Silence

Silence
grown grand and gravid is awesome.
Awful. Full of awe.
Dripping with it.
                           Heavy.
Humming with long
drawn-out thoughts--
have you ever heard the earth
sing in quarter time? It
drowns out all other sound
with sighs.
                  Hush.

My head rested on my daddy's chest--
I still called him daddy, then--
on the days when we'd stay home
and he'd stay in bed.
I counted the hairs on his arms
watched his belly rise and fall
listened to his breath.
Listened to the empty song.
Learned to wrestle with the gift he gave me.
The heavy sound.
                             Silence.

A self-portrait in watercolor, 2014

I saved in a vial all the tears from exes
gasping, begging me to stay, from my father
the last words I said to him twisting like a knife,
and from my own crocodile self pity.

I mixed in rich pigments of hazel,
whiskey brown and crushed ice blue
and with a brush of hair gathered up from around my apartment,
cleaned out of the shower and the couch cushions and the pillows on the empty bed
and a handle made of cruel stoic heart-of-oak

I made the perfect reflection of my heart.
It’s a masterpiece.
A fully realized vision.

The dreamer

I was waiting for him outside the theatre,
under the marquee that hadn’t changed in thirty-two years;
I watched him walk home,
his shadow playing boko-maru with my footsteps.

This Falstaff, this Hamlet,
his whole world masks and makeup down to the bare skull,
stopped and stared at the reflection of the moon
in a puddle.

I pitied the man just as
I pitied the ones who went back and sat
in the cave and watched the shadows play on the walls,
the names we had given them as children, forgotten.

Bark your shins and stub your toes and bite your tongue

I hissed at the corner of the coffee table
that had  jumped out at me
from the darkness of my midnight-lit room
and bit my shin.

for the burning moments while the pain ran up my leg
I had a chance to pause and breathe deep
the night-sounds of cicadas
for the furniture in my room to tell me to slow down
and dance awhile

but hatred is a sweeter fruit
sweet as blood from the tip of my tongue
dribbling over my chin as I spit out curses
chewing on seeds like hot coals
damning the darkness as if it had an ear to listen.

Le petite mort

I’ll swallow you whole
I’ll start with your toes
I’ll engulf your heart and you’ll die
“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,”
I’ll whisper, cold lips on cold thighs.

Burnt Buildings

TO MCCLUNG, BURNING
sometimes you feed the flame

I walked through you, once
when you were being erected.
I slid my fingers over the the new
corners, the nooks and crannies,
the walls inside your walls,
all your plumbing exposed.
I watched as they dressed you
and breathed life into dirt.
I remember you before you were tall.

But you were filled with a desire
for the lick of flame, the tongue of fire
pulling up your skirts
you showed everyone your girders

And I’m feeling sick because
I trudged, half-drunk
through knee-deep snow
to see you
and I see you
I see you slumped over in the night
and I see your ribs poking through your back
and I see your brick skin hiked up like a sundress
and a wink in your broken windows
that glitter with a smirk
and a crooked finger

I can’t tell
if it’s your last time
to beckon me in
or because last time was the last time

I was the only one to come inside.

Homecoming

I was breaking into the house i grew up in
and paused for a moment
on the ledge outside the second-story window
where my brother and I snuck out
and smoked weed
and made promised each other we’d never turn out like Dad

I had a fleeting feeling
the empty house would be deserted
that the lights had been dark for years
I indulged myself in a little bit of hope.

I wondered if it would be easier to explain
to the old family where the hell I had been
than to the new one who the hell I was
what the hell I was doing
breaking in
to their home

With Regards to Mr. Tyson

The most astounding fact I ever learned in science class was that hydrogen,

given time, will begin to ask questions like:

Where did I come from?

Where am I going?

What am I doing here?

What's the point of getting out of bed in the morning?

