Grasping at Goodbyes

Poems by David Baxley

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Poems

Beauty Catch Me

Dreamer

Sorry for the Inconvenience

Breaking and Falling

Grasping at Goodbyes

Remembering to Breath

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17.c. 2011A collection of poems written by David Baxley

With illustrations and layout by Alexander BarnettMade For Typography 2

Professor Jay Merriweather

6. 7.

Beauty Catch Me

Beauty catch me in your palm like a snowflake falling from a sky so perfectly blue its repulsive and melt me into rivers that flowthrough the folds of your life-lines.

Beauty fold your hands and pray me into a heart breaking since the night freedom set its alarm to 9/11.

Don’t cover your ears love. Listen—to the clinking metal of a wind chime fashioned from dog tags. Feel the rhythm of combat boots marching to the cadence of blind obedience. Listen—I know a hundred-thousand things louder than a soldier’s gun. I know the heaviness of an empty room. I know the heartbreak of his mother.

Beauty speak me with your tongue for I have been screaming through the windpipe of your sons and daugh-ters whose open mouths you have filled with sand and silence.

Beauty fill my chest with your breath like the air prayed from the living to the dead and breathe me holy.

Don’t cover your eyes life Watch—the night awaken with stars and learn to read by their light. Awaken from this dream that has become our American Nightmare. Watch—as Kenny Lukes, soldier and father learns to hold his baby daughter with one hand. Watch—as Tariq Hafeez rocks an empty cradle with brown hands caked by red mud.

Beauty catch me in your palm like flecks of ash falling from a sky so perfectly torn its…beautiful and smear me into snowfall that falls upon the branches of your life-lines.

Beauty fold your hands and pray me into the heart of a life breaking since the moment we closed our eyes.

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Dreamer

We gasp for the firmament of sleepas our lungs cloud with smokefrom embers dying into trails of cirrus,stratus, and cumulonimbus, signals,from the fires of yesterday, burning,to not be forgotten.

Awaken the comets in your eyes,harbor happy thoughts as you shake star shinefrom the wings of your muse like pixie dustand push back against the ground with both feet.For only in the night do our shackled limbs remember flight.

Let go of the doubts you cling to like a drowning manand place one brave step into uncertainty like a child learning to walk by falling.Do not fear the breaking only in the keepingof their rules.

You—are the dreamer. You—are the painter.Trust in the Pablo Picasso and Salvador Daliof your unconscious, because it can paintwith all the colors that our brusheshesitate to apply to the canvasof our waking moments.

Say flint.Say spark.Say this is me speaking from my hearth.Stop choking on the ashes from the bonfiresof dreams sacrificed to doubt.Allow your lungs to be free and open.Taste this life.Breathe this life.

Close your eyesand awaken the Monarchs in your chest,the hummingbirds in your handsand feel. Feel from your constellationsall the way down to the dents in your shins.

Allow your spine to openlike that of a book. A bookwith empty pages thirstyfor everything your pulse has yet to write.

Love this lifein spite of your clenched fistsand cease to be witnessto this life. Plead guilty.Stand chargedand convicted.

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Sorry for the Inconvenience

Stopand remember the childrenAmerica.

Or at least that’s what the crossing guard’ssign is preaching.

Held aloft from the pulpit of his gripthe octagonal sheet of red metaland reflective paint that calls for usto yield attention to remembrance.

You can see him,on any given school zone cornerlike a slice of Americana pie,slowing the self-importantpace of traffic.

Flip the radio dialfrom blasphemous to reverence,open your window,and crane your necklike you were passingthe scene of an accident.

Stopand rub the sleepof the American Dreamfrom your eyesAmerica.

Give your attention undividedto this guard of the crossing. Brush the clouds from the skies of apathetic eyes and lift them up from the worn rubber soles of tired work boots,swim across the cresting wavesof faded denim,

while you do your bestto block out a vest draped overa paunch 234 years in the making.Built brick by brickupon the cracked foundation of the dreammortared with double quarter poundersand six-packs kicked backto the chorus of touchdowns,a vest bursting into caution yellowthat says rememberthe middle…America.

Allow yourself to bend a kneeto the oafishness of his grin and the mesh of a cap advertisingmufflers and a split fingered wavethat looks Vulcan,reminding us to“Live long and Prosper”.

Stopand remember the childrenAmerica.

Their tiny outstretched handsuncurl like budding plants.Plants that have been stamped flatby the tires of an eighteen wheelerwith golden arches embossed on the trailer.

Remember the landfillcalled a restaurant.Remember the railroad trackscalled a ribcage.Remember the sweatshop

called the north pole.

Somebody pray for the children.Somebody pray for what is lost.

Stopand remember the guardwho says “Sorry for the Inconvenience”America.

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Breaking and Falling

Daybreak

Day breaks through the windowand scattersrefractions across the floor.When I was six I broke a glass.While reaching for its placeon the top shelfit slipped from my gripand shattered.In waking we shatter our dreamslike that glass placed beyond our reachand the fragmentswe push beneath the rugsof waking eyes.

Noon

The sun at noon dayhas seared our dreamstoo hot to live by.Suffering from sunstroke we have forgottenhow to listento the voice of ourselves as children.When I was a child I didn’t dreamof flipping burgers.Filling the car with gas,shopping, and tuning our synapsesto the rhythm of nine to fiveare all ritual offeringsto the god that resides,beyond burning coronas,in the fiery heart of that starour eyes have learned to see by.

