes

of Bathsheba’s galloping glance’

or how he ‘whines like faithful Jonah, when compassed like algaein the eshy, lightless bellyof another stormy, merciless evening.’

And St. John’ll prolly still be riding that carousel.


8/10

Excuses, excuses

Dear poetry professor,

I’m sure you’ve heard them

all — sickness, sadness, a family death,“family emergencies”(or simply “emergencies”), which so conveniently fall three daysprior to said student’s spring break in Cancun.

— None of which I can cryptically off erfor my absence. Tough,as the Good Book says,“Te truth will set you free”

and as such, I shall relate my own:

Twilight on Tursday, A devil and an angel pitched tentson opposite shoulders.One seemed to whisper,“Live a little.” Te other was speaking like a Protestantsmothered in the Holy Ghost. Ten I remember that T.S. Eliot line‘bout

“the awful daring of a moment’s surrender”

I’m jump onto a silver rocket,catapulting off of semi’s on I-76Head bangingmy left-hand steering,devil horns bent out on my right.

Tirty minutes later,I roll into a mid-brow

college apartment complex. Te rain is sneering at me,and I haphazardly steermy car into an illegal parking space.

After this point,my memory ickersin fteen-second Instagram clip.


9/10

Tere’s a booze connoisseurnamed Jake(or was it Jack, or James?),riffing like Coltraneon the pure-as-a-nuns-rapsheet

moonshine known exclusivelyto Southwestern Pennsylvania,how’s ten beers in andsober as a pallbearer.

It tasted likelighter uid to me.

Rolling in a negative feedback loopof another-and-another,.00-to-.25 BAC in thirty minutes,

a few I-love-you calls,some existential nauseaon the nihilism of a generation, which like most thingsis simply a sigh to pass the time,

Te girl is props me up,for a second, I think ofhow I’m going to break the iceon her couch. A st-pump & I-love-you

to a Nice Guy named Dave(which I could only recall because he looked like Diamond Davefrom Van Halen)and trip out of his SUV.

A distant clock motionsthat it ’s 10:30AM.I'm awoken by the clang ofa coff ee cup hitting a glass table,that white henley I thought would look super-hip

crusted in vomit.

Drunkards make terrible marksmen.Everywhere but the black trash can —Muddy puddles,the acid rain of my“awful daring.”


10/10

Is this what a lobotomyfeels like?

Her arms crossed,Oceanic eyes growling,

“Fuck you. Clean my

oor.”I’m not much of an artist —though I tried to smearevery damn inchof her living room hardwood canvas withhues of blue Windex and white bleach.

Apologies, hugs, kisses,are blocked by my puke-stained clothesand little stomach-crystals stuck between my teeth,

and I can’t

nd my car keys yet again.

I felt like a half-drunken vampire,navigating a string ofcountry backroads home,and my phone dies.

Tough, while technically,I passed the English hallfteen minutes prior to class,

My eye’s were chasing adistant Promised Land ofa cathartic shower and a steaming French Press.

So, as I worry ‘bout whetherI fucked this relationship thing up yet again,and a hive of sociopathic spring beessting my skull for fun,I pen this letter to you.

And, if it seems irresponsibleI can only say, “touché,”andand off er only one humble retort:

At least,I got a poem from it.

Assorted Poems Version 1

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