More eloquently (or perhaps slightly less eloquently), it concerns people who have had a variety of reasons to stop by. Some of it's not very nice, but I'm bringing it to the poetry slam tomorrow and we'll see how it does.
***
to the slush pile:
I see you writing to each other,
I see you writing to each other,
all of you,
quoting each other’s writing and modifying it to serve in conversation.
That must feel wonderful: comfortable, lovely, warm, caring/ having someone quote your poetry (or theirs) back to you like that
like you are important enough to understand the hug of a word-bender
Sometimes I join in a little, but you do not know what I mean, because you do not know my writing and it comes much too fluent out of my head, straight and strong and often profuse.
It is something that you would only dare to serve in demitasse cups before 9 AM, or in shot glasses after 9 at night
in a dive bar set in back of the main drag
because it is not very good.
Being a writer yourself, you down it accordingly –
tossing it back politely, nodding in all courtesy –
Then, you rise from the corner booth and leave a small tip on the table – your own words, because it is the right thing to do in a situation like this, and you pull your jacket around your shoulders.
My words will shift in your stomach until you have something better to notice, at which point you will not forget them, but you will not particularly remember them
either
And though I know you love those little shots, you exit the bar silently after only one and do not ask for another.
Down the street, you glance over your shoulder
(I am not staring after you, and I would not have judged)
But in my periphery, you go in the side door of a bar that serves you a familiar glass, with a hug
It is the street of the drunken poets after nine at night. I go to wipe your table, and I find your tip – soon, I will
retreat to the kitchen to think about the glowing windows of the bar that you entered
and read your words over and over until they circle my shoulders, along
with the faraway noise of your other familiarity – I turn your tip over and over
in my head. Around my shoulders
because it is almost like a hug
***
Your shoes don’t belong. Maybe in this classroom, more. They didn’t back there; not at all, and I’m not sure why. Not to describe them, but to describe what they are there for and where they /would/ belong.
Beautiful is the wrong word for feet. So is strong, or demure, or embarrassed or talkative or sexy.
Your feet must not have had any say in that matter, you bringing them in here this morning. They talk about love and slipping into places, going towards and backing away from desire (backing away so as not to turn your back on it).
And in the stuffy pungent classroom the size of a estate closet with carpet that wishes it didn’t exist and walls that aren’t much better? Your shoes? Those?
really
?
they’re falling asleep, not paying attention. There’s nothing here that they are vested in.
perhaps this is why they’re doing better in a colder classroom. There is more room for an echo in here.
the carpet still wants to swallow up your feet,
but it never knows what it wants,
and it won’t. They’re safe to keep moving.
you’re cleared for dismissal.
***
Dear, I am going to collapse this great irony between two hands
and speak something over this ground. This is for Tucson. This is what I am telling you:
you, far from home? Perhaps.
You rolling on forward in the life, in the life. Can I tell you how much you’re loved;
how much purpose you are simply made of.
put your feet forward, one in front of the other; look up and please recognize your surroundings.
I am but a translator here, when I tell you
There are streams even now rising within the desert – an ocean lapping at the loose and thirsty dry tongues of your tennis shoes. The wrenching want within you is the feel of a season changing – it is your heart facedown upon a quaking existence,
the angling of a different light, of an answer to your frustrated roar.
you, seeker?
You have been heard.
He’s pulling despair and crushing it beneath Love.
If I asked you, could you notice the best things about being alive today?
Could you appreciate the heartbreaking beauty of brokenness and desire it be made whole –
a chalk drawing running on the sidewalk,
the pent-up smear that frees its pieces in the rain
because that is where the artist put it with an intention and a dream of impermanence
Your waxen face has bubbled under the intensity of it, and tears sizzle upon ruined cheeks
just a little while longer,
just until a greater thumb smoothes down the shape of your troubled chin.
May I encourage you to remember the love that is pounding on the other side of your brick wall
as persistently as your feet continue.
One in front of the other.
***
to zobella:
How do you do it?
You love your people, and those not your people, and suchlike love you back
simply for knowing you love them, which somehow you’re able to show.
And it’s beautiful, and I’m so jealous –
Of this open love and friendshiplike communication such I think I knew-
once from a very long time ago, But
one can never be sure of such things. You spin in the golden-green
Perhaps olivevocadopaya if I were to copy the patterns, but I won’t:
I don’t know how, dear.
