Posts Tagged Fear
Dragging Along Before Lunch
I know about rounding up
courage; not bragging, but
I stick sharp fingers in plaster of
dissonant accidents, disliked
by all who know. I search for
purposeful dissonance, stomp
feet in defiance, move my head,
make my eyes wide and terrified,
petrified to be moving still, wanting
not to survive, screaming, WHAT
IS WRONG WITH ME? Knowing
chance is all gone, shaking my
head at the madness, my own with
all the others, as my hands freeze
in the plaster, choking life out of
me, not fast enough; oh, why
do I live to tell you this shit?.
Who Left Me Dead Alive?
If the music gets loud enough, I feel
the escape of despair, and I scream
with dizziness, though I never say it
as well as the musicians, and I’m left
wondering why I’m pale and so muted.
Freedom, let’s catch the bus as it leaves
the station, jumping up and down on the tin
roof, grabbing the crumbling cement,
passing under structures meant to bury
us, swallow us, throw us away.
Superman and I rage against the wind
as we jump from rooftop to polluted roof-
top, scrambling to locate our missing
hearts, rumbling through city forests,
making pancakes out of cement trucks.
Screaming in my twisting intestines,
coughing, blowing out clogs, who is it
who shut me out from my art, who has
splayed me, sucked out my screams,
removed my hums, left me breathing?
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In Case You Didn’t Know
A day late, and always short on dollars, here’s my shot at PAD 11, a challenge to write a poem involving the phrase “In case…”
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In Case You Didn’t Know
The lady in front of you, crawling,
intensely tight, lacking a gas pedal
is not attempting to make you late
for work. She had eye surgery two
weeks ago, and not one of her four
children was willing to take her
to the doctor today, that the boy
presently trudging across the bridge,
looking up as if looking for a space-
ship is not contemplating suicide
by jumping off the bridge as you have
concluded, mostly because you
have never seen someone walk
across that bridge and he does look
spaced and gone from this world,
that when you are thinking you
are a failure, you might be wrong,
that when you also feel gone from
this world, you are here, and some
slice of fucking goodness makes
you persist in this increasingly
futile activity, that sometimes, no
matter how hateful some may seem,
sometimes, some people like you,
that they are battling demons and
they grip tightly to prevent you from
seeing this in them, but you don’t
talk and no one talks to you,
so in case you didn’t know, you are
not alone, but life is the loneliest
plot created by those before us.
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Me and the Woolly Black Bear
Today’s PAD prompt, in honor of two for Tuesday, was to write a poem about the hunter or the hunted or both.
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Me and the Woolly Black Bear
He is my rear shadow, the woolly
black bear. He doesn’t have
a name, and shadow because he
spends his time coming
after me, always getting close,
but not killing me. A few times
were close. I almost surrendered.
He’d love to eat me. He wouldn’t wait
to cook me. He’s fierce, and the winds
from his claws cause my hair
to fly like when I’m on a motorcycle
without a helmet, and a helmet
would be good when he’s
after me. I know it’s his nature,
but his battering and clawing
create tremendous distress. We
treat it with medicine, but my prayers
go unanswered, for I wish
the medicine would kill the woolly
black bear. I see a kind
lady, a doctor who specializes
in people who are traumatized
by these black bears,
and when I am with her, I
become the hunter, and
very rarely, I imagine I have
killed my tormenter, but it’s
never true, he’s never dead,
so I’ve learned not to celebrate
when it seems he’s dead because
his absences are far too short. I
am hunted, but I try to use
my injuries to help
others and sometimes, I forget
about my woolly black bear. Though
I know better, during these times,
for short spats of time, I celebrate
his absence and love the world.
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Lessons on Madness and Flow
Lessons on Madness and Flow
Rolling back, go gentle,
pray with the blackbirds
as they scatter to the soft
trees, trees bending graciously
with bright air, and remember
the leaves are moving for you,
so move with them and when
particles of evil come after you
fast and hard, duck down on a
slight bend and feel the energy
as yours, and if someone greets
you, smile at the beauty of being
there and remember those knives
from people who don’t know you
are false, and dig with integrity
to live as you wish, and this I tell
myself, each day, trying to be
the man I want to be someday.
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Marked Measures of Death’s March
The Poem a Day challenge today was to write a piece about the word “post.”
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Marked Measures of Death’s March
Walking what I remember to be
desert roads, cloudy but paved,
layers of dust bracketing charcoal,
and as a child, remembering ranch
fences, posts at regular intervals,
counting time and space in a day
broken by too many micro moments
of doubt. The posts work, providing
false assurance, brokering chunks
of lanky steps, and I’m done, remembering
now, an emptiness, ripping pains, merely
a prologue to destitute soaking old, blue
nerves on this miserable leather couch.
