Fuck your pretense,
call a spade a spade-
just don't name it nigger
or cracker or honky or tom no matter
how colored the ignorance and
shake the sugar from your coat,
call that cunt a cunt-
but not if it shops uptown or
sticks itself to a Sunday pew
or gives the best blow-jobs around
don't pull the punch,
call a prick a prick-
just not if it signs your paycheck or
is a good provider or preaches
community unity at the VFW and
suck that decorum,
call the victim a victim-
but only if it fought back, left marks,
dressed appropriately, lived to tell about it
on the channel 2 news and not
if it rides poles to pay rent or
trades pussy for crack on Southside,
works the zombie shift at Porno-Emporium
or lives in a row house with dingy windows
so spill it on the chalk line,
strip it to the bone and spit-
lick it till it bleeds
the same scarlet as mine.
Friday
Monday
Talking To Him
I can’t call it chat;
seems to light, too free-
and it wasn’t but
it was good
in a self-searching way
that I wasn’t prepared for
or aware of until
skin was already peeling
away in painful strips,
bloodless yet weeping-
I felt them fall,
drifting in dry and dusty piles
beneath my anonymous desk
somewhere in river town
and I wanted to
gather them up-
stick them back
to my naked self, shivering
and unprotected,
weak and wanting.
idle words bared me
like a lover couldn’t
like a confessor might
like a surgeon skilled at the craft-
and voices screamed
from the opened wounds
voices with names that can’t
be counted, faces that won’t be gone.
Their tongues scrape my edges,
dig furrows through the bone yards
that carry my weight-
and I stumble,
I tire, I wonder
will it always be the same.
seems to light, too free-
and it wasn’t but
it was good
in a self-searching way
that I wasn’t prepared for
or aware of until
skin was already peeling
away in painful strips,
bloodless yet weeping-
I felt them fall,
drifting in dry and dusty piles
beneath my anonymous desk
somewhere in river town
and I wanted to
gather them up-
stick them back
to my naked self, shivering
and unprotected,
weak and wanting.
idle words bared me
like a lover couldn’t
like a confessor might
like a surgeon skilled at the craft-
and voices screamed
from the opened wounds
voices with names that can’t
be counted, faces that won’t be gone.
Their tongues scrape my edges,
dig furrows through the bone yards
that carry my weight-
and I stumble,
I tire, I wonder
will it always be the same.
Sunday
Bored With Pink
She wears black everyday,
widows herself
from the Ivory girls,
scrubs the scalloped parts
until they’ve lost their seashell hue-
At night she sheds,
sits cross-legged in blue shag
and draws scarlet bracelets
from her wrists, Exacto circlets
around her throat in crimson beads.
widows herself
from the Ivory girls,
scrubs the scalloped parts
until they’ve lost their seashell hue-
At night she sheds,
sits cross-legged in blue shag
and draws scarlet bracelets
from her wrists, Exacto circlets
around her throat in crimson beads.
Blue On Blue
3:16 AM, emergency entrance, county general-
I was propped against the rear doors of a rig
parked in Bay 5, close to where the docs smoke
with cigarettes tucked behind their palms,
furtive anarchists flicking ash at the don’t-do-that sign
while people shift back and forth around them
and I was thinking about this tweaker kid
we brought in on a dead run; skull a cracked vault,
his secrets betrayed on the floor beneath my boots
I was thinking about how he wouldn’t
stop breathing; how the noise of anatomy
dogged collapsed lines in fibrillating waves
I was thinking about a girl in a dirty blue skirt
sitting on a curb with his blood on her knees,
how her face pulled away in the rear-view like a scream
I was thinking about how an intern
with two silver loops in his ear hummed ‘Blue on Blue’
under his breath as we gave our report to a nurse
I thought about these things
I watched the guards watch me
I didn’t clean any secrets from the rig
I did sit down on the step plate
I picked at the wick of my Zippo
I whistled the intern’s song
somewhere behind me
a girl with bloody knees sits on a curb
pulling threads from the hem of a cheap skirt.
I was propped against the rear doors of a rig
parked in Bay 5, close to where the docs smoke
with cigarettes tucked behind their palms,
furtive anarchists flicking ash at the don’t-do-that sign
while people shift back and forth around them
and I was thinking about this tweaker kid
we brought in on a dead run; skull a cracked vault,
his secrets betrayed on the floor beneath my boots
I was thinking about how he wouldn’t
stop breathing; how the noise of anatomy
dogged collapsed lines in fibrillating waves
I was thinking about a girl in a dirty blue skirt
sitting on a curb with his blood on her knees,
how her face pulled away in the rear-view like a scream
I was thinking about how an intern
with two silver loops in his ear hummed ‘Blue on Blue’
under his breath as we gave our report to a nurse
I thought about these things
I watched the guards watch me
I didn’t clean any secrets from the rig
I did sit down on the step plate
I picked at the wick of my Zippo
I whistled the intern’s song
somewhere behind me
a girl with bloody knees sits on a curb
pulling threads from the hem of a cheap skirt.
Thursday
Hunger
She takes the six-forty
everyday, a real zaftig mama
running register at the Slavic Grill;
slack tits and hair and broad, flat teeth
stick perpetually to cracked lips
like the biting aroma of onions and cabbages
sticks forever to her skin and
it floods the bus in sudden clarity,
passengers think of home, of sweet sausage
for supper and tired wives with tight asses,
angry husbands with hard hands and
nobody knows her name is Zinnia;
sour old maid but somebody’s flower
and no one will guess
she takes the six-forty everyday
on a three-stop ride to see her daddy-man,
fat black butcher who strokes her heavy head,
kisses dry lips slick as they slap needy meat
together until their pores spit vinegar,
until the starving empty tastes onions, cabbages.
everyday, a real zaftig mama
running register at the Slavic Grill;
slack tits and hair and broad, flat teeth
stick perpetually to cracked lips
like the biting aroma of onions and cabbages
sticks forever to her skin and
it floods the bus in sudden clarity,
passengers think of home, of sweet sausage
for supper and tired wives with tight asses,
angry husbands with hard hands and
nobody knows her name is Zinnia;
sour old maid but somebody’s flower
and no one will guess
she takes the six-forty everyday
on a three-stop ride to see her daddy-man,
fat black butcher who strokes her heavy head,
kisses dry lips slick as they slap needy meat
together until their pores spit vinegar,
until the starving empty tastes onions, cabbages.
Sunday
Dance
Loretta wears an Angela Davis sphere
picked to perfection atop a broad skull,
colored insolence-orange to compliment
her red-bone tone and the white boys love it-
or so they say when they say something at all
to a picayune yeller waiting table for tips
she saves for three months strong to buy
suede kitten heels and a rayon fluted skirt-
fine as anything the white gals sport
down at the legionnaire's hall on Saturday nights,
kicking ankles and hems to black-balled beats;
but she can't go where she can't go so
she dances to echos in the outside lot while
old men pass bottles on benches nailed to brick-
they blink like Lazarus as she bumps and grinds,
their laughter cracks across the gravel like
cartridges jacked into waiting breeches,
as cold as a cocking trigger.
picked to perfection atop a broad skull,
colored insolence-orange to compliment
her red-bone tone and the white boys love it-
or so they say when they say something at all
to a picayune yeller waiting table for tips
she saves for three months strong to buy
suede kitten heels and a rayon fluted skirt-
fine as anything the white gals sport
down at the legionnaire's hall on Saturday nights,
kicking ankles and hems to black-balled beats;
but she can't go where she can't go so
she dances to echos in the outside lot while
old men pass bottles on benches nailed to brick-
they blink like Lazarus as she bumps and grinds,
their laughter cracks across the gravel like
cartridges jacked into waiting breeches,
as cold as a cocking trigger.
Tuesday
Wars And Rumors Of
Hunched like dogs mid-shit,
faces flooded contusion blue,
we quiver before the corpse-lights;
slaver over designer drones whose digital tongues
flap static louder than our intellects-
they spew sang-froid emesis
across the collective floor,
stroke our heads, pat our asses by invitation;
they sing us lies and lullabies but
we know the ice age cometh:
it taps a salvo against the convex eye,
puts an antedate ear to our bowels and
listens to the rumblings within.
faces flooded contusion blue,
we quiver before the corpse-lights;
slaver over designer drones whose digital tongues
flap static louder than our intellects-
they spew sang-froid emesis
across the collective floor,
stroke our heads, pat our asses by invitation;
they sing us lies and lullabies but
we know the ice age cometh:
it taps a salvo against the convex eye,
puts an antedate ear to our bowels and
listens to the rumblings within.
Friday
From My Window
A girl sits everyday
on the 10th floor ledge
of a building that faces mine.
From my window I look down;
watch as she contemplates something
or nothing- feet angled towards our street,
ankles crossed above heads that never look up.
Her name could be Jenny,
Alice or Ruth; but I name her Jane
under breath that catches each positional shift,
anonymous doe caught between ricochets
of afternoon glare; its whisper-licks blend
gray shadows into ghosts against the stone.
I wonder if she reads
confessional poets- lonely masturbator
waking in the blue, looking for Bedlam
with a howl picking locks in her throat or does
she want to eat the world like Plath ate her daddy;
in sucking gulps of oblivion and I wonder
if she knows I'm here, does she know I see
everyday the bow of head,
the shape of hands folded in a spare lap;
will she sense my regret should the hands snap
and plummet, grabbing for rungs on rising air
while currents turn the pages backward-
does she know they will leave no riddle exposed;
only hair and bone and the ache at the root of my tongue-
on the 10th floor ledge
of a building that faces mine.