I’ll end up the fat old poet-artist who always wanted to look like you, Because
I will sit in my dankish family-house with my
art photos of my grandchildren and their happiness on the walls
and perhaps I will beget one who enjoys what you have,
which I will invariably vicariously envy
And I will stare down at my lumpy aging body in its sweatclothes in front of the word processor (surrounded by enchanting bookshelves and purchased artwork supplemented by my own old things) and do up my balding gray top in an outdated scrunchie, refusing to be fake and wear a wig
And perhaps in the irony of the moment I will write something
of publically sold perspective-worth.
I’ll look through my old photographs and remember whom it was that I loved, and remember
There were few whom I did not, say and
I will wonder
how you did it.
***
to jen:
scream to the world, “It’s like those days when all you want is to be talked to! But you don’t want to scream it at the world –”
It kills me. Really.
Whatever happened to a connection that wasn’t buttered with public sharing – indecent exposure of ideas? Tug down your skirt, miss incredible Poetica; don’t put yourself out there. Please –
High-speed, full power and
look at it
this-way.
You are standing in the middle of a parking lot, and it’s quite fancily paved
with the new asphalt, the kind that doesn’t make a sound when you drive on it.
Huge parking lot. I’d reference any mall or Marketplace, anything
if you are an ant, stepping soundlessly across three or four 11x17 sheets of black construction paper, you’ll get the picture. Soundless isn’t the point. Now think of every beautiful song you’ve ever heard. Everything you’ve sung ingenious out of the shower, but never written down, that made you cry –
everything from a tiny near-empty bar, wedged between a cultured restaurant and a decades-old theater; words sung-spoken alone, when the man with the well-loved acoustic guitar presses his forehead against the peopleworn wood of the old countertop
Just for a second,
and nobody’s there to see – everything that was knockout-gorgeous and popular, and played for months on the radio after you stumbled across it on an acquaintance’s iPod and called it in to the station, one day – and everything else that’s been sung by the elementary school chorus
and all other things that I have not time to mention.
For each one of those beautiful pieces, there is a lightpost out in this parking lot
or a streetlight out along its bordering road, and to each of these posts is affixed an all-weather outdoor speaker.
You can see it coming, can’t you.
wait! … I’ll
tell you what happens in the end.
You know what I’m about to say. Each of these speakers is playing one of these different pieces
broadcasting the kind of beauty that’s only to a point when it hasn’t been written down from the shower, or caught on the security camera in the tiny empty bar
(It is irony that you are reading this. That you can hear this speaking.)
No deeper ambience in the parking lot is achieved – everything blasting would only be worthwhile in an artistic sense. But what kind of popular cry is that? The singular and wonderful parts of each piece that had been beautiful would be destroyed, as you walk through this parking lot with the soundless asphalt.
All of them going on at once together.
It would be performance art, that cry of desperation rising from that parking lot in your experienced cacophony of overindulged divergence, of sharing with ears already assaulted, and hearts already satiated with things seeming to care for no return. Perhaps
beyond the point of no return? Perhaps.
No acknowledgement, but if you were one of the heartbreakers coming through the rough little speakers, you’d feel lost and cancelled-out in the dissonance patterns, so-to-speak. And if you were the poor soul unlucky enough to be the one wandering through the parking lot, you too would feel lost. You’d collapse, and your knees silently bloody
would weep bright colors for your recognized fate
to notice all these – or, depending on who you are
weep bright red. Upon those black sharp bits melting under the sun for being unrecognized, as it were. Here’s how you notice it, in the end: you are there on the ground
your heart against the pavement, for all these threads of spiderwebbed reason
And the paint in the lot, marking out the lanes and crosswalks, is a ketchup-and-mustard orange/yellow. Probably I should have mentioned that before. But anyway you are there for many years melting soundlessly down, until at sunset one day you look up. And the paint has faded to a singular pale circus-peanut yellow/orange and the sky over the western horizon is clear, save for the brownish dark mountains poking up, like your knees had dried so long ago
And what happens in the end – you see that the sky in the cooling sunset
fast-washing-out
is the same color as the faded paint in your parking lot
With the music still playing (or what used to be music)
you keep these facts to yourself.
Stiffly you rise to a standing position, stiffly because you have been kneeling for so very long
and one by one, each speaker falls to the soundless asphalt and breaks
until the one above your head is left playing. This song you have just finished.
