The spring I was eating dates
and you were skipping class
there was the last solar eclipse of the American empire
and all the young socialites sat on picnic blankets with novelty glasses and hands on each others' asses.
MY POETRY BACK
MY POETRY BACK
The spring I was eating dates
and you were skipping class
there was the last solar eclipse of the American empire
and all the young socialites sat on picnic blankets with novelty glasses and hands on each others' asses.
When my mother goes to heaven
God will tell her she was right about
everything and she will weep as she
is given the title of modern seer,
the only woman gifted the cards
to see the frequencies stretching
between our flesh body souls.
When I go to heaven
God will tell me my mother
was a genius
on par with a long-forgotten
Mesolithic medicine woman
who spoke to constellations
and buried her feet in soft mud
as the sun rose for her
every day,
and I will sob as I am told
the world should have
embraced her in mossy arms
and made itself beautiful
for the epiphany.
Henry’s hair is wildly curly from humidity I can’t feel in the air,
twisting into velvet branches like budding antlers
and his smile is a little crooked and wide as he talks:
So many deer, man, so many fucking deer;
he has been cantering along the footpaths,
racing behind a doe re mi who now sits with her
knees to her chest at the fire, transfixed to the light
like headlights.
The Egyptian god of scratching teething gums
against the smooth bark of a fig tree
is in white on the back of her sweatshirt– chest bare
eyes tired and antlers tangling with the clouds.
The herd eventually leaves the fire, telling ourselves we’re
too clever to be spooked by the sparks
or by our common urge to draw closer
until the only thing reflected in wide dark eyes is flame;
Now we pick along the trails, slender limbs
feeling out pitfalls in the dark and new, still unheeded antlers
snagging on every swooping bough.
The highway breaks our path only once, briefly,
a stretch of asphalt most of us trot across
in silent testament to the concrete forests we’re native to.
I feel myself pause on a white line, watching Henry
half shadowed in the darkness of the other side,
half illuminated:
the streetlight making his eye glow blank white.
I can only barely see the rest through the aspen,
where they stand on idle alert–
all waiting for some car-borne violence
we’ve never seen, which sits only in some gut instinct:
vigilant for the same reason we grow and shed antlers.
And when we’re back in a pickup truck, arms and legs
splayed and blue eyes hooded, we pass a handful
of two-point bucks with antlers soft as teenage peach fuzz.
They pause at the edge of the road and watch us.
We watch back.
Exit OPHELIA 3/23
This piece is written as a missing soliloquy from Hamlet, fitting directly before Ophelia drowns. I always thought it was interesting that Horatio is left with her charge in the last scene she's seen living. Clearly he doesn't fufill his responsibility.
[Exit OPHELIA]
- HORATIO
She ought to be halted where she stands, held firm
by hands which outsize her gentle, delicate ones, hands
which would ensure that no devilish escapes would come to fruition.
It’s seen in her eyes. By the Queen Gertrude, by Lord Hamlet–
by me, anon, for to be the intimate of a dane
is to recognize the darkness of the winters in their eyes,
to see when the soft flesh of gray matter freezes over
and begins to indulge the point of no return. To be the intimate of a dane
is to know your place, your restraints and your refrains.
I know who I am at the side of my Lord Hamlet– shepherd
to the flocks his mind produces, a shepherd which naps idly
alongside them for the most part but which naps with one eye open.
I know not my place alongside this girl, the wolf who cavorts
my herds out of sight. Should sympathy be given– should freedom?
It would be folly to play sheepman with a wolf, lest that wolf be a lamb.
Her feet are so light upon the tile as to leave no trace, and my
snow-trodden soles leave sodden trails beside her.
At one’s most foolish, one imagines that this is a trivial difference.
There is a deep, deep beauty in her: one that Lord Hamlet may delude himself
into seeing as fleeting trickery but which a learned man–
one who does not nap through his lessons on Hellenic tragedies–
knows is far more enduring than his “heart of heart.”
Tis a beauty rooted in deep passion: that which drives to madness.
Tis a beauty rooted in her cumming
demise.
And what is a man to a lord: someone who will quip about the women
I will not look at? There are no women for a dane’s intimate,
which is why she is kept at arm’s length lest he become her intimate
and, by a turn, disallow him the indulgence he disallows me.
At one’s most foolish, one imagines he thinks so much.
The twists and turns of carnal and protosocial affinity haunt this hall
far more than the true ghost within, and Lord Hamlet navigates them
like a bull through a glass forest. When he breaks what he touches,
I can do but finger the bitter shards and watch his lithe back.
At one’s most foolish, one imagines that one may shepherd a woman
back from the brink of the stream, back into her father’s arms,
back from the precipice which one has always eyed her toeing.
Tis folly, deeply, to be envious of the line she walks twix passion and despair
But tis the envy of a lame tiger watching the circus performer.
Oh, the irony to become her keeper, as if she has not been mine
since the moment I shook his hand. I can hold no sway over her.
I know my place at his side, and I know that it cannot be chaining her wrist.
At one’s most foolish, one tries to hold a goose’s feet.
4/24
She does things so 9/11 with
this wide-eyed beautiful
authenticity, with this pre-Recession
sharpness, with fingers bloodless
of Terror walking up my
arm
She’s riot grrl
mass culture. She’s
‘Rebel Girl’ at a jagged-logoed
Hot Topic, like a suburban kid playing
Sleater Kinney on
a guitar lying on
a bed of leaves. She’s
so Y2K missing disco and I feel perpetually watching her twenty years ahead of
google in a
Terms and Conditions
contract long, long ago.
She makes me feel like a bright eyed young academic whose depth perception
If she asked me to dig through the earth I could
do it, right in the green, if
I just remembered to go hand
over hand.
She makes me feel like Reaganomics isn’t in
Merriam & Webster.
I want you like
Ella and Louis.
9/24
Are there to be no more revolutions?
Is my saliva to fall on dry ground
and my hopes to be nothing but an intrusion
in a world already set and sound?
I was born knowing of nothing
and was taught the dignity of flesh:
how it bleeds red under the boot of a king,
how to love the shining thing and dismiss the dreck.
Are there to be no more revolutions?
No flowers to take as my own,
and no cries save the dilutions
of words once seeds to be sown.
I came of age in an aging nation
which has lost sight of its youth.
Adolescent desires and easy sation,
open mouths dripping polyurthane and vermouth.
What is youth without the promise of revolution?
What am I without hammer and stakes?
Saliva falls and destitution,
flowers are cropped as a lawnmower shakes.
7/24
The women emerged to the Circle K gleam,
Their arms were decorated, our teeth were clean.
A closed circult blinked, as monotony smothers,
And her hand ate the lens as she said to the others,
"Look, for a moment: to be unseen."