From my window I look down;
watch as she contemplates something
or nothing- feet angled towards our street,
ankles crossed above heads that never look up.
Her name could be Jenny,
Alice or Ruth; but I name her Jane
under breath that catches each positional shift,
anonymous doe caught between ricochets
of afternoon glare; its whisper-licks blend
gray shadows into ghosts against the stone.
I wonder if she reads
confessional poets- lonely masturbator
waking in the blue, looking for Bedlam
with a howl picking locks in her throat or does
she want to eat the world like Plath ate her daddy;
in sucking gulps of oblivion and I wonder
if she knows I'm here, does she know I see
everyday the bow of head,
the shape of hands folded in a spare lap;
will she sense my regret should the hands snap
and plummet, grabbing for rungs on rising air
while currents turn the pages backward-
does she know they will leave no riddle exposed;
only hair and bone and the ache at the root of my tongue-
Tuesday
Yellow Jacket Summer
I offer nothing save this want,
this tepid press into breathless flesh.
Damned hot days.
Blacktop blisters where dirt meets road,
dogs with slats in their sides pant,
watch the August air waver and dance;
an idle promenade with shadow and sun.
This season of strain
pains its way across our surface,
lays a path in rivel and rut.
Regret brings us to a vacant place;
faint thrusts erase words, crumble thought
to dust that cannot lift itself to scatter.
Promises culled from sweat
flitter by sill and frame, their sway
traces the fretwork of your face.
Catbirds simmer in cedars that stroke
dry fingers against the pane;
familiar ghosts bend toward the husk of sound.
A storm stirs, lightning robbed of voice
sheets through the close haze of day.
Yellow Jackets hum in paper nests,
their anger cools beneath juniper shade.
Somewhere in the thinning distance,
dogs slip away without goodbye.
We shed our skin, twine sticky and shorn
on sheets with roses faded down to pink;
count beats in our strained necks,
watch the rise of breath, catch its fall
in the hungry mouths of opened palms.
In this gloaming, I will see your smile.
this tepid press into breathless flesh.
Damned hot days.
Blacktop blisters where dirt meets road,
dogs with slats in their sides pant,
watch the August air waver and dance;
an idle promenade with shadow and sun.
This season of strain
pains its way across our surface,
lays a path in rivel and rut.
Regret brings us to a vacant place;
faint thrusts erase words, crumble thought
to dust that cannot lift itself to scatter.
Promises culled from sweat
flitter by sill and frame, their sway
traces the fretwork of your face.
Catbirds simmer in cedars that stroke
dry fingers against the pane;
familiar ghosts bend toward the husk of sound.
A storm stirs, lightning robbed of voice
sheets through the close haze of day.
Yellow Jackets hum in paper nests,
their anger cools beneath juniper shade.
Somewhere in the thinning distance,
dogs slip away without goodbye.
We shed our skin, twine sticky and shorn
on sheets with roses faded down to pink;
count beats in our strained necks,
watch the rise of breath, catch its fall
in the hungry mouths of opened palms.
In this gloaming, I will see your smile.
Friday
Mindfuck
In the dream
you are naked, pallid
on pale sheet, powerless
and sleep-dead and something's
come to grieve;
sprung from a hitch
beneath your breath,
it winds, insistent shroud-
pressure forces
your thighs, parts a passage
to other worlds and resistance
sticks in your throat
stops the shriek
and then it speaks, says
what you want to hear in your
own voice, slides familiar arms
about your waist
and they were never so tight,
never so wrong and you
close your eyes-
feel a need
a greedy suckle at your neck
and you think of high school,
of backseats and blow jobs
and now it thrusts,
presses fear into flame and
you smell cigarettes and popcorn
and your daddy's after shave-
a slick tongue
wraps with yours and pulls,
sucks out secrets like a lover
never did and at once
you taste your
first cock and your first Jack
and every flavor you had forgotten
fills your mouth until regret
spills down your chin
and still it pushes,
strokes that shatter your spine,
nail flesh to fantasy and
now you know,
this is how you want it,
this is how it should have been;
relentless, revered,
rushing up
from the dead spot like revelation-
it splits your seared throat
and you scream
the great primal howl
fuck me, fuck me like it never
meant anything and so it does;
snaking under your skin,
piercing your bones
and it licks the inside of your mind,
feeds on what lies hidden
eats questions you could never ask
and spits the answers
behind your eyes; they gather
in the corners, muddy puddles of doubt
and disregard and when you wake
you'll rub them
and wonder why you can't remember
what it is you can't forget.
you are naked, pallid
on pale sheet, powerless
and sleep-dead and something's
come to grieve;
sprung from a hitch
beneath your breath,
it winds, insistent shroud-
pressure forces
your thighs, parts a passage
to other worlds and resistance
sticks in your throat
stops the shriek
and then it speaks, says
what you want to hear in your
own voice, slides familiar arms
about your waist
and they were never so tight,
never so wrong and you
close your eyes-
feel a need
a greedy suckle at your neck
and you think of high school,
of backseats and blow jobs
and now it thrusts,
presses fear into flame and
you smell cigarettes and popcorn
and your daddy's after shave-
a slick tongue
wraps with yours and pulls,
sucks out secrets like a lover
never did and at once
you taste your
first cock and your first Jack
and every flavor you had forgotten
fills your mouth until regret
spills down your chin
and still it pushes,
strokes that shatter your spine,
nail flesh to fantasy and
now you know,
this is how you want it,
this is how it should have been;
relentless, revered,
rushing up
from the dead spot like revelation-
it splits your seared throat
and you scream
the great primal howl
fuck me, fuck me like it never
meant anything and so it does;
snaking under your skin,
piercing your bones
and it licks the inside of your mind,
feeds on what lies hidden
eats questions you could never ask
and spits the answers
behind your eyes; they gather
in the corners, muddy puddles of doubt
and disregard and when you wake
you'll rub them
and wonder why you can't remember
what it is you can't forget.
Wednesday
And The Question Was
a real pisser; posed by a guy with a mic
in his fist, mousse in his hair, and a cameraman
wearing an ANARCHY RULES tee-shirt whirring
Shocking! Graphic! footage into eager TV's
across the viewing area so I said-make that spit-
what the fuck do you think I'm doing,
Mr. Rather-be-an-anchor? Just a cannibal
trying to eat her words, standing here with
RBC's clotted on my mags, Pollack-style splashes
drying on white cotton issue and won't they be
the bitch-kitty to get out if I ever get to take
it off so just what the fuck do you guess
happened to joe blow, hardening on the concrete
with his gray matter where it don't matter,
giving you such good profile while all these
gawkers and shoppers and kids -Oh My!-
talk in not-so-hushed tones about it being
broad daylight and what the fuck do you
suppose we'll do once the cops finish taking notes,
snapping pics that'll end up in a dead file because
nobody ever sees nothing; once we scrape joe
into a black bag and the firehouse boys hose away
what's left over so everyone can forget until the
next one and tell me, what the fuck will you care
after the film stops?
in his fist, mousse in his hair, and a cameraman
wearing an ANARCHY RULES tee-shirt whirring
Shocking! Graphic! footage into eager TV's
across the viewing area so I said-make that spit-
what the fuck do you think I'm doing,
Mr. Rather-be-an-anchor? Just a cannibal
trying to eat her words, standing here with
RBC's clotted on my mags, Pollack-style splashes
drying on white cotton issue and won't they be
the bitch-kitty to get out if I ever get to take
it off so just what the fuck do you guess
happened to joe blow, hardening on the concrete
with his gray matter where it don't matter,
giving you such good profile while all these
gawkers and shoppers and kids -Oh My!-
talk in not-so-hushed tones about it being
broad daylight and what the fuck do you
suppose we'll do once the cops finish taking notes,
snapping pics that'll end up in a dead file because
nobody ever sees nothing; once we scrape joe
into a black bag and the firehouse boys hose away
what's left over so everyone can forget until the
next one and tell me, what the fuck will you care
after the film stops?
Saturday
On Sweetgum And Faith
I hold my faith in my hands.
Steady, they clip the straps that hold
the sweetgum straight against its stake.
Now, it bows only to drop seed to fertile earth.
An ovenbird cocks her tail, watches me
from her canopy perch, close and unimpressed.
I spread my fingers, let thin rawhides fly;
morning will find them bunting for her bed.
Tiny scars cross the backs of my hands,
their fretwork remembers years long buried.
I trace them in the dusk of memory.
I open my palms; gods that never answered
drift through the cracks, ashes on a scant breeze.
Behind me, the ovenbird trundles her nest.
Quiet. The dead are tolling their bells.
Steady, they clip the straps that hold
the sweetgum straight against its stake.
Now, it bows only to drop seed to fertile earth.
An ovenbird cocks her tail, watches me
from her canopy perch, close and unimpressed.
I spread my fingers, let thin rawhides fly;
morning will find them bunting for her bed.
Tiny scars cross the backs of my hands,
their fretwork remembers years long buried.
I trace them in the dusk of memory.
I open my palms; gods that never answered
drift through the cracks, ashes on a scant breeze.
Behind me, the ovenbird trundles her nest.
Quiet. The dead are tolling their bells.
Sunday
If It's The Faith That's Important...
let there be fight.
Send a prayer up for the hunted,
prey for the predator; all mass to the enemy,
amen. Will you offer your boys to the clergy?
Light a candle, confessions feed flame.
