July 17, 2009

control

frenetic
  fingers,
knots of nerves,
some   inner
 neural intersection
where the    streetlights
flash and   flicker
and the electric  cars
quietly   collide.
you touch me   and
   i flinch, an electricity
in your hands
arrhythmic,   circuits
of fingers.  water,
  lips, wired all wrong.
this failing apparatus  of
 muscle and sinew
gone awry,   hands,
 foreign hands,
recalcitrant   hands,
fingers shaking,
arms shaking,
   a tic, a tic,
a twitch in my neck.
your lips pull away, eyes open,
          steady hands hold my face
it's just me.

  these hands, my hands
not my hands,
 i can't keep them still.
tremors from somewhere   dark,
reverberating   with a tension
   that nibbles at the  cords
 in the walls,     feckless
fingers, futile   feeling
         it's not you.

nervous tic
tic tic   in the neck,  a twitch,
 hands counting down.
the accumulated detritus
of nerve against   bone,
sizzling,     snapping.

my hands,
how long until these are
not my hands?

tic tic
  tic.

July 12, 2009

Dusk, On A Porch In West Virginia

The day had been picking up steam
and setting it on the crooked shelf
of sky
as gently sliding clouds.
Now, at light's end,
the moon has nestled itself
in the small
of the mountaintop's back.
Mist rises from the trees
and it is clear that both mountains
are sighing, forest-blanketed
lover lying
next to lover.

Inside the house,
the sound of women talking,
laughing, their voices too thick with twang
to escape through the screen of the door.
The chains of the porch swing
creak with each forward
backward, forward
backward push.
A rusted tractor with flat
tires sits in the field
across from the house
and tall weeds thread themselves
through its cracked innards.
They bow and bend slightly.

Far away,
something is breaking.

The dogs run up and down the holler
in the last moments of twilight,
tails at nervous attention.
They trot back to the porch
after realizing they've been barking
at their own voices
as they bound back
down the valley walls.

 

July 5, 2009

independence day

explosions
in the night sky,
followed by a thud
that shakes the ground,
hammers in your chest.
think about your last kiss.

husks
of brown smoke
slide into the black background
illuminated by the
green, yellow, red,
violet and blue of the latest
screaming, spiraling, crackling
chemical reaction
to dance across your eyes.

a finale,
an assault of sound,
sight and smell
from above. then,
no more light.
just the knowledge of that
terrible smoke, vaguely visible,
tentacles of dirt
slowly twisting into a cloud.
people around you
sigh
in lawn chairs,
on blankets.

suddenly,
in your memory,
all the bright colors
become indistinguishable,
all the excitement you'd bottled
rocketing up, up, up
like a roman candle,

hiss bang and gone.

 

July 2, 2009

Salinger & The New Age Dipsomaniacs

Diary: Any body that reads this without permission
will drop dead in 24 hours
or get sick.


She had tied Polaroids of herself
to a mobile hanging from the ceiling.
Funny girl. Blurry clouds! He doesn't
care if it thunders every night because
not everybody's made out of iron.
He looks at her fingers.
She's been biting around the nails
since she was a kid.
They're bloody, their tips misshapen,
but strong. They are a damaged part of her,
a painter. He looks around the room at everything
they've created, hanging from the walls, not
a carpenter in sight. Cleverness! His wooden leg.
From one limping artist to another,
be courteous and kind. He kisses
the broken skin on each finger.

A genuine war is needed,
to fight, to stitch a real conflict into the plot.
Enemies! He's been long-impaled on
bayonets of memory, soldiers
coming up and over the trench walls with
faces he has tried to forget.

Soupy Peggy and her love
of how the boy stood at the chalkboard.
Surrounded by her paints and oils,
he still is not really using his own poetry
for the occasion. She straddled him on the couch,
pulled at his hair as they kissed. He's shaking.
He refuses to write under the pressure
of dead-weight beauty, The Brain,
The Brain, pounding on the window of a
restaurant on a dark street. Running from one
and into another. He had things
on his mind, needed pruning shears
to remove them.

Drinking, sober, drinking.
I'll come over Christmas Eve. I'll trim the tree for ya.
Plead with steel blue eyes, say nothing.

Without his glasses,
he couldn't see what was coming. She's seen quite
a few bananafish in her day. He is not well-
versed. That terrible fever, it's nearly all poetry. Do you know
what that means? Poor Uncle Wiggily,
she said over and over again.

A worn paperback copy of Franny & Zooey sat in two
pieces on her coffee table. He tried to put it back together,
but the pages were old and bent, the spine dissolved.

Later, as he lay on the pillow,
inches from her face, he wanted that suave serum,
the one mixed from William Powell’s
old cigarette case and Fred Astaire’s
old top hat. Something that would allow him
to capture the high, rosy cheekbones,
the large eyes that, upon seeing him,
bent small lips into a smile
before heavy eyelids slowly slid shut,
her nose touching his.
He heard about a ski resort that had opened
on her shoulder. With the slightest of hesitations,
his index and middle fingers
were the first on the slopes,
a touch and yet
not a touch.
Slalom between small hairs,
then a slow lift back to the summit.

I don’t really have a good reason for taking myself out of the third person,
but let's assume I wrote some of this and borrowed the rest for my own
selfish purposes. The next bits are sadder, I think.

He had been repeating a girl's name ceaselessly
under his breath for so long
that it echoed closely behind every heartbeat,
swam through his veins, and
when she was gone, his blood thinned,
slowed. To restore the proper
heart-cadence, he had to find another name.
Frightful, new medicine.
Either the Pilgrim has been repeating the wrong
name or his God does
not exist.

She can't spit, she can't even sit still,
her fingers entangled with his, a threnody
of laced, white skin. Empty ritual,
a hollow chamber he tried to fill
with music or rainwater. He knows
something is wrong, but does not
know where.

This play, if she asked,
Nicht fertig
yet.

When he got home he wasn't sure who he missed more,
her or
her.
He was supposed to leave something beautiful
after he got off the page and everything,
but it only came out as something stolen, Ray Ford,
ending on something about how he felt around her, ending how
he wanted it to begin:

Not a wasteland, but a great inverted forest
with all the foliage underground.