outside in gambols

Here lies a confessional piece. I wrote it last year sometime to commemorate an epoch of literal powerlessness in my life. Before I wrote this poem (as indicated in the first two lines) I had written very little in the way of direct acknowledgment of my on again off again struggle with incapacitation. Since I wrote this poem, I have written more freely (at times more pathetically--allowing myself the occasional wail of self-pity) of my tenebrous condition.

Because such poems are practically and rightfully poor stuff for at-large publication, my little blog here makes for a decent outlet.

The Playground

I have not said enough of the bed

Or the five weeks I spent there

Daily funneling through the slender

Middle of an hourglass

until the end when all of me

Had settled in the bottom.

Five weeks and I’ve only a few lines

To show for it. The comforter—ha!—

Was red, faded from use and ultraviolet

Rays. Windows are crap for stopping

Light and no great conquerors

Of playground sounds either.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

The great triumph of some days—

Crawling to the bathroom; the white

Flag of most days—pissing in a bottle.

Family bought CDs of jokes, L’Amour,

Music interposed on lapping waves.

For calmness. For calmness slows

Funneling grit. That was the theory.

At last, I lost my mind. Five weeks

Finding shapes in the ceiling:

Horses, mostly, horses on a carousel

Without poles, without children—

They were all outside in gambols.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

What else? It’s important

To be forthright. As I gathered

At the bottom, pinned by the Wrestler,

Watching my million grains cascade

Upon me. Me in the third person—

Out of body because in of it reeks

Of sweat, fear, the last several meals

And unwashed armpits. To be forthright.

It’s important. What else? Envy.

Sadness. Radish-bitter daydreams,

This one of many: Me in a tree,

Limbs like a ladder, up and up.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

Sometimes, I sang. I’ve written

Hundreds of songs but none

Of them came to mind. I sang the hymns

Of my youth. God on a horse

On the ceiling, me and the comforter—

Faded, stitched together; it cannot

Budge beneath me, I cannot rise

Above it, we are each others’ jailer.

No bars. Just keys. Jangling

From the ceiling. Do I remember

Any psalms? The twenty-third, is all.

It’s enough. For an hour. Then not even close.

Children slide, sling gravel, sing.

Songs of their own invention.

Swing.

in prep for summer

Here's a poem that first appeared in my thesis and subsequently in The White Pelican Review. Pasted here for your encouragement if it happens to be close to home.

Ratio in Drought

The reservoir recedes. The shore

Is fishing lures and mussel shells.

In sorghum muck the heron stalks

A glimmering of fish. She knees

Along her way in snapshots while

Her crook of neck uncoils to meet

The spot where she’ll be next.

With waders hitched above his gut,

A thin man floats a feathered fly

Into a cranny dimpled

By invisible mosquitoes.

A twelve-deep stack of notices

At home, a tumor in his young

Son’s head, he comes to cast and jig,

To swallow the fist in his throat.

A bass erupts through gathered froth

And pauses, still-life for a blink,

Then flops, darts for waters cool

Beneath the jutting bluffs. The man

Is happy for the miss, the chance

To try again. The bird ascends.

A bloated, tallow-bellied cloud

Slugs in the distance—steady, slow.

tottering

In which the main character, Justin Latterly, has been confronted by his employer's seventy year old wife (presumably), Gloria Grace Stenson, with a series of double-edged questions, the answers to which all seem like traps. The excerpt is the culmination of that scene. (Gloria Grace is one of my favorite characters and perhaps the novel's most compelling.)

Her eyes watered—on the verge of hysterical laughter or hysterical tears. I had seen the look before but in younger, simpler eyes. But just then, with two lustrous welts clinging tight to her lower eyelids, the woman tugged at my soul, seemingly hungry for all of it, to satisfy what craving I could not imagine. We were on the brink. Time, for all of its usual calculability, whether figured in terms of every memorable moment or as the weight of all such moments crashing into you, was completely non-essential. Not so much standing still as standing on its head, simply killing itself until that moment passed. That anguished moment. On the brink, on the verge, tottering above the foggy abyss. And the real question was not any of the ones previously asked—neither hypothetical nor rhetorical nor to do with Gloria Grace Stenson at all but exclusively, unbearably, and incomprehensibly to do with Justin Michael Latterly— or, rather, the person by that name.

I kissed her lips.

The moment passed. Time resumed.

She laughed hysterically—two tears like pink quartz on her youthful, red cheeks.

yourself as the you

I wanted the moments of my life to follow each other and order themselves like those of a life remembered. I might as well try to catch time by the tail.--Jean Paul Sartre

So I've been undulating on the foamy swells of the Amorphilacious-Antaginons (aka Facebook) for over a week now and despite the occasional vertiginous crests and the stray stomach-sinking lulls, I feel like I might survive the scare. After all, what's a few soul-wrenching, psyche-anguishing, despair-inducing confrontations with yourself as The Other? That is, yourself as the you-that-once-was. That is, the you-that-is breaching the Nothing, reaching through stubbornly unsubstantial time, and faintly touching the you-that-was as a candle-flame might touch the fog.

Believe in ghosts, Ether, believe because they're out there. They resemble you: in the gleam of an eye or in the turn of a lip or in the cross of the legs. They remind you of you. They are you. Even when you're looking at someone-else-as-they-once-were it's just the you-as-The Other still stuck in the Nothingness of what once was but is no more--textbook case of Ghost encounter. Shiver.

To put it another way, all these old pictures of old friends and old mes gives me heebie-jeebie-willies.

Here's a sonnet--apropos of something above, I think. Or feel, rather.

Elementary

One may say that the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility.

– Albert Einstein

Remember sallow afternoons when we

Would count the passing cars and itemize

By color? Brother, I had open eyes

And gaping ears. I learned lessons for free

That you had bought by sitting in a class.

Who knew that stars were relatively still,

But you? You knew that salt would kill

A slug by shriveling it and that glass

Was made by blowing into glowing sand.

Remember pinching lightning bugs to smear

Our faces green and yellow? We would stand

At neighbors’ windows peering in like ghouls,

(Like what? I asked, secretly cramped with fear.

­Like ghosts, you said) no smarter pair of fools.