Wafers, wine, penitential suits;
dinner for two behind stained glass curtains.
Hail Mary, full of grace
let us blow this goddamned
place your money in a tin plate.
Increase the tithe until sin ceases, Sunday mothers iron
perfect creases, all god's chilluns' wear Baptist blue.
Songs sung blue, everybody knows
one hallelujah chorus
sing it for us while we burn crosses, burn Jews,
burn the bush; soldiers of Golgotha in faceless diorama.
Dead deities shop for attention, sell lightning rods
door to door; frightened neighbors at the blinds
sneak peeks for celestial signs and wonder why
martyrs make mistakes of sacrifice over and over.
Send a prayer up for the hunted,
prey for the predator; all mass to the enemy,
amen. Will you offer your boys to the clergy?
Light a candle, confessions feed flame.
Wafers, wine, penitential suits;
dinner for two behind stained glass curtains.
Hail Mary, full of grace
let us blow this goddamned
place your money in a tin plate.
Increase the tithe until sin ceases, Sunday mothers iron
perfect creases, all god's chilluns' wear Baptist blue.
Songs sung blue, everybody knows
one hallelujah chorus
sing it for us while we burn crosses, burn Jews,
burn the bush; soldiers of Golgotha in faceless diorama.
Dead deities shop for attention, sell lightning rods
door to door; frightened neighbors at the blinds
sneak peeks for celestial signs and wonder why
martyrs make mistakes of sacrifice over and over.
Tuesday
After Gods, The Floods
In the hour that I first knew
Jesus built new and improved voids
to measure his levels of devotion,
I called him and we got high
in ways our bodies couldn’t atone.
A portent pressed so close
to the backs of our eyes
all we could see spilled out,
trickled down to our toes buried
in saw-grass swaying like prayer-fans
stapled to popsicle sticks.
I made him black coffee before noon,
Jamaican Blue Mountain, 8.95 a pound
at the strip mall on South Avenue.
His upper lip tried not to crimp,
his hands tried not to shake and I smiled
because my days are cherry days,
mostly. He called me apathetic,
said I drank through a war and slept
through a revolution once.
I know it must be true, I know there was one
because when I wake up after drinking
it feels the same as when I don’t.
He said that he wakes up every morning
and throbs and sometimes, so do I;
but I know they are not the same aches,
so when he said that I set my face
and pretended to look empathetic
when all I really want is winter-
the time back spent in an unfinished attic
with Rachel, our lips ringed with her mother’s
kosher salt and drinking margaritas;
our grace unlaced, a white flag shaped
like a pillowcase defining our surrender,
our silhouettes blushed behind the pulled shade.
Jesus built new and improved voids
to measure his levels of devotion,
I called him and we got high
in ways our bodies couldn’t atone.
A portent pressed so close
to the backs of our eyes
all we could see spilled out,
trickled down to our toes buried
in saw-grass swaying like prayer-fans
stapled to popsicle sticks.
I made him black coffee before noon,
Jamaican Blue Mountain, 8.95 a pound
at the strip mall on South Avenue.
His upper lip tried not to crimp,
his hands tried not to shake and I smiled
because my days are cherry days,
mostly. He called me apathetic,
said I drank through a war and slept
through a revolution once.
I know it must be true, I know there was one
because when I wake up after drinking
it feels the same as when I don’t.
He said that he wakes up every morning
and throbs and sometimes, so do I;
but I know they are not the same aches,
so when he said that I set my face
and pretended to look empathetic
when all I really want is winter-
the time back spent in an unfinished attic
with Rachel, our lips ringed with her mother’s
kosher salt and drinking margaritas;
our grace unlaced, a white flag shaped
like a pillowcase defining our surrender,
our silhouettes blushed behind the pulled shade.
Friday
Canning Lessons 1961
There was a colored woman
who came most summer days
to help my old mam
shell peas or shuck corn
or snap beans for canning.
Every third Tuesday
they washed sheets in big tubs,
then hung them to dry
on twine strung between canted poles;
the flat smacks of their hands
carried staccato across the fields.
She had a niece named Sookie
that came along those days;
we would play until our bones hurt
in the fields where old pa's
colored men walked endless rows of tobacco,
popping bright yellow flowers from each plant
with fingers always sticky,
always sore and when the field boss
looked away, they would turn up water
from jute jugs suspended
on straps at their waists.
Sookie and me plucked
fat tobacco worms from their leaves,
saved them in jars with punctured lids;
old pa gave us a nickle for each full jar
because there was nothing
like a greenhorn worm
to attract big cats
cruising the river bottom
while the sun beat its surface
until you saw the heat waver and roll.
We spent our nickles
on RC colas and Moonpies, side by side
and knee to knee eating them
in the shade of a high row.
The woman never came
when the days turned short.
Summer would end, school start
and Sookie sat in a different classroom
at the end of the hall.
When lunch came,
she stood against a back wall
with the colored kids and the white trash
and they all wore bright yellow tags
pinned to their shirts
that said FREE LUNCH in big letters;
they always ate last
because that's the way things were
when seasons changed
worm money and Moonpies
into days sealed like summer jars.
who came most summer days
to help my old mam
shell peas or shuck corn
or snap beans for canning.
Every third Tuesday
they washed sheets in big tubs,
then hung them to dry
on twine strung between canted poles;
the flat smacks of their hands
carried staccato across the fields.
She had a niece named Sookie
that came along those days;
we would play until our bones hurt
in the fields where old pa's
colored men walked endless rows of tobacco,
popping bright yellow flowers from each plant
with fingers always sticky,
always sore and when the field boss
looked away, they would turn up water
from jute jugs suspended
on straps at their waists.
Sookie and me plucked
fat tobacco worms from their leaves,
saved them in jars with punctured lids;
old pa gave us a nickle for each full jar
because there was nothing
like a greenhorn worm
to attract big cats
cruising the river bottom
while the sun beat its surface
until you saw the heat waver and roll.
We spent our nickles
on RC colas and Moonpies, side by side
and knee to knee eating them
in the shade of a high row.
The woman never came
when the days turned short.
Summer would end, school start
and Sookie sat in a different classroom
at the end of the hall.
When lunch came,
she stood against a back wall
with the colored kids and the white trash
and they all wore bright yellow tags
pinned to their shirts
that said FREE LUNCH in big letters;
they always ate last
because that's the way things were
when seasons changed
worm money and Moonpies
into days sealed like summer jars.
Saturday
Transition
This is how it happened:
It's 1964, John F. Kennedy has been dead
a year and two weeks come Monday
and here I am, laid up in some bar
so dive I'm shooting mescal in dixie cups
listening to Clifford Brown blow
his brilliant trumpet through speakers
that crack and bleed and now there's a girl
on the stool next to mine; she wears
a flesh-colored sweater like it's skin,
tells me she's from downstate somewhere without
me asking and now she's brushing her tits
against my arm, talking about jazz and Benny Waters
and don't I just love a good sax when it rains;
then we're outside, steam lifting from the concrete
because it has rained, been raining all day and next
thing I know, she's peeling off the skin-toned
sweater in a ten dollar room while I untie my shoes,
wonder if she's going to taste like the Camels
she's been burning all night and she does;
but it's alright, it's ok, because it might not be
good sax but it's a decent lay for a Thursday night
and somewhere between the push and the grind and
the sweat-wet valleys I am transformed; jolted out
of time, yanked up and carried away just like that
magic bullet yanked JFK from his black continental,
his ideas strewn across a pink chenille suit-
no transition, no time to bide, no reflections
in a half-shut eye; just the taste of smoke then
I am here.
Someplace else.
Dislocated.
It's 1966, John F. Kennedy has been dead
forever, fucked over by a Texan and here I am;
sacked out in some bamboo bar, drinking ruou from
a tin cup while women shred dog meat in a back room.
It's 1964, John F. Kennedy has been dead
a year and two weeks come Monday
and here I am, laid up in some bar
so dive I'm shooting mescal in dixie cups
listening to Clifford Brown blow
his brilliant trumpet through speakers
that crack and bleed and now there's a girl
on the stool next to mine; she wears
a flesh-colored sweater like it's skin,
tells me she's from downstate somewhere without
me asking and now she's brushing her tits
against my arm, talking about jazz and Benny Waters
and don't I just love a good sax when it rains;
then we're outside, steam lifting from the concrete
because it has rained, been raining all day and next
thing I know, she's peeling off the skin-toned
sweater in a ten dollar room while I untie my shoes,
wonder if she's going to taste like the Camels
she's been burning all night and she does;
but it's alright, it's ok, because it might not be
good sax but it's a decent lay for a Thursday night
and somewhere between the push and the grind and
the sweat-wet valleys I am transformed; jolted out
of time, yanked up and carried away just like that
magic bullet yanked JFK from his black continental,
his ideas strewn across a pink chenille suit-
no transition, no time to bide, no reflections
in a half-shut eye; just the taste of smoke then
I am here.
Someplace else.
Dislocated.
It's 1966, John F. Kennedy has been dead
forever, fucked over by a Texan and here I am;
sacked out in some bamboo bar, drinking ruou from
a tin cup while women shred dog meat in a back room.
Thursday
Dog Story
There's a three-legged dog
that roams the back alleys of town.
Some days find him brave along main street,
dodging traffic on three scarred pads
and a counter-weight shaped like a thigh.
He has no name that I ever knew,
but I call him untitled; a shambling draft
filled with page after page of stories
no one will ever hear, or get to read
within the bindings of a worn and dusty book.