Well my take is that the very first thing that ever happened

was a great big CRASH like the spark of a match

that burned brighter than the hope of two people trying to make a third

louder than every scream or sigh or story or song that you ever heard

and it still burns.

and when that white-hot shaking settled,

cooled like quivering fresh-forged metal,

slowed down and solidified it dressed itself in protons--

protons, like that girl from the first day of science class

who turned around in her seat and asked

"Can I borrow your notes? Did you catch that?"

and me, I'm like an electron, opposite in every way

but doomed to fall around this girl like the moon falls around our world

and all I can manage to stammer out is a pitiful "y-yeah."

but you get a proton and an electron together you make hydrogen,

and with enough hydrogen it'll all fall in on itself

until all that heat and all that pressure make two of them fit together

and FWOOSH the rest follow suit, a wildfire inspiration

in a star, a thermonuclear crucible, an intergalactic philosopher's stone

turning hydrogen into gold-- an alchemist's wet dream!

but it was the astronomer who saw and knew and never told.

Because two hydrogen make helium, then lithium,

beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen--

breathe in oxygen breathe out that same air

that you and I breathe used to be hydrogen just like you and me

and like a pregnant woman that's grown too fat

and can't support the mass of her ravenous babies

a star that's grown too heavy will collapse

and send her enriched guts throughout the cosmos

to make new stars, new planets, new rocks covered in carbon and nitrogen--

water, that's just O and H2, throw in some C and some N and you get a stew

and given time that stew will learn to crawl and walk and breathe

and talk and dream and screw and be just like me and you

so yeah, we're in this universe but it's in us too--

That's why we're here! That's why we exist!

to recognize and experience the brilliance that's within us and around us.

I wasn't lying when I told that girl I saw galaxies spinning in her eyes

and I'm not lying when I say: when you send me flying

off into the void, I won't be going on some lonesome, heroic voyage.

I won't be alone.

I'll be going home.

some haiku.

Old, tired dreams fall

Softly; distant thunder on

Lightning-tattered trees

Cold

frost sets in to my fingers and wrists

stiff fingers fumble with lighter and cigarette

blue climbing up my arm

spreading like frozen gangrene

it gnaws its way down to my bones

sucking out my marrow, poisoning my blood

I feel it worm through my tenderer organs

when it reaches my heart I think I'll die

I came to learn to love the cold,

to fear the hearth being burned there

to hate the heat the murmuring inside

the crackling of a bonfire of hair

Ice on the wind clawing down my throat

harsh as the first few breaths of the drowning

cold air on my cold lungs

going down like cheap whiskey and cheap smokes

Ice in the tumbler, Ice in the whiskey

and drags off a menthol cigarette

I take a few little sips of death

it warms me.

Elegy to the Open Sea

I never used to be so scared

of the open sea. I’ve seen

so many of my Joys disappear

over the horizon to die the slow death

in the fog or dashed against the rocks

like so many whales— shepherds

of those lost, deep places, beached

ragged-beating hearts, bleached

bone-white like secrets burning in the sun.

I’ve spent

so many of my Days in lighthouses

reaching out into the night. dimly groping,

calling them home. waiting.

hoping. watching the horizon,

the endless waves, the sky looming.

from the back porch of the carousel at night during a smoke break

Between the gently murmuring crowd behind me

and the soft, empty October night, stretching

So smooth so deep so dark

and so close it swaddled my eyes

I made those faces that you make

to your reflection, making those nobody's-watching-me

faces, with only that infinite intimate

emptiness for a mirror. Thoughts drift away, smoke

curling from my nose my throat my lips

curling twisting writhing into the hush of coming rain,

Like silent faces, unobserved, into the void.

Oh, My Sarah, How I Love You

Partly inspired by a true story, I am planning on revising this piece for spoken-word competition:

OH MY SARAH, HOW I LOVE YOU,

his last letter read.

scrawled in the dark

“Oh God for one more breath”

dissolving sprawling

deteriorating

a charcoal stub

a sheet of burlap

a mile of earth.

“Oh God for one more breath.”

Somewhere a soldier’s writing home

“There’s nothing I want more than to grow

giant wings and fly to you,

Oh my Sarah, how I love you.”

cold in his bones

blood and shit in the water

in it over the boots

a maggot in his right big toe

prays for the whistling before

the thunder shakes fistfuls of soil

on the half-buried dead men

on the half-dead buried men

they can’t go down any further.

In Pamplona the crowd

in his ears

sunlight, sand

sweat in his eyes

blood in the back of his throat

and the bull, wheeling,

Bellows

Drinks the last dregs of his life

the speed

the strength

the sword.

Nothing.