Posts Tagged Take Me To The Hospital
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 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
.
Memories That Terrify Beyond Their Aged Powers
A brief instant, coming back
frequently, but not more than a
spark, a tight frame, when I surely killed
my son and a dear friend, one of those
lashes where there is no possibility
of survival barring some god
which flowered sympathy for the
tragic follies of men so deleterious to
themselves as I, and that maroon
truck which should have flown through
unforgiving skies, which would have
fallen so far, it would have bled its
own gallons of life as that same
merciful god, merciful if it had allowed
us to die instantly, would have used
our own gallons of blood for lessons
for people who were meant to be
frightened by the terrific powers of
those named follies, this increasingly
swamped unconsciousness which
seems to alleviate years of agony, of
empty purposelessness, but only
prolongs the blankets of pain,
as the stadium grows larger and
larger, our wiring blurs in tornadic
waves, sounds fuller than a stadium
should allow, having dreamt of the
massiveness of the musicians we
longed to see cranked my drive to
a state beyond intoxication into an
evil blob of emotionally stormy
empty, evil for it was to murder
us but for that sympathetic god,
and when this flash comes back,
I long to know that god for one
moment or more and thank it
for that night,
ask it how it chose
such worthless, mostly
in my case,
candidates for rescue, but the truth
seems to be I’ve been saved
from the nothing of the end
millions of times, despite
thousands of desires for the end
from a defeated spirit, it seems
this impossible prevention of the
end was either done to save only
my son and my friend, or more
frighteningly, done to prove to me
that something loves me despite
my follies, that something needed
to show me my powerless receipt
of a gift too large to imagine.
.
Pissy Refrigerator Truck
Spikes of frozen hopelessness permeated
trotting around empty crosswalks surrounded
wrappers crawling along human legs
loose change not falling
wheelchairs wider than doorways
big men cheer while fixing noise systems
lights, maybe, lights reflecting mean walkers
peaceful phone call undone, lost despairs.
.
Choosing Survival Angles from the Swamp
A favorite artist refreshed my
broken perspective
this morning, leading to a dead sense
of life.
I need shiny
perspective in the frames of a
regular day. Without,
I am a defeated rabbit,
ready to hang
from that sturdy oak tree. (I pause
knowing that all oak trees seem
sturdy, so no need for adjectives, but
sturdy helps me feel more comfortable
about hanging. Successfully.)
But with this fresh view
from my favorite artist, I understand there
must be beauty in all tiny fragments that
speed through foggy crosswinds in the
chaotic frenzy of working
to do things right in every
moment, all moments, and with these
clear views, realization of the sickly,
petty, empty, frightening day strikes me as an
ice pick deep in my skull. Life,
bedazzling in its beauty,
leaves me
on splintered picnic benches,
being stabbed and
shot by the
modernity of gray roadside weeds,
weeds that laugh viciously in cackling
snaps with broken xylophones, splitting
cottonwoods, and through heavy tears
which come from dry horse troughs,
I cannot see anything
but my invisible
contributions to a society
that wants to laugh
with the weeds, see me hang and laugh,
but further,
it is with cowardice that I ask
with all clarity of my empty soul,
I plead
with you to bury me in a brick cell,
turn up the flames, if you will, and feed
me bread, but please don’t laugh
while I die. And medicine might help.
.