***
to pris:
polkadot music bounce strum-strum spotfall here on the gymnasium floor of the attic.
guitar-wishes and rhythm pounding, knocking gently on your clavicle and
caressing the sunburned right shoulder under double-dip green blue lavender gray tie-dye of this adrenalined and dried-out, breathed here on the morning and
all the way through to the night jabber-whack walk on and forward and into your clothing because of the two bright red crescent moons atop your breasts, one for each,
walk and glorify the chalky alkaline earth and its SOIL
to speak of the things that live and do not live here yet but have reserved their places …! things
like words, there, then, now;
these boots are everything-boots; making that
pssh sound as you step on the sharp rocks that offer up to you the most of their balance.
***
to mina b.:
You still fake your fire-hair and remind me of toothpicks, but I am nobody to judge. You’re in your own on these days, an arm here / lips there
And now, always like miniblinds stretched in an ikean shadow, you do not hide, do not cower.
Thrown over property and a self-named claimant for love, you would stand (or four of you would stand) each to a corner of all the time that belongs to you
Maybe proud, one to a pylon, and maybe in a study of shoes yours would be most at home in a cloud of sun-flashing straw, Golden and
you will keep chickens one day, with a hug for the speckled ones
Your fingers are perhaps among the best at knitting tossed hours, each passing minute a thread that catches on the armature of the wings you hope to decoupage in time.
Maybe they will take you somewhere.
sometimes driving by I catch you stepping towards home, wandering out of the way just a little
to catch the minutes you see drifting by in the exhaust from the sunset.
your chin doesn’t let the days go by unappreciated.
I hope you are proud of that.
***
to isabelle:
So we can all be broken. The good of this is that it breaks us.
This and everything else that does.
Many spools of colored thread hang tied from melting twigs, a drawing of a lipstick tree
each one comes forth with its fifty meters of lines
its forgetfulness, its concession to the un-ideal
the fact that a mouse took one into the caverns the other day, and hasn’t returned yet
Says that’s some real good pathfinding that thread’s got going on there. Real good.
Oh, that’s rich,
returns another fact from its weatherbeaten beach chair sitting on the other side of the tree.
A circle of facts surrounding the defenseless red lines, the color exactly a Rich Garnet,
and a faceless fact laughs from a three-legged stool. The fact of a bad pun is a cowering small thing at the feet of the stool, but it too hangs its panting mouth adjusted in a ridicule, mocking the tree of thread. Coats and Clark are in their graves, wringing their hands. /Your garments are sturdy! How do you think they got that way; joining seams with tacky glue?/
The facts form a solar dome, because what could be more fitting?
Dior’s sophisticated shade and the artist’s careful dark contours bleed over these even strands of too-useful cotton. Made to be functional, not to be hung upon some smear of a city girl’s wild apartment imagination.
She left the sketchbook open on her floor that day the climate control broke -
She tucked the shiny makeup tube into her clutch
- She forgot about the threads, all of them.
And they were up there for hours, until the last cosmetic grease finally liquefied and then
the fibers began to dissipate:
hopes and dreams? Wishes, for certain, escaping from the open page
in more a manner of incense than anything else. Like smoke through water, like dye held in creased palms, these spools turned back to dust in silence
albeit not without leaving a beautiful smoky red stain on the rented carpet
They had hung upon the sketch of a tree, but for too long
and an explosion shook the one window of the studio bedroom. Later, the channel nineteen news crew would report on the strange masses of colored thread that draped trees, telephone lines, traffic signals, and lawns; later, the girl would pay to replace the landlord’s flooring; but also later, she would cut out the stained portion of that was to be replaced,
and she’d keep it, accompanying a story
because only the girl knew about the circle of facts that had driven the sketch to its desperation
and even she could only guess that the folding chairs she’d penned
the three-legged stool, that beach chair she’d first seen bearing the heft of a speedo-clad old man
must have held their ideological counterparts in facts: the ambiguous sharp corners that we bump up against in the middle of the night and cut our foreheads on,
never knowing their names (the floor is always clear and easily navigable in the morning)
but at the latest hour when we cannot move for fear of bumping another point
when the darkness is thicker than road tar and we lack so much as Ariadne’s labyrinthine guide: the thread, of course –
she fancied her lines had simply grown tired of being less than what they were, and facing such commonly cruel derision of the science for it, and a look out upon the decorated street confirmed that suspicion.
***
to divya:
Silk splash, spheres set and shift sash-pull spun wonder through your fingers in the light
and you kiss it, dripping from your lips clarity in nature,
dusky rose pink contrast steady under the clouds
chill air to make you feel this way, this way alive
Sung out bellowing in streams cannot stand withholding but know, know this, know Love
grey-blue-grey-blue-green-blue-grey can’t make up its mind, mist stealing into the beauty to
concredibly infuse
Bright eyes, glow dark – watch the city colors in off the hill
blowing out over the plains, flat and speedy orchestral as the reflections race through your ears,
your eyes, your mouth in its proclamation
Heartbeat, pounding feet, never going to be able to sleep
until you realize, “this is I”
until you stand/ here you are.
