Archive for category Poems
Today’s Wilted Spirit
The door, not heavy, but my arm
won’t open it against the moderate
closure spring, and desire strikes -
Suck me down 17 stories, through
the blue cements of underground
garage, through the wet clay until
I turn into chaotic French Onion
Soup and resigned to be beaten
by the thousands of personality
punches, ready to bend and flow
with all of the slice dragons who
think they are human. I look at
our entrapments of tired journeys,
and I hope they don’t dump me as
my age shows, dump me into empty
gutters where it’s only suitable to
drink and to die miserably in the
clay with the furry bunny souls.
.
Oh, You Needy Spiritual Vacuum, You
Brahms brings out the writer in me
as I sit here asking why there is nothing
as beautiful as this guy’s meaty work (well,
this is untrue because there is nothing
more beautiful than whatever of my hundreds
of favorites currently fires the electrons
of the MP3 player at the moment), asking why
I have no words for the spiritual beauty I seek
and touch for mere glancing moments, asking why
I have no clues about how to
write poetry, except that I know you should never
write about writing poetry, so I droop,
conducting the air, asking god
to take me out, to take me
away to where my existence is only
Brahms, Mozart, Ligeti,
Bach, Shostakovich,
(well, there are surely a few others, maybe even
David Foster Wallace or Anne Sexton
or Hemingway!),
and these round, jolly dudes give me pipes
filled with funny tobacco and endless Costco
cake (just the blue icing), visions interrupted
by internal, screaming pleas, “God, please,
take me out,” but the compressed, dilapidated,
empty, vicious, pressed, caked wood yawns
at my spooky stupid whims and tells me to get back
to work on the meaningless numbers that I push
around, with only Brahms saving me from a
hanging from a light pole that has spooky
intimations of a cross and is warmly welcoming.
.
The Reason I Blame the Vodka
In the gruff days before she killed herself,
I told myself she was the preacher’s problem
because that’s what he did; he comforted
the distraught souls, cushioned the despair.
He had all day for visiting, while I worked
all day, while I frittered with numbers for
meager paychecks, to pay the bills and buy
my vodka, so it was his deal, his bag of guilt.
But I kept thinking of it, kept thinking that I
expected too much of the preacher, a man we claim
to be a man of God, for if a man of God couldn’t
save her, how could I, the orphaned infidel?
Yes, but I replayed the days before, all of those
days in my cubicle thinking of when my vodka
would comfort me first, then thinking maybe,
perhaps, if I spent time with her, it would help,
but the vodka never gave me time.
.
Little Girl Terrorist
I saw this little girl
terrorist, bowling, quite
unsuccessfully. The Secret
Police (Hey, NSA) were hang-
ing from ceiling tiles, arms
stretching down like
confetti, but they never
could stop the balls, and
the girl howled in vicious
laughter at a couple toppling
pins for each one she hit was
another city, and this is why
the number of pins was not
part of the battle for her.
One here or there, “I don’t
need no strikes,” she
screamed hoarsely.
The Unshakable Infantile Spirit, Part II
So many say they can write, and here I add pink flurries
to the leaning stack, as gargoyles snort snot and
hang from my eyebrows laughing at my twisted,
sick, inadequate brain, and the excuses grab
my knee caps, rip them out, and the man on the corner
snickers. I don’t say I can bake. Why am I compelled
to write? I spy on the snake that guts, rather swallows whole,
all the other writers, and he and I drink grape juice at all the futility,
and the man on the corner hands me Pessoa, tells me
to read this, this that will tell me why I can’t
write, but the ants keep crawling up my
ass, while the gargoyles jump in the man’s pipe, burning
up into little leaves that blow up toward dirty clouds, and I keep
trying like a little baby with nothing to say worth anything.
.
The Unshakable Infantile Spirit, Part I
I’m a baby, and I work hard
to cover tiny me under thick skin.
I wonder if being a baby is a bad
thing, thinking of my most
compassionate self coming
from baby me, but
I cry, and many people don’t like
people who are so maladjusted.
When I’m working the hardest to
cover, I don’t notice, but sometimes,
when my shell is naturally suiting itself
to me, I look at others and I think
I see that they have baby moments,
and those splitting quick images
make me feel less inadequate, less
alone, but I measure my inside
sensitivities against their outside
shells, knowing better, but I see
they don’t need shells like I do.