He doesn't eat well but he eats-
a scrap here and a morsel there, sometimes
I see the butcher's boy lay bones unwrapped
outside the rear door; strings of meat and sinew
reflect an act of grace beneath the sheen
of summer blowflies.
I often wonder if he dreams of Rin Tin Tin,
if he envies the great shepherd and his celluloid flock;
or if he knows that had fate only made him aesthetic
and born him in a different circumstance, that it might
have been him poised stalwart on a Hollywood cliff?
I know that one day I'll come into town,
find him bloated beside some curb; sides fat at last.
And when the road crews shovel him up, he'll spill
volumes across their boots; an untitled tide of words
riding gutter-waves to an nameless sea.
that roams the back alleys of town.
Some days find him brave along main street,
dodging traffic on three scarred pads
and a counter-weight shaped like a thigh.
He has no name that I ever knew,
but I call him untitled; a shambling draft
filled with page after page of stories
no one will ever hear, or get to read
within the bindings of a worn and dusty book.
He doesn't eat well but he eats-
a scrap here and a morsel there, sometimes
I see the butcher's boy lay bones unwrapped
outside the rear door; strings of meat and sinew
reflect an act of grace beneath the sheen
of summer blowflies.
I often wonder if he dreams of Rin Tin Tin,
if he envies the great shepherd and his celluloid flock;
or if he knows that had fate only made him aesthetic
and born him in a different circumstance, that it might
have been him poised stalwart on a Hollywood cliff?
I know that one day I'll come into town,
find him bloated beside some curb; sides fat at last.
And when the road crews shovel him up, he'll spill
volumes across their boots; an untitled tide of words
riding gutter-waves to an nameless sea.
Monday
Look Back In Longing
I wait inside while strangers cart boxes through depleted rooms;
my mother's house empty now in fact instead of theory.
Thumbed to the inside of a pantry door, a calender dated 1961
holds watch. Here is the transience of x'ed out days;
I've come to name the ghosts in this sudden unhinging of air.
It's '61 again, and Eddie loses his footing on a low stool
while crepe myrtles bob purple heads outside the window,
leaving a silence, an absence of light beneath a door.
Mother listens to Debussy, La Danse De Puck, and does not cry;
I watch the weight draw lazy circles in the dusk of day.
It will be spring in a while; I never wanted to go to Paris.
This is the summer Joan found the husk and bark
of Dylan, threatened to move to Greenwich Village, get a job
pouring coffee at Gerde's Folk City. She named a took-up sooner
Woody, got caught behind Conner's Feed 'n Seed with a boy
who looked a lot like Bob. She disappeared that summer,
"away with an aunt", they said; returned before fall set in,
the arc of EST still visible in the fine hair at her temples.
Afterwards, she was always barefoot, humming behind a frozen smile.
Autumn has come, wind scares up old leaves that tick down in spirals.
"Take a picture of this" says my father; now he hides in the slump
of a stranger photographed beside a pearl-gray sedan, his face
too far away to see the set of his mouth; tight-lipped until
he drank it loose. I smell rain in the swelling dearth of sky.
I am not like him, all flesh and hollow bone. He speaks in loud tones
of the nigger allowed on his crosstown bus, reason enough, he says,
for the Buick. The camera doesn't record the stink of his breath.
It is winter. I have carried the cold in from the outside.
The movers are done, their trucks packed and idling at the curb;
exhaust curls from their pipes and dissolves as I watch them pull away.
I think of whatever it is that looks back in longing, how the hibiscus
still blooms in February and my God, it's been years since I've seen snow.
my mother's house empty now in fact instead of theory.
Thumbed to the inside of a pantry door, a calender dated 1961
holds watch. Here is the transience of x'ed out days;
I've come to name the ghosts in this sudden unhinging of air.
It's '61 again, and Eddie loses his footing on a low stool
while crepe myrtles bob purple heads outside the window,
leaving a silence, an absence of light beneath a door.
Mother listens to Debussy, La Danse De Puck, and does not cry;
I watch the weight draw lazy circles in the dusk of day.
It will be spring in a while; I never wanted to go to Paris.
This is the summer Joan found the husk and bark
of Dylan, threatened to move to Greenwich Village, get a job
pouring coffee at Gerde's Folk City. She named a took-up sooner
Woody, got caught behind Conner's Feed 'n Seed with a boy
who looked a lot like Bob. She disappeared that summer,
"away with an aunt", they said; returned before fall set in,
the arc of EST still visible in the fine hair at her temples.
Afterwards, she was always barefoot, humming behind a frozen smile.
Autumn has come, wind scares up old leaves that tick down in spirals.
"Take a picture of this" says my father; now he hides in the slump
of a stranger photographed beside a pearl-gray sedan, his face
too far away to see the set of his mouth; tight-lipped until
he drank it loose. I smell rain in the swelling dearth of sky.
I am not like him, all flesh and hollow bone. He speaks in loud tones
of the nigger allowed on his crosstown bus, reason enough, he says,
for the Buick. The camera doesn't record the stink of his breath.
It is winter. I have carried the cold in from the outside.
The movers are done, their trucks packed and idling at the curb;
exhaust curls from their pipes and dissolves as I watch them pull away.
I think of whatever it is that looks back in longing, how the hibiscus
still blooms in February and my God, it's been years since I've seen snow.
Friday
Deconstructing Mother
I.
Beginning
She shook off Perihelion
one strangled afternoon
in a perfect gnash of gears;
a dirt burg south of Bakersfield
so hot Hell shunned membership
and so did she; flipped a fed-up
finger at the Mediterranean Cafe,
dried-out dive where simple sallies
ply pussy for promises and warm
mescal; they snickered behind
spidery hands as she played her
crafty ass flush on that final
fuck-all score and when
the heat rose like fetid smog
she yanked it loose; scorched sand
with a stripped-down skyline painted
horizon blue and raced the devil
to Babylon in a fifty-nine Ford.
II.
Middle
Mama got implants
the year the Sox traded that lousy southpaw,
because she wanted her audience of one
sorry son-of-a-bitchin' bricklayer to pay
more attention but it only made him tease-
he said they made her teeter worse
than those jade-colored juleps
she was constantly sipping because she thought
they were so couth, so uptown Savannah
but mama always did wear
her avarice on her pink velour sleeves;
even bought parquet-patterned linoleum
for our rented kitchen floor and when
the son-of-a-bitch caught that last caboose
to Birmingham one hot July night
she woke us all up; put Percy on the box-
slow-dragged us around the black and white,
her breath like mint against our upturned faces.
III.
Near The End
When mother fucked the mechanic,
years after accusations fell and nestled
into pastel carpets, along eggshell baseboards,
she led him in with coffee in a bone cup-
took his coat, his hat, his hands;
laid him down on pink nap beside a cracked
leather sofa that stank of rum, of shalimar
and hip on hip they rocked; wrung doubt
from shadows watching behind papered walls
while we watched Peyton Place upstairs,
while the calico in the window watched rain
patter against a pearl-gray sedan-
its hood up, opened like a secret.
IV.
Last Look
She takes martinis in the morning,
three jiggers to a pilsner glass;
spoon-stirred because shaking
bruises good London gin, every
Barton's baby knows that and then
she eddies angostura down the
crystalline well, arid as a nun's glove
because vermouth is only wine,
never was anyone's secret recipe
and besides, she's been to Trinidad;
danced slick-skinned on Tobago sand
while island boys watched behind
hidden eyes, swinging promises
between twitching flanks and now
her days are dry, the nights dusty-
so she drinks martinis in the morning,
three decades to a pilsner glass.
Beginning
She shook off Perihelion
one strangled afternoon
in a perfect gnash of gears;
a dirt burg south of Bakersfield
so hot Hell shunned membership
and so did she; flipped a fed-up
finger at the Mediterranean Cafe,
dried-out dive where simple sallies
ply pussy for promises and warm
mescal; they snickered behind
spidery hands as she played her
crafty ass flush on that final
fuck-all score and when
the heat rose like fetid smog
she yanked it loose; scorched sand
with a stripped-down skyline painted
horizon blue and raced the devil
to Babylon in a fifty-nine Ford.
II.
Middle
Mama got implants
the year the Sox traded that lousy southpaw,
because she wanted her audience of one
sorry son-of-a-bitchin' bricklayer to pay
more attention but it only made him tease-
he said they made her teeter worse
than those jade-colored juleps
she was constantly sipping because she thought
they were so couth, so uptown Savannah
but mama always did wear
her avarice on her pink velour sleeves;
even bought parquet-patterned linoleum
for our rented kitchen floor and when
the son-of-a-bitch caught that last caboose
to Birmingham one hot July night
she woke us all up; put Percy on the box-
slow-dragged us around the black and white,
her breath like mint against our upturned faces.
III.
Near The End
When mother fucked the mechanic,
years after accusations fell and nestled
into pastel carpets, along eggshell baseboards,
she led him in with coffee in a bone cup-
took his coat, his hat, his hands;
laid him down on pink nap beside a cracked
leather sofa that stank of rum, of shalimar
and hip on hip they rocked; wrung doubt
from shadows watching behind papered walls
while we watched Peyton Place upstairs,
while the calico in the window watched rain
patter against a pearl-gray sedan-
its hood up, opened like a secret.
IV.
Last Look
She takes martinis in the morning,
three jiggers to a pilsner glass;
spoon-stirred because shaking
bruises good London gin, every
Barton's baby knows that and then
she eddies angostura down the
crystalline well, arid as a nun's glove
because vermouth is only wine,
never was anyone's secret recipe
and besides, she's been to Trinidad;
danced slick-skinned on Tobago sand
while island boys watched behind
hidden eyes, swinging promises
between twitching flanks and now
her days are dry, the nights dusty-
so she drinks martinis in the morning,
three decades to a pilsner glass.