Afternoon

The day is winding awayand I am searching for distractionfrom all that I have learnedto live with.The flicker of the televisionout shines the image of myselfas a boy reaching for moon rocks.The mashed and greasy burgerin my hand is amnesiafor fingers that have forgottentheir longing to plant themselvesin the earthand flower fossils.

Twilight

After the light of daylightrealizations of the reality of our situationshas fadedwe are captivatedlike staring into a sunsetso beautiful it hurts.The colors of fading lightmixing with the rising nightlook like the pack of crayonsmy son left on the dashof the car.

Nightfall

Blue gives way to blackand my eyes close. I can seeall the things thatthe sun has blocked out.These stars that my heartis free to beat toare giant balls of distant lightand under themis a boy forgettingthat he wants to be an astronaut.In the night I fall but I hopethis time the dreamcatcher will catch mebefore I hit the day and break.

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Grasping at Goodbyes

My brother gave himself up for deadthe day after he set fire to his deployment papers,trying to catch freedom in the asheswhile on exhibit in a glass houseand no amount of stones could shatterthe panes and release him.

My guts are a war zone in flameswith a pit big enoughto dissolve twenty-eight years of memory.My lungs are filling up and I’m choking on the sandsof a desert eight-thousand miles distant.I can’t catch the breath to say-goodbye.

It feels like we have already laid you to restin a casket made of yellow ribbons.If you avoid hate-tipped bullets firedfrom angry guns, explosives billowing outwardinto clouds of cowardice, if you come homewith flesh and sinew intactwill you remain the same?As you push in firing solutionsand turn fathers, mothers, sisters, and little brothersinto shadowswill you remain? Becausenot all casualties come home in body bags.

You choke-chained depressionwith the shackles of Uncle Samand now that he has come asking for the priceyou can’t open yourself.I’m still digging through a drawerof unwanted things in a house long abandoned,haunted by your ghost and the only keyis formed from the bones of our family.

Don’t go. I’m still tryingto scrape away the rust. We all havesince the moment of our birth.In this storm that is lifewe are looking for confirmation in lightning.Our hearts still beat c-sharpas we tune our spinal cordsto the key of redemption.

Sacrifice is something someone comfortably anonymous should make. This can’t happento you—to us.I’m still formulating my argument againsta god I’m not sure can hearas you go off to fight for my rightto fill my car with Muhammad’s pulse.I’ll sell it and walk or get a bikeif it will keep you as arealive, unchanged, my brother.

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Remembering to Breath

I opened a box of my favorite post cards,the one I keep inside my chest,and there you were,lodged between the summer camp of ‘94and a boy afraid of the water.

There are things I know by heart,like family outings to the beach,the wind waltzing through your hairand you just smilingbecause you still rememberhow to breathe,

and there are things I don’t.Why are loved ones taken?Why does life have to cost so much?

I still wander along the forgetful shoresof my memory pressing shells to my ears.Hoping, that someday the roar bouncing back from the inside will singin the key of your voice box.

Most days I wonder if you werereal or imagined and that if I forgetyou will transubstantiate like vaporsteaming up from cold ground glazed with frost on a morning kissed by the sun.

And I know my shine can’t holda candle to my rustbut I’ll do my best to keepthe flame of your vigil lit,burning bright as the days you were happy to see me.

Those days when you were the princessand I was your humble steed.I would prance for hours across the floorsof your now broken homeon my uncle hands and knees until they bled.

The blood flowing like your father’s tears.My pulse finger painting forget-me-notsin your image.

Recalling your image these daysis like watching God rend branches from our family tree.because God has always been a boy playing with fire.Heaven has always been a pyrefueled by the kindling of suffering and fanned by the breath of a thousand unanswered prayers.

If prayers were enough to save usI’d collect them all and stitch them into a white flag and wave it in surrenderand ask God the tough questions he has been avoiding.Why did he abandon us like life abandoned my brother’s daughter andwhy did that man decide to drive for home and drive her from us on that hourthat was anything but happy?

Now I hold my children extra tighthoping that with each embraceI can squeeze more life into them.All the while a man breathes forget-me-notslike paper planes taking flightsof freedom through the bars of his cell.

He drank to forget and nowit hurts to remember.I wanna catch those planessoaring on the winds of regretand send them back inscribedwith poems that speak of forgiveness.That I’m sorry for carryingthis noose of hate for so long.

Because I have been screaming for helpthrough the windpipe of a man who cannot speak.

Because I have been trying to keep you afloatas you swim for the familiar shores of homecarried on the current of my blood stream.

And I have been running into the armsof someone who fades and find only the wallsthat now exist between us when I get there.

Maybe one day she’ll show upin starfish of lightand tell me why things are…

the way they are.

But until then I will mail this postcardof you and myself to myselfto remind myself to breathebecause we all have different reasons for forgetting.

Every breath we take is sacred.Every second of this life is scriptureand these holes our hearts have learnedto beat with are like the valves in an instrumentand these wounds are where the places where the music comes through.

I’ll keep wandering these shoresplacing one foot in front of the otherand to do my best to rememberto take a breath.

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