At some point, babies decide
that they want to be loved by
everybody, and if one comes
along, not loving, babies like I
feel intense pain, perhaps not
understanding the finicky qualities
of mature humans. I am like
hungry babies about some things;
I want what I want right now, but
I am a big baby, and I don’t want
much, if anything. I always want to
sleep like a baby, but for me,
instead of fueling cell growth, it
helps me relieve the pain of sadness,
and when I don’t get enough sleep,
my emotions are terrible like a baby’s,
my feelings are like tiny slivers of glass
being smothered by sharp rocks,
so I do my best to get sleep, but the
adults don’t like this for they think
I am a lazy asshole. When I became
old enough, I started enjoying alcohol
because the alcohol smothered baby
me, and I built my booze shell that made
me funny and entertaining and fooled
me into feeling a central purpose, fooled
me into a sense of meaning, and alcohol
smashed my persistent depression.
I’m a lucky baby because alcohol
decided to become my enemy, made me
hate the world so severely, and inspired
me to quit drinking with many people
who helped me avoid the deepening
path to miserable death I was on, so
I sit here wishing I could tell you how
embarrassing this is, tell you how
my spirit is so frail, so undeveloped, so
you can see how terrible I feel, but I tell you
because afterward, I can let loose, and cry
and cry and cry until you send me away.
.
Plummeting with Today’s Coffee Chore
I was scolded because I didn’t
make the coffee
properly. The electricity
from the grass burned
my feet even as I sat
inside, looking through
protective covers
of glass. The thunder
in the distance made the grass
frazzle, and I
longed for that statuesque, red brick
home where I could paint, slathering
canvas with burning
yellow and brandishing
black to draw stick
men with circle heads, men
far more successful
than I. “You
wait for the water
to be scalding, and then you
soak your pot before
you brew your coffee.”
The thunder allows
me to surrender,
to quit fighting
everything, and the darkness,
the weight
of the drops pounds
me into safety, allows me to
retreat into tiny rooms
with those red brick
walls and steel bars and aluminum
utensils so that I can live
out my
days,
protected in the shattered violence
of complete retreat, but my
throat tightens because
it’s not
true and I struggle and I
hate this moment, just this one.
.
The Persistence of the Sharp Freezes
The freezes visit too often
on some of the days,
longing for round and deep sewers,
forehead is warn from friction of hands,
mostly the left hand, working to wear holes,
to make openings for the tense, frightened
animals, for their escapes, for relief,
for return to the emptiness that is more
dull aching, more like the squeezing
of an adult’s hand on a child’s tiny arm,
which is far superior in the frozen mind
than all of the stabbing of ice picks
on all of those small, squeaky animals
scurrying about like lost rats in daylight.
My mind feels like that baby’s arm,
and I wonder if it is you, though I know
better, but I wonder if it is you, that fierce
beast behind all of the ice picks, and if
it is, why can’t I block them with my
sullen, stiff, messy face made of all
the tiny frayed, burned, torn wires.
.
Lunch in Empty Park
While the wind emptied my spirit
in the soulless park, while
many vacant, metal picnic
tables laughed at my loneliness,
tortured my Ill-founded sense
of being, while people, all dressed
in black, walked around the park
edges as if in Olympic parades,
I brushed my sandwich against
the rusty metal of my picnic
table, took a bite from that
edge of the sandwich, not
purposefully, and waited
to die without struggle.
Rolling, Meaningless Willpowers
choosing where my mind aims
losing light
“Too fucked up to care anymore.”
finding tedium of scales
coming back to art
speaking death but unification
being told I’m worthless and buried
in sleep
knowing instead, I’m diseased
Broken
Shattered
Irreparable
maybe wishing
Not asleep
coming back to music
why don’t you choose happy music
why not music that pampers
my soul has too many bandages
looking inward builds more disease
but outward tinkles with no substance
choosing targets
obligated to fabricate smiles
fake they all are
False
why do we forgive the pretensions
we drive through repetitive forests
powerful boats full of empty bowls
antiques stained with dried oatmeal
chips of personality
Torn
by two poles
life having constructed the magnificent gift
perpetual pain is unendurable when awake
my mind lies to me
I can’t force it to wipe away
all of the evil
all of the dirty germs
.