Tuesday
Talking To Walls
She was a big, bottle blonde
kissing the backside of forty,
looking like Mansfield might
if she hadn't blown Biloxi in the rain;
cartoon tits packing Lana Turner sweaters,
checkerberry breath clinging to tacky lips
like the promise of something sweet.
Flashing teeth and thigh six nights
out of seven, she works counter
down at the Angelica Theatre on fifty-third,
selling zabars and popcorn in greasy sacks
to strangers sweating behind familiar features;
they count their change as they walk away.
She shares time and a three-room walk-up
with a dyke she met in Jersey city,
creole stripper half her age who calls her doll
and doesn't know that mama named her Gravis,
reminder of days grown heavy, nights gone hard;
the chance missed to die without scars.
She's never talked of how she split at fifteen,
another ant struggling from someone elses afterbirth,
never telling how it felt when the cord snapped
somewhere east of Idaho; the severed end
drags behind her, erasing the ways back.
She doesn't speak of lying belly-flat
on a sheet-draped table while a man she didn't know
inked his thoughts beneath her skin; he hung
a new moon off the base of her spine, indigo stain
posed like an unfinished question.
In her dreams, faceless people hide answers
under the impossible designs; they leave clues
in concatenate patterns behind her eyes.
Sometimes late at night,
she puts Holiday on the box, sips cold duck
from a tea glass and listens to a closed throat
croon about how things get lost, how turns go wrong.
She watches the girl sleep, her still-firm flesh
the color of peppered honey; and she wonders
will years stretch it slack, or will it ride off
into some sunset in a pink Electra, wind up
on a sheet-covered stretcher, face-up to the dead.
But mostly, she thinks of voices and young girls,
how they last while they last; everything is only until.
She pours herself a kill-shot, rubs absently
at the nag buried in the small of her back,
fingers moving in concentric circles;
their remembered rhythms shushing the tell-tale moon.
kissing the backside of forty,
looking like Mansfield might
if she hadn't blown Biloxi in the rain;
cartoon tits packing Lana Turner sweaters,
checkerberry breath clinging to tacky lips
like the promise of something sweet.
Flashing teeth and thigh six nights
out of seven, she works counter
down at the Angelica Theatre on fifty-third,
selling zabars and popcorn in greasy sacks
to strangers sweating behind familiar features;
they count their change as they walk away.
She shares time and a three-room walk-up
with a dyke she met in Jersey city,
creole stripper half her age who calls her doll
and doesn't know that mama named her Gravis,
reminder of days grown heavy, nights gone hard;
the chance missed to die without scars.
She's never talked of how she split at fifteen,
another ant struggling from someone elses afterbirth,
never telling how it felt when the cord snapped
somewhere east of Idaho; the severed end
drags behind her, erasing the ways back.
She doesn't speak of lying belly-flat
on a sheet-draped table while a man she didn't know
inked his thoughts beneath her skin; he hung
a new moon off the base of her spine, indigo stain
posed like an unfinished question.
In her dreams, faceless people hide answers
under the impossible designs; they leave clues
in concatenate patterns behind her eyes.
Sometimes late at night,
she puts Holiday on the box, sips cold duck
from a tea glass and listens to a closed throat
croon about how things get lost, how turns go wrong.
She watches the girl sleep, her still-firm flesh
the color of peppered honey; and she wonders
will years stretch it slack, or will it ride off
into some sunset in a pink Electra, wind up
on a sheet-covered stretcher, face-up to the dead.
But mostly, she thinks of voices and young girls,
how they last while they last; everything is only until.
She pours herself a kill-shot, rubs absently
at the nag buried in the small of her back,
fingers moving in concentric circles;
their remembered rhythms shushing the tell-tale moon.
Monday
Where The Road Runs
He drove himself down every road.
In a Plymouth with tires balder than his head,
slicker than onions growing wild in the ditch.
Does he see the feral cats race his shadow
as it whips through the rabbit grass?
Can he hear the cicadas whirr in the Digger pines?
He claimed he saw a coyote chasing its tail
through fields white with bolls, never admitting
that coyotes ain't common around cotton;
then he would laugh like chuckles were dollars.
His opinions meant everything; his weight pulled
carts filled with sand down at the cement yard
until his yield grew so slack the big boss noticed;
let his time go with a watch and a gold smile-
he had grinned, said it was just another bone
for the archeology folks up state way to dig up
one fine afternoon, to study over like he studied roads-
everyday, a different road. He always said
he heard his oasis calling, heard the slip of streams,
smelled suckle dripping from the vine somewhere
out past the end of the Butternut groves.
Take me back, he'd say-
lead me where the roads run to earth;
leave me drink from the slipping streams,
let me draw communion from its song;
bring me grapes that hang from strapped stakes,
feed me honeysuckle sweet as time-
wash away years like the river smooths stone.
Those blacktops earned his admiration,
hugged his glass tires, pushed his days forward.
He said his satisfaction was always just ahead-
lurking in the sawgrass, swimming with water striders
across the flat planes of Gardner's pond,
caught on a high soar with the morning doves
throwing shadows like bullets on the two-lane;
their flight cutting delicate arcs through thoughts.
He paid attention to clouds, drew their chaos
in the dust on his hood. He chewed sour-thorne
as he drove, said its tang called memories
of a girl he once kissed beneath a fingernail moon.
He collected thistle from bullrushes,
strew it out his windows for the architect birds
building homes in the Silver Birch stands.
He carried a trowel in his trunk for small burials.
He couldn't remember his childrens names.
He died on a Saturday.
Parked his Plymouth on a slow rise
out where split-rails lean against the sky.
He opened his arms to a fading sun,
lent his voice to a slipping stream-
Take me! Lead me where the road runs to earth!
They found an old man on Monday, the papers said;
pillowed on piles of thistle miles from the rush thickets,
his eyes full of dew, his pockets full of grapes.
In a Plymouth with tires balder than his head,
slicker than onions growing wild in the ditch.
Does he see the feral cats race his shadow
as it whips through the rabbit grass?
Can he hear the cicadas whirr in the Digger pines?
He claimed he saw a coyote chasing its tail
through fields white with bolls, never admitting
that coyotes ain't common around cotton;
then he would laugh like chuckles were dollars.
His opinions meant everything; his weight pulled
carts filled with sand down at the cement yard
until his yield grew so slack the big boss noticed;
let his time go with a watch and a gold smile-
he had grinned, said it was just another bone
for the archeology folks up state way to dig up
one fine afternoon, to study over like he studied roads-
everyday, a different road. He always said
he heard his oasis calling, heard the slip of streams,
smelled suckle dripping from the vine somewhere
out past the end of the Butternut groves.
Take me back, he'd say-
lead me where the roads run to earth;
leave me drink from the slipping streams,
let me draw communion from its song;
bring me grapes that hang from strapped stakes,
feed me honeysuckle sweet as time-
wash away years like the river smooths stone.
Those blacktops earned his admiration,
hugged his glass tires, pushed his days forward.
He said his satisfaction was always just ahead-
lurking in the sawgrass, swimming with water striders
across the flat planes of Gardner's pond,
caught on a high soar with the morning doves
throwing shadows like bullets on the two-lane;
their flight cutting delicate arcs through thoughts.
He paid attention to clouds, drew their chaos
in the dust on his hood. He chewed sour-thorne
as he drove, said its tang called memories
of a girl he once kissed beneath a fingernail moon.
He collected thistle from bullrushes,
strew it out his windows for the architect birds
building homes in the Silver Birch stands.
He carried a trowel in his trunk for small burials.
He couldn't remember his childrens names.
He died on a Saturday.
Parked his Plymouth on a slow rise
out where split-rails lean against the sky.
He opened his arms to a fading sun,
lent his voice to a slipping stream-
Take me! Lead me where the road runs to earth!
They found an old man on Monday, the papers said;
pillowed on piles of thistle miles from the rush thickets,
his eyes full of dew, his pockets full of grapes.
Tuesday
Notes To Rachel
1
You gave me bunny slippers
for Easter, and a copy of Watership Down;
it earned you the benefit of a doubt.
I wonder how long before you are gone,
after you've vanished.
2
This morning the refridgerator
dumped cold on my bare feet;
I thought about the way
your back arched around my toes.
3
Estelle came today
with a shoebox of photographs
you had taken on our trip to Vermont;
you scribbled notes on the back
of every one.
4
When she was gone,
I read the words on each photo
over and over.
5
I walked to the mailbox
four times ahead of the mailman.
Mrs. Campos next door
thinks I'm going insane.
Maybe she's right.
6
This afternoon
I sat and watched the wallpaper peel
from the corner where the glue
never took; after a while
it looked like a time-lapse film
of rotting fruit.
I decided to get the TV fixed.
7
Estelle came by again-
this time with a girl
who looked a lot like you used to,
before those I-want lines
furrowed your forehead.
You named them all after me.
8
Estelle left and she stayed;
we drank Tanqueray with no ice
until you disappeared.
Afterwards, she slept naked
on the blue couch downstairs.
9
She was gone this morning,
left a note under your smiley magnet.
I didn't read it.
It wasn't from you.
10
I went to Delmar's for breakfast,
but negatives of you live there,
the leatherette booths mocked me.
I snuck out before my order was up;
I can't go back.
