Block

Photo by Matt Ferrara

The mind plays hide, the pen plays seek.
Everytime. The drawers are yanked open
to reveal scrawled notes and doublespeak.
Images to fill the braggart need.
It’s me. Self-proclaimed writer. I greed
for release. I want confess. I want to kiss
the beckoning vacuum. I want to bleed with my pen.
But do the margins I’ve set provide a spine
for my invertebrate ego? Am I playing tourguide,
exhibiting my deep cruelties? Would you climb aboard
this torn notebook page if I told you I’ve lost the way?
Look behind the wheel, there I am,
Look out the window, there I am again,
leading you back to a memorized space.
Look at me! Hung on corkboard. Published. Named.
Labeled and categorized. Defined at last
and still slouching towards emptiness. Slumped. Wrestling words out,
failure squealing over heartbeat. I opt for a turn,
a second turning cheek, tongue firmly placed within it.
No, a second tongue, one for the mind, one for the pen.
No, an explosion. I explode. I can’t help but explode.
I burn in words. I have burned and I know I’ll burn again.

Tale of Two Gulfs

August 31, 2005

The near groans
under a lashing of wind and rain.
Dead dogs fester in the streets.
Heirlooms mold in mud.
A couch floats above the room
in which it once stood.

The far punctuates its own heat.
Shrapnel blinds a child.
Antiquities shatter,
or are placed in bags.
Money is placed in bags.
Men and women are placed in bags.
Children are placed in bags.

In the far, uniforms haunt the streets.
In the near, a thick sludge covers all.
Corpses and trash.
Waiting. Tired.
Hoping on empty suits
that won’t even shrug a shoulder.

Four years have passed
since the president thumbed pages
of a children’s book
while America clutched a wound,
and the twentieth century burned
and collapsed.

Now,
when he at last awakens,
allowing firm hand gestures
to addresses the waving flags,
his eyes misting for the nearer gulf,
will he again leaf through pages
of a children’s book,
coloring each with blood-red inaction?
Will his heart float, face-down,
on the brackish flood waters?
Will his heart groan
is if lashed by wind and rain?
Will his guilt be punctuated?
Or will it, too,
be placed in a bag?

Photo by Matt Ferrara

Watching the Simpsons with You

Photo by Matt Ferrara

Though Homer shatters the great white lighthouse eye
and the cargo ship swaggers to unseen rocks,
like a bloodhound, Marge, blue cactus hair piled high,
downhill tracks her husband’s trail several blocks
to the lighthouse, knowing Homer much better
than he suspects. Once there, she helps repair
the light, saving the ship. “Soul Mate,”–Homer
threw the term like noise confetti in the air.

And next to me on the couch, I heard you sigh,
and though I longed to make soul mates of us
I knew deep down: it takes a yellow dope
mere minutes to learn to love, but you and I,
for all our wishing, will hover at the cusp
forever, our smiles aching from the hope.

Shit

Shit if you don’t find it funny how you peel yourself from the floor like a careless drip of wax, skin pale, sometimes yellow as brittle, aged parchment. Shit if I can’t see you from the smolder and black smoke. Shit if you don’t evaporate every love I bear you. Shit if you don’t burn everything around you, every forgotten car ride, every morning you’ve ever awakened with your chin caked in blood. You burn the mystery bruises, burn the the falls, burn the piles of receipts from nights spent underwater, eyes open, mouth bubbling the same stories again and again and again and shit if you haven’t burned it all. I’ve put out fires long enough, watching you cut through dive bars like a hummingbird, splashing water on your scorched feathers. You suck the plumes of charred air, tasting every broken promise, laughing and wheezing. And shit if you’re not still oblivious to the reason that I shake my head and avert my eyes. Shit if you can’t see it. You’re a fiery shipwreck, sinking. An exploding star, exploded.

Photo by Matt Ferrara

Now

Photo by Rachel Brown

Worn out from fighting, we sleep in our clothes.
She whispers and I crush her closer
to hear her say time is a black jackrabbit
stamping dark paws in our prints.

It brings me back two years to the night
we spent camping in Maine. She pokes a stick
at the waning embers in the fire pit
asking me the question, and I hear myself say
time is a rabbit, it must be slaughtered and eaten.

Stop fooling around, she says, I’m being serious.
Do you want to get married? It’s now or never.
I say now. Her face is a second crescent moon
under the shimmer of bent stars.

But this is now. Darkened hours beside her in bed.
Cried hollow. Her engagement ring scratches my cheek.
And this? Putting my ear to her lips to hear her breathe,
the way one might hear the sea in a conch,
straining for answers in the white noise? This is never.

Steps

Photo by Matt Ferrara

My father’s face drifts nearer,
hovering like a church bell over his body
and over the red leaves, those quickest to fall,
that are swept back upward by his stride.

Photo by Matt Ferrara

4:30am, Henniker. Thinking of My Father.

Photo by Matt Ferrara

When the mists of dawn rise
the streetlights draw roman numerals–
thick, waving, white–
on the black waters of the Contoocook River.
I find myself following bent weeds
to the riverbank, gathering stones,
my father in my memory’s pulpit–
a time to cast away stones
a time to gather stones together.
When will I grow up? I’ve only grown older.
It is time to cast away.
Each flat, smooth stone leaves my hand and is swallowed,
First by darkness, then the river.

Procession

When the funeral procession enters the cemetary,
the road is frozen. An line of idle cars, sheets of ice
rattling from leering grills, stretches into the pines.
I press my nose to the window, fogging it with childishness.
Papa, at the wheel, brushes a cough from his lips.
This waiting persists for several minutes, before the car behind us
bangs an impatient three-pointer, prompting another car to follow suit,
and another, until we are all that is left waiting, keeping vigil.
Papa checks his cheap wristwatch, drums his fingers on the wheel.
Seconds later, he checks it again, as if eternities sprawled between glances,
as if his death were written on the second hand.
And yet, for all his own impatience, Papa holds his Oldsmobile there,
as icicles sag the pines and each snow-heaped, mourning car
turns into the January graveyard,
chrome bumpers twinkling a pyrotechnic yellow.

Photo by Matt Ferrara

Red Ink, White Scrap

She scrawled red ink on a scrap of white paper.
Her sweeping name and Fibonacci phone number.
Clutched in my fist, pressed to my lips like a pax,
this scrap is a fucking talisman. It has big plans for me.
Sometimes I just need thunderbolts to climb like stairs.
Sometimes I just need a fucking talisman.
A promise in the lectern of my hands.

Stalled Engine

Drunken bagpipes disqualify his thoughts,
the bacchic scraps, the bottle a snow globe
depicting how Earth appears from heaven
when God is in one of His better moods.

His hand and lowered head
form a chevron of introspection,
all solvency washed away
in the mill stream of solicitant gloom,

His typecast role of sorrow
rabbit-punching his resolve
to get up, to leave the bar,
to not be his father.