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Lightly, Not Trespassing
This is my late submission for PAD Day 3. My dog ate the first one and that is why this is so late. The prompt for this day was to write a poem on something tentative.
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Lightly, Not Trespassing
Her ego, too large, but perhaps not,
might it be a sensitive soul,
needing defense, causing compassion,
and I’ve fallen in, or have I?
She talks of her fans. They love
her, cause her to be reticent in shar-
ing, about how close they get to her,
and I want to be one, a fan, close to her.
More of her takes me into deep, warm
areas, and I must hold back, not tell
her any truth about my desires, so I
watch her, shiver, downed by longing.
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Revolutions – This Isn’t a Poem, but I Don’t Write Fucking Essays
Posted by Carl in Essays, Finding Purpose, Poems on March 18, 2013
Here today, things started to change dramatically.
Do you know, when I just said that, I knew it was false,
but it’s hope, so fuck ‘em. So for a few minutes, I thought,
I might be a writer. To me, that meant I might be a decent
human being. I have this blind sense that humans need to
have a central purpose, a reason for going on despite all
the facts that seem to recommend action to the contrary, but
it is blind because I don’t know other humans well enough
to know that they need a purpose. In fact, often, I wonder
how these integrated, bloated masses of people get along
without purpose because they simply trudge through, yes,
contented, but vacuous, contented with eating three meals,
with chips and snacks and pops, and weekend trips to the
lake ( THE fucking lake), and working on these schedules
that are preposterous, barely having time to hug the dog,
rarely awaking without an alarm designed to send humans
into blind destitute, where they don’t know how empty all of the
facades are, and I sit here, wanting to spit on my new pants,
wanting to throw the cafeteria tray across the room, blowing
out the perfectly-clean window which teases me with a Zen
garden that is never used for true purpose, not for lack of need,
but because the minds are entrapped in this buzzing hum
of doing what responsible adults and other gurus have told us
we are meant to do, despite our god-given sense that we waste
this gift of life every day, each day with these millions of
moments that spin down clockwise through snake-cleaned
drains made of the detritus of all of the gold we mined in the
good days when living in a tent and eating smoked rabbit
was a good thing. Here I am praying for a revolution that will
turn me into a writer and allow me to live out my days,
comfortable in some sense of purpose, praying that there
are people who might read and might be changed in the
slightest, because if I can touch a few people with writing and
eat a bit of rabbit, what would be wrong with me, but I’m scared
in the end, remembering those nightmares of walking out of
my tent and hanging myself with heavy rope on the sturdy,
horizontal limb of the old oak tree, ending what seems to be a
useless quest, a useless longing to rid myself of this vast,
empty purposelessness. And here I am wondering what kind
of stupid fuck would write about writing, and I stop. I’m due
back in my cubicle.
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Brahms, Revisited without Tears for Today
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Brahms, Revisited without Tears for Today
Brahms has the twitchy fuse,
lighting me in acidic
flames and the arguments inherited
from old elephants, between piano and orchestra,
are trudging – me, I verses the world,
and I’m losing
but I’m pounding the keyboard
until I get a break, a breath, a sigh,
and I show this grace
that is un-Brahms
but is
Brahms at his greatest,
and when the horns arrive
in red army coats, you know
victory is grasped with dirty,
dry, crisp finger nails, but it
never happens, never consummates.
I am finished, a heaping
pile of slippery dung
when Brahms is done.
And as a practicing drunk, the tears
would wilt tarnished cheeks and create heat
emanating around thorny eye sockets,
but these days are desert dry, pain layered
and hidden and only Brahms, only the
master knows, knows the truth, and now,
at least I rest, I stop, I pray, lost.
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p.s. – Embedded below is the referenced piece, performed by my favorite conductor and one of my favorite pianists. The exposition of the first movement lasts 3:45, so patience is needed in waiting for the arguments between piano and orchestra. The climax/recapitulation of the first movement at about 13:20 is one of the most intense sections of music I know along with the ending of the first movement. It is immense music. The third movement is a kick ass jam if you make it that far…
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The Carved Carcasses of Cranial Cacophony
Sitting, uncomfortably warm, clammy, I plotted
drawing a picture with words but all that I could do
was come up with a title. I love the title, but now
I couldn’t possibly tell you what it is that I feel
as I have fallen into this crevice of my spirit, a jagged
pair of cliffs pinning me to my feverish desires, showing
me fields of acres of perfectly windswept snow with
three little blades of Kansas grassy stuff protruding
to warn me away, to ask me to take the dullest carving
knife and start splitting out all of those parts of my
defective brain, hoping to pinch off bits of the ravaged
spirit, pulling from the sinewy brain mush stuff that
tears like fat on prime rib. Some animal from
another corner of the barren field yells to tell me
that if I sever my brain, I will lose my life, but I yell
back, “but I will feel much better.”
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