11
Going home,
I thought I saw your head
above a clutch of backpacks on sixth street;
but it turned out to be
just another blurred ghost.
12
Mrs. Campos watches me
walk up the drive;
I grin and wave like a lunatic-
as if I never saw the falling,
as if I don't know it will be years
before I feel the crash.
You gave me bunny slippers
for Easter, and a copy of Watership Down;
it earned you the benefit of a doubt.
I wonder how long before you are gone,
after you've vanished.
2
This morning the refridgerator
dumped cold on my bare feet;
I thought about the way
your back arched around my toes.
3
Estelle came today
with a shoebox of photographs
you had taken on our trip to Vermont;
you scribbled notes on the back
of every one.
4
When she was gone,
I read the words on each photo
over and over.
5
I walked to the mailbox
four times ahead of the mailman.
Mrs. Campos next door
thinks I'm going insane.
Maybe she's right.
6
This afternoon
I sat and watched the wallpaper peel
from the corner where the glue
never took; after a while
it looked like a time-lapse film
of rotting fruit.
I decided to get the TV fixed.
7
Estelle came by again-
this time with a girl
who looked a lot like you used to,
before those I-want lines
furrowed your forehead.
You named them all after me.
8
Estelle left and she stayed;
we drank Tanqueray with no ice
until you disappeared.
Afterwards, she slept naked
on the blue couch downstairs.
9
She was gone this morning,
left a note under your smiley magnet.
I didn't read it.
It wasn't from you.
10
I went to Delmar's for breakfast,
but negatives of you live there,
the leatherette booths mocked me.
I snuck out before my order was up;
I can't go back.
11
Going home,
I thought I saw your head
above a clutch of backpacks on sixth street;
but it turned out to be
just another blurred ghost.
12
Mrs. Campos watches me
walk up the drive;
I grin and wave like a lunatic-
as if I never saw the falling,
as if I don't know it will be years
before I feel the crash.
What Frank Knew
She pauses on the rim
of the shimmering desert,
lights a sweet caporal
with a boot-struck match,
shadowed face floating behind
the arc of a blue diamond
and suddenly she's Ava,
backwoods beauty stolen
from an old movie, playing
a sultry scene in sweat-wet khaki
beneath a hot California moon,
swaying to forgotten strains
of silent music that tickle
my memory, tighten my senses
and now she turns, turning
to smile at me dark-haired and
dangerous and all at once
I recognize the pull, fall
under the hard draw
of a sucking tide and I am
swallowed, sluiced down a perfect
throat like the perfect shot and
I understand, same as Frank did,
the nature of certain addictions.
of the shimmering desert,
lights a sweet caporal
with a boot-struck match,
shadowed face floating behind
the arc of a blue diamond
and suddenly she's Ava,
backwoods beauty stolen
from an old movie, playing
a sultry scene in sweat-wet khaki
beneath a hot California moon,
swaying to forgotten strains
of silent music that tickle
my memory, tighten my senses
and now she turns, turning
to smile at me dark-haired and
dangerous and all at once
I recognize the pull, fall
under the hard draw
of a sucking tide and I am
swallowed, sluiced down a perfect
throat like the perfect shot and
I understand, same as Frank did,
the nature of certain addictions.
Sunday
Segue
After seven Dewar's
straight-up because anything else
is less than enough;
after the premeditated swallows,
one blister-pack to a shot-
the segue of the day is a closed door
at the end of a hall, and this:
stumble-hand on a knob,
blast of TV glow slaps the mirror
and in it, the reflected you;
riddle of hair, bone, sated breath.
Sung asleep by his demons, Azrael waits;
splayed in handsome repose
on seminal sheets that smell of dirt-
nothing but whipcord, sinew, shit.
Almost finished here
putting prologue to past;
yesterdays sloughed like a bad tattoo,
the shucked angel lies revealed,
stripped truth pulled from its own debris.
Sweat-dappled Loki in a satin sheath
turns towards a mirror to see who is there.
straight-up because anything else
is less than enough;
after the premeditated swallows,
one blister-pack to a shot-
the segue of the day is a closed door
at the end of a hall, and this:
stumble-hand on a knob,
blast of TV glow slaps the mirror
and in it, the reflected you;
riddle of hair, bone, sated breath.
Sung asleep by his demons, Azrael waits;
splayed in handsome repose
on seminal sheets that smell of dirt-
nothing but whipcord, sinew, shit.
Almost finished here
putting prologue to past;
yesterdays sloughed like a bad tattoo,
the shucked angel lies revealed,
stripped truth pulled from its own debris.
Sweat-dappled Loki in a satin sheath
turns towards a mirror to see who is there.
Encounter
I picked her up at a bar
on Southside; lipstick lez
with hair the color of cardboard
and cinnabar stilettos
that matched her scent but
didn't suit her Tanqueray stride.
She stripped while I watched,
the detached observer-
her breasts were not like
melons
only half globes of flesh and fat
and failing musculature;
nipples that were not the pert red
of Bing cherries
but puckered and flat across
their tops, angled slightly towards
the blue cut-pile of a motel 6 floor-
They look like Devils Tower
and the thought was as sudden
as a spilled shot; close encounters
of the desperate kind and the laughter
was as quick as the process
She was angry, the observer unrepentant;
what we made was not love
but raw, real in the way of imperfections,
everything and nothing at once.
After, I read her poetry she didn't understand
while she drank gin from a plastic glass
and watched the words fall
like minutes, like years.
on Southside; lipstick lez
with hair the color of cardboard
and cinnabar stilettos
that matched her scent but
didn't suit her Tanqueray stride.
She stripped while I watched,
the detached observer-
her breasts were not like
melons
only half globes of flesh and fat
and failing musculature;
nipples that were not the pert red
of Bing cherries
but puckered and flat across
their tops, angled slightly towards
the blue cut-pile of a motel 6 floor-
They look like Devils Tower
and the thought was as sudden
as a spilled shot; close encounters
of the desperate kind and the laughter
was as quick as the process
She was angry, the observer unrepentant;
what we made was not love
but raw, real in the way of imperfections,
everything and nothing at once.
After, I read her poetry she didn't understand
while she drank gin from a plastic glass
and watched the words fall
like minutes, like years.
Friday
On The Way
Hot and humid day,
a twelve pack of Red Seal
pulses my veins as I take photos
of weary Mexicans at the bus stop
and a dead end road that runs into fallen arches
with painted signs that say 'lomas del Pacifico',
a stop off Hwy 200 on the way to Mismaloya.
Drinks at a bar in La Jolla
with sweaty European tourists sad to see the beach
has eroded almost to nothing when just 3 years ago
I played volleyball there with some Argentinians
and rode a slow boat to Yelapa for cold Cervezas
then lunched in a place without electricity.
Climb out on the rocks,
take a seat on the ocean floor and drink another beer.
Rain salt-smooth stones into the calm mouth of God.
I think to myself too often, when do I leave?
How long do I sit here, directionless breeze on my nape?
Until I move on, driving with the windows down.
a twelve pack of Red Seal
pulses my veins as I take photos
of weary Mexicans at the bus stop
and a dead end road that runs into fallen arches
with painted signs that say 'lomas del Pacifico',
a stop off Hwy 200 on the way to Mismaloya.
Drinks at a bar in La Jolla
with sweaty European tourists sad to see the beach
has eroded almost to nothing when just 3 years ago
I played volleyball there with some Argentinians
and rode a slow boat to Yelapa for cold Cervezas
then lunched in a place without electricity.
Climb out on the rocks,
take a seat on the ocean floor and drink another beer.
Rain salt-smooth stones into the calm mouth of God.
I think to myself too often, when do I leave?
How long do I sit here, directionless breeze on my nape?
Until I move on, driving with the windows down.
Thursday
Chronology
I.
Day fades out, folds in-
minutes run their hands through the hours,
tangle themselves in weeks and months
like the slow grip of Kudzu twines
the passing of time around the river cypress.
Barn swallows raise their wings
against a sky angry with the roil of early rain.
They dance spirals on a gray backdrop-
ballerinas dressed in browns and russet,
their choreography follows remembered winds.
The river kisses its banks with slow pleasure.
It slides against stone and branch
like the track of a blacksnake through warm rows;
only shadows mark their passage.
II.
Colored women form a ribbon on the shelved bank-
their hands fly in rhythm as they clean fish.
scales shimmer the earth at their feet,
float atop dark water like prism.
They slip entrails beneath the surface to feed continuance.
Children pop-the-whip through young corn.
They rustle the stalks with a breeze of laughter,
frighten the snake from its basking row.
In the near distance, a dog howls his exclusion-
swallows in their cribs dip towards the sound.
An old man naps in the shade of an oak,
back pillowed against its kudzu-wrapped trunk.
Clover bees churr their approval at the still of sleep;
they waft in drifting circles around his shoulders.
III.
Night draws in, pulls out-
it recedes across fields and canopies in spectrums of blue.
Swallows wake in the eaves, barn cats stretch
in the slow rift of day; their backs bowed in tight arcs.
Along ditch and fence, Queen Anne lifts her lacy heads.
Migrants jump from flatbeds onto acres of tilled earth.
They glean until dusk, carry baskets balanced on their heads.
At noon they squat in bright groups among the rows,
eat cold rice and pork from paper sacks.
Afterwards, they tuck the folded bags under their hats.
A woman in a red kerchief pins sheets to a line
strung between the span of two young oaks.
She slaps them smooth with the flats of her hands,
their sharp cracks scatter squirrels from branch to branch.