***
to allegra:
Was that a dark-green velvet ribbon in your hair that one day, when Nick broke his board? You must know how time keeps rolling forward; knocking persistently upon these thin pasteboard walls, steadily;
our days have the lifespan of mayflies; one after the other,
mouths full of air. The hours are short.
Have you been here longer than you have been anywhere else?
out of curiosity.
The rest will come later, simply because I do not quite know how to put it right now.
You’re growing older. (a small boy on the edge of a crowd, pointing a finger at familiar faces. He’s only stating childish fact. Obvious fact indeed, but no less is the significance of his words
because of that.) You and all of you, your class? yeah. But I have other words for others.
You, older,
have tied a green velvet ribbon in your straight light hair. It is still serious; you, still much reserved. Red.
patent-leather Doc Martens, is something that I will remember about you.
***
to lauren sleator:
You are simply less moderated.
You like to show. You like the attention.
Don’t goggle like you don’t know what I mean.
As much as I regret it sometimes, as much as I love it sometimes,
I am not unlike you.
I open my mouth and give myself away,
you enjoy the quizzical looks; you
like to know how your mind works differently. I cringe under the eyes of the class.
Why do I cringe, here?
Few other places shut me up in this manner.
I do not want to look like you.
So, here,
My writing is bare.
Undressed,
Inelegant.
Paper cards with words on them
and we dine on these cards, and comment how very delicious
Remarkable indeed;
You are an excellent cook.
and I have dined upon my foot.
***
to james kittredge and anna fulford:
Words now, when I have the time and presence. Numbers later, when the ideas have melted in the drowning buzz of family overtones and disappeared. You know.
It’s cold in this corner of the English room; maybe it just seems like that because I had been sitting under the heater-vent before I moved to be able to sit on this desk with my back up against the wall. It’s cozy, though, with the electric lights and the almost-damp-almost-dry blue corduroy around me. Remembering the janitorial piece … sorry it was stolen. It’d be interesting to read nowadays.
Rained through lunch, today. That living-here feeling when the relatives wonder why on earth you’d be bounding through the raindrops; your cold feet after your tennis shoes are soaked and the cars have splashed you up and down. It’s all right; you can sigh, relax, and nestle back up against the wall in your complacently navy while breathing in the ideas. Sounds odd, but that’s why the writing center is friendly. Rarely does one end up exhaling cyanide, should you catch the reference. Philosophy is welcome in this room for the next fifteen minutes.
Sparkled is not the right word, but – take the action of sparkled and the connotations of soaking, emulsified not artificially in “droplet” … lunch, today. Splashed, maybe, without the wetness of the picture? Maybe someday I’ll come back to this brain-dumping zone and see if there’s anything to be found from picking through the surprisingly well-preserved artifacts. Picture the stands of furniture-woods along the Oregon Trail, and you’ll know what I mean.
The options are discouraging, but the fact of the matter is even worse. I am the frustrating fact of the matter, in its particular self-disgust and repulsive egocentricity. The room is quiet but for the light tapping of my keys. Tap all you’d like, my dear; your belly sticks out in those comfortable pants, and the lock’s jammed as yet – Dancing will never be your career, you’ll rearrange the tangrams until the picture’s grown fuzzy and almost-forgotten. Not like mold. Like leaving off your glasses in a futile attempt to see the world the way you were meant to see it, and realizing in disappointment that those lines you had used to draw for distant faces? Those details you suggested to yourself? Your glasses had shown you that they actually existed, and were not merely products of your childish imagination. So you remove the glasses and begin to fill in the blank spaces, until you remember that the space has already been filled in and you are the one who cannot see it.
It’s odd, you think awhile later, how your own lines managed to trace roughly (with few deviations) the lines that were actually there. The fact is odd, that is – but wait, Darling; you’re the fact. Hunched over your keyboard in the comfortable corner as your damp feet freeze slowly to the desk and your fingers grow cobwebby and lose their ability to speak … the voice of my mind is hoarse. There are so many things left to allude to, yet so little to veritably speak.
Lighten up, you tell yourself.
It’s time to go.
***
poo.
ReplyDeletebut this is great.
I soooo want to be there now! "Classical Singer" should reschedule.
ReplyDelete