IV.
Day ends, night begins-
The river calls turtles from rock cooled with dusk.
Swallows tuck beaks to breast, the silver spruce
curls its leaves against the moon. Beneath a porch,
a dog chases rabbits through the twitch of dreams.
Mothers smoke at open windows and watch while
children follow fireflies on their uneven dance,
capture the glow in jars with punctured lids.
Their laughter bells beyond where wood meets bank,
its whisper rides ripples across the black water.
Old men sit under cypress canopies at river's edge,
their faces dim in the spill of lanterns.
Empty milk jugs tied to cane-lines bob the surface;
they pass bottles and wait for time to pull them under.
Day fades out, folds in-
minutes run their hands through the hours,
tangle themselves in weeks and months
like the slow grip of Kudzu twines
the passing of time around the river cypress.
Barn swallows raise their wings
against a sky angry with the roil of early rain.
They dance spirals on a gray backdrop-
ballerinas dressed in browns and russet,
their choreography follows remembered winds.
The river kisses its banks with slow pleasure.
It slides against stone and branch
like the track of a blacksnake through warm rows;
only shadows mark their passage.
II.
Colored women form a ribbon on the shelved bank-
their hands fly in rhythm as they clean fish.
scales shimmer the earth at their feet,
float atop dark water like prism.
They slip entrails beneath the surface to feed continuance.
Children pop-the-whip through young corn.
They rustle the stalks with a breeze of laughter,
frighten the snake from its basking row.
In the near distance, a dog howls his exclusion-
swallows in their cribs dip towards the sound.
An old man naps in the shade of an oak,
back pillowed against its kudzu-wrapped trunk.
Clover bees churr their approval at the still of sleep;
they waft in drifting circles around his shoulders.
III.
Night draws in, pulls out-
it recedes across fields and canopies in spectrums of blue.
Swallows wake in the eaves, barn cats stretch
in the slow rift of day; their backs bowed in tight arcs.
Along ditch and fence, Queen Anne lifts her lacy heads.
Migrants jump from flatbeds onto acres of tilled earth.
They glean until dusk, carry baskets balanced on their heads.
At noon they squat in bright groups among the rows,
eat cold rice and pork from paper sacks.
Afterwards, they tuck the folded bags under their hats.
A woman in a red kerchief pins sheets to a line
strung between the span of two young oaks.
She slaps them smooth with the flats of her hands,
their sharp cracks scatter squirrels from branch to branch.
IV.
Day ends, night begins-
The river calls turtles from rock cooled with dusk.
Swallows tuck beaks to breast, the silver spruce
curls its leaves against the moon. Beneath a porch,
a dog chases rabbits through the twitch of dreams.
Mothers smoke at open windows and watch while
children follow fireflies on their uneven dance,
capture the glow in jars with punctured lids.
Their laughter bells beyond where wood meets bank,
its whisper rides ripples across the black water.
Old men sit under cypress canopies at river's edge,
their faces dim in the spill of lanterns.
Empty milk jugs tied to cane-lines bob the surface;
they pass bottles and wait for time to pull them under.
Tuesday
Surrender
I remember smoking joints with you,
stained fingers twisting our hair
in tangled knots, eyes closed,
Hendrix hanging somewhere above
low-slung clouds circling our skulls.
Your body pressed against the wall
nearer the window than mine,
you pull your lips and fire erupts-
your chest struggles, deflates,
surrenders God from your lungs in drifts
that scatter the clouds to ribbon.
I've been cold before, I know
my goose flesh well. Trading breaths
with you beneath the cracked window,
its panes jitter like loose teeth
every time Jimmy walks his watchtower.
I will sleep in shifts and tonight
I'll sleep without touching you-
already miles between us, a pushing distance
that marks itself in hardwood beneath
a braided rug that smells of ruin.
I watch you, asleep on your back,
knees bent up and ankles in; pidgion-toed.
Your breath volcanoes up, visible in the chill,
then disappears as if it never was at all.
stained fingers twisting our hair
in tangled knots, eyes closed,
Hendrix hanging somewhere above
low-slung clouds circling our skulls.
Your body pressed against the wall
nearer the window than mine,
you pull your lips and fire erupts-
your chest struggles, deflates,
surrenders God from your lungs in drifts
that scatter the clouds to ribbon.
I've been cold before, I know
my goose flesh well. Trading breaths
with you beneath the cracked window,
its panes jitter like loose teeth
every time Jimmy walks his watchtower.
I will sleep in shifts and tonight
I'll sleep without touching you-
already miles between us, a pushing distance
that marks itself in hardwood beneath
a braided rug that smells of ruin.
I watch you, asleep on your back,
knees bent up and ankles in; pidgion-toed.
Your breath volcanoes up, visible in the chill,
then disappears as if it never was at all.
Sunday
Charleston, 1959
We are no longer children
to look back on, our faces turned back
in elegant black and white, hands raised
towards some forgotten goodbye.
I have iced water in a blue glass
and miss the ocean. You, the younger one,
grip time in your fist, lifted
in a toast to our father,
who still fishes summers off Charleston.
Here is the set of things.
To tell you the Sunday after David died,
daddy pulled his lips, folded them
into the sands of his face and ceased to speak.
A stony silence; the rock crags of a seawall.
To tell you months after he closed himself,
he opened again; put his hand inside
his other hand, brought them to his salted heart,
rubbed them across his driftwood mouth.
"My son David was dragging net for prawns,
in Calabash, where it gets dark early.
My boy is sun and water and blue."
His hands opened; what was held there
swelled, broke apart like whitecaps to a shore.
I placed my fist in his and to my briny lips.
to look back on, our faces turned back
in elegant black and white, hands raised
towards some forgotten goodbye.
I have iced water in a blue glass
and miss the ocean. You, the younger one,
grip time in your fist, lifted
in a toast to our father,
who still fishes summers off Charleston.
Here is the set of things.
To tell you the Sunday after David died,
daddy pulled his lips, folded them
into the sands of his face and ceased to speak.
A stony silence; the rock crags of a seawall.
To tell you months after he closed himself,
he opened again; put his hand inside
his other hand, brought them to his salted heart,
rubbed them across his driftwood mouth.
"My son David was dragging net for prawns,
in Calabash, where it gets dark early.
My boy is sun and water and blue."
His hands opened; what was held there
swelled, broke apart like whitecaps to a shore.
I placed my fist in his and to my briny lips.
Saturday
Miles, Millenniums
I tell my father "On our way to the lake,
Uncle John stopped and bought lightning
in a jar from a colored man in Opalaca"
and when he tells me "Alright, then" his face
folds in and tightens and I see him under
the bowed silver birch with leaders in his hands,
their transparent ends knotted with tiny
brass hooks and bright blue and yellow feathers;
the brim of his Redman hat hiding his brow
from the high August sun.
He looks like a photograph I saw once
of a man tying flies beneath the lace-hung
arms of river cypress; but I took no photograph,
because on this day, under that tree,
beneath that sun and in these bones my hands
would not have known where to point or what to take
for the sake of memory; in this place I am twelve.
There is a dog at my feet, or asleep on the steps,
two gunmetal cats watch a family of robins preen
in the shade of eaves; their heads sway in a strange,
imperfect rhythm. The women behind the screened door,
lovely in waisted aprons, are from another time;
a disconnected past that doesn't belong here.
I would give it up to the fireflies, to the cicadas
that sang beneath the bark of digger pines, leaving
shells of themselves behind for fall to find.
I have left it to the black-hulled pecans, to blackberries
strung along a border fence, to the big stones braced
at the bend of the river where beavers built dams
large enough to widen the turn a little every year;
both grown so much smaller now.
I remember, him and I, collapsing here;
once upon a summer knee to knee, a stolen blanket,
a rainbow-heavy creel set to soak against a bank.
Beyond sloped banks, years away, ladies sit behind screens
and fan themselves with their hems, dogs nap,
cats court the notice of birds long flown to dust.
These cypress dripping moss, this river,
those voiceless days with nothing left unsaid.
On this day, in this skin, I am twelve,
and you a shadow beneath the brim of a hat;
a foreknowledge of flyting days,
a fretwork caught in the blue of our veins.
Miles, millenniums, lightning in a jar.
Uncle John stopped and bought lightning
in a jar from a colored man in Opalaca"
and when he tells me "Alright, then" his face
folds in and tightens and I see him under
the bowed silver birch with leaders in his hands,
their transparent ends knotted with tiny
brass hooks and bright blue and yellow feathers;
the brim of his Redman hat hiding his brow
from the high August sun.
He looks like a photograph I saw once
of a man tying flies beneath the lace-hung
arms of river cypress; but I took no photograph,
because on this day, under that tree,
beneath that sun and in these bones my hands
would not have known where to point or what to take
for the sake of memory; in this place I am twelve.
There is a dog at my feet, or asleep on the steps,
two gunmetal cats watch a family of robins preen
in the shade of eaves; their heads sway in a strange,
imperfect rhythm. The women behind the screened door,
lovely in waisted aprons, are from another time;
a disconnected past that doesn't belong here.
I would give it up to the fireflies, to the cicadas
that sang beneath the bark of digger pines, leaving
shells of themselves behind for fall to find.
I have left it to the black-hulled pecans, to blackberries
strung along a border fence, to the big stones braced
at the bend of the river where beavers built dams
large enough to widen the turn a little every year;
both grown so much smaller now.
I remember, him and I, collapsing here;
once upon a summer knee to knee, a stolen blanket,
a rainbow-heavy creel set to soak against a bank.
Beyond sloped banks, years away, ladies sit behind screens
and fan themselves with their hems, dogs nap,
cats court the notice of birds long flown to dust.
These cypress dripping moss, this river,
those voiceless days with nothing left unsaid.
On this day, in this skin, I am twelve,
and you a shadow beneath the brim of a hat;
a foreknowledge of flyting days,
a fretwork caught in the blue of our veins.
Miles, millenniums, lightning in a jar.
Friday
Therapy Session At The Circle K
Don't tell me where I'm going;
you think I'm alone but you can't know
that from time to time, I sleep side by side
with beautiful girls who are afraid of the dark.
Slivers of shine beneath our random doors are never
enough, so we let up the shades of rented rooms,
flood the dead space with the dead glow of commerce.
Tonight it's the Circle K, happy round pearl
ringed in red, looming foot upon foot above the asphalt
of south avenue; everything caught within its ovum
glitters. Whores pass back and forth, showcased at its base;
tiny statues of saints hang from their lobes, depend on ribbons
from their necks; they shimmer like shattered glass.
Beside me balls some beautiful girl, asleep outside her shadow.
Her skin is olive and damp; I think of angels with emerald lips.
It seems just yesterday, I carried tricks
in a tin box covered with rock-star-hip-cats strumming their
air guitars in primary colors. My smile was brilliant, I alone
invented the high gloss of good veneer. In some city somewhere,
buzzcut ladies dance naked in glass boxes, bodies like suede cages.
In my city, dumpsters brood behind the open-all-nights, shelter
refuse from a foregone rain. No one ever told me not to spill
the milk, no one ever said that fight holds consequence too large
to recall. I never knew I was a sinner until the magic failed.
So you guessed it, Doc, I'm bothered by
a little thing or two; I don't sleep like I should, and I've got
a lily busy dying on my ktchen table. It doesn't seem to matter
how I'm aware of how selfish I can be, no one noticed when I ceased
to care. I appreciate your time, but time is a measurement of thought,
and I think too much. Logic is a beautiful girl locked against my dark,
mouth parted in the pretense of sleep; she knows, they know,
I know that I never really loved myself.
you think I'm alone but you can't know
that from time to time, I sleep side by side
with beautiful girls who are afraid of the dark.
Slivers of shine beneath our random doors are never
enough, so we let up the shades of rented rooms,
flood the dead space with the dead glow of commerce.
Tonight it's the Circle K, happy round pearl
ringed in red, looming foot upon foot above the asphalt
of south avenue; everything caught within its ovum
glitters. Whores pass back and forth, showcased at its base;
tiny statues of saints hang from their lobes, depend on ribbons
from their necks; they shimmer like shattered glass.
Beside me balls some beautiful girl, asleep outside her shadow.
Her skin is olive and damp; I think of angels with emerald lips.
It seems just yesterday, I carried tricks
in a tin box covered with rock-star-hip-cats strumming their
air guitars in primary colors. My smile was brilliant, I alone
invented the high gloss of good veneer. In some city somewhere,
buzzcut ladies dance naked in glass boxes, bodies like suede cages.
In my city, dumpsters brood behind the open-all-nights, shelter
refuse from a foregone rain. No one ever told me not to spill
the milk, no one ever said that fight holds consequence too large
to recall. I never knew I was a sinner until the magic failed.
So you guessed it, Doc, I'm bothered by
a little thing or two; I don't sleep like I should, and I've got
a lily busy dying on my ktchen table. It doesn't seem to matter
how I'm aware of how selfish I can be, no one noticed when I ceased
to care. I appreciate your time, but time is a measurement of thought,
and I think too much. Logic is a beautiful girl locked against my dark,
mouth parted in the pretense of sleep; she knows, they know,
I know that I never really loved myself.
Thursday
Canadian Club And End Results
Down my road a piece or three
lived an ex-pat named George,
who worked the CSX freighters
after he washed up in Charleston
where he discovered his age was measured
in gypsum and sweat, and his trouble
with money lost its punch somewhere
around the sixth double of Canadian Club.
He had a woman called Mac,
a blousy low-lander with a gift for gab
who washed his clothes and sometimes
floated his rent; but he put up with her lip,
he said, "because she's a fair throw
for a broke horse" and then he would laugh
open-mouthed, his teeth as yellow as his skin.
and he had a fascination with guns
that he showed me when I happened by;
an old Enfield
a 45 Magnum and a Colt
a semi-carbine with a strap
and boxes and cartons full of ammunition
"in case those mushrooms ever bloom"
he would say, his eyes wild and glaring
while he sipped his Club and misfortune
like ladies sip tea on hot afternoons.
It all resulted in a shot one morning
that pierced the still of the March air
and made the barn swallows fly off
towards the Atlantic ports
where he had been young once.
lived an ex-pat named George,
who worked the CSX freighters
after he washed up in Charleston
where he discovered his age was measured
in gypsum and sweat, and his trouble
with money lost its punch somewhere
around the sixth double of Canadian Club.
He had a woman called Mac,
a blousy low-lander with a gift for gab
who washed his clothes and sometimes
floated his rent; but he put up with her lip,
he said, "because she's a fair throw
for a broke horse" and then he would laugh
open-mouthed, his teeth as yellow as his skin.
and he had a fascination with guns
that he showed me when I happened by;
an old Enfield
a 45 Magnum and a Colt
a semi-carbine with a strap
and boxes and cartons full of ammunition
"in case those mushrooms ever bloom"
he would say, his eyes wild and glaring
while he sipped his Club and misfortune
like ladies sip tea on hot afternoons.
It all resulted in a shot one morning
that pierced the still of the March air
and made the barn swallows fly off
towards the Atlantic ports
where he had been young once.
Sunday
Words
Intent on a clutter of college ruled,
absorbed in ink and smudges of thought,
I never noticed her in the doorway,
hopeful in a hopeless red dress-
write this down, she said;
write this down so you'll listen,
so you'll hear what I got to say
the same way I hear you when you put into words
the flat of this dismal sky;
it makes me feel damp on my skin,
taste lonely at the back of my throat
and I know you think I don't know much
about words, or just how them words
make you happy when nothing else can,
but I understand well enough, I get it
when I read "nothing grows here but water"
so write this down, and listen:
I want to live out loud;
I want to be more than what I am,
I want to sit in one of them outside cafe's
sipping mint juleps like ladies do in Atlanta;
I want to wear my hair up in curls, silk on my back,
smell anything besides magnolia and tobacco and dirt-
I need to tell my daddy
that the best look at God is from hell,
not a pulpit and I need to let my momma see
what she closed her eyes to at night;
I need to learn how to cry and remember
that tears is just so much salty water.
I have to chip out what's been covered in stone.
I want to read on them pages someday
that maybe I was special; that you noticed
how I held you, your sap still on my hands,
while you twisted uneasy in sleep.
Let me see it put down that you thought I was pretty,
hair the color of honey off the comb, skin like butter.
Paint me in a poem that will find its way out of here-
She caught her breath with a hitch,
a sound so small that I bent to catch it.
Her fingers fluttered, familiar against her neck;
she turned, walked away without another word-
her talc lingered long after she'd gone.
absorbed in ink and smudges of thought,
I never noticed her in the doorway,
hopeful in a hopeless red dress-
write this down, she said;
write this down so you'll listen,
so you'll hear what I got to say
the same way I hear you when you put into words
the flat of this dismal sky;
it makes me feel damp on my skin,
taste lonely at the back of my throat
and I know you think I don't know much
about words, or just how them words
make you happy when nothing else can,
but I understand well enough, I get it
when I read "nothing grows here but water"
so write this down, and listen:
I want to live out loud;
I want to be more than what I am,
I want to sit in one of them outside cafe's
sipping mint juleps like ladies do in Atlanta;
I want to wear my hair up in curls, silk on my back,
smell anything besides magnolia and tobacco and dirt-
I need to tell my daddy
that the best look at God is from hell,
not a pulpit and I need to let my momma see
what she closed her eyes to at night;
I need to learn how to cry and remember
that tears is just so much salty water.
I have to chip out what's been covered in stone.
I want to read on them pages someday
that maybe I was special; that you noticed
how I held you, your sap still on my hands,
while you twisted uneasy in sleep.
Let me see it put down that you thought I was pretty,
hair the color of honey off the comb, skin like butter.
Paint me in a poem that will find its way out of here-
She caught her breath with a hitch,
a sound so small that I bent to catch it.
Her fingers fluttered, familiar against her neck;
she turned, walked away without another word-
her talc lingered long after she'd gone.
Saturday
The Bullshit Chronicles, Chapter one
Still-black dawn cracks
over dove country-
staccato shots rip me from sleep
as they rip breath from flight;
rude alarms without faces.
Light brings the neighbors’ girl
to roost in a fall field-
arms full of the plastic lives
of several dolls with neoprene skin.
Her tinny voice trills across
my coffee, the forgotten words
of some long ago song-
“On the wings of a snow white dove-”
It shudders behind my eyes,
the goose-fleshed imprints linger all day.
End of day finds her
at the edge of my yard;
scuffed hands cupped around a dead bird.
She offers it like truth-
quick, free of fanfare.
“Bullshit,” she says, nodding her head
to some secret agreement.
“The wings are just grey, after all.”
over dove country-
staccato shots rip me from sleep
as they rip breath from flight;
rude alarms without faces.
Light brings the neighbors’ girl
to roost in a fall field-
arms full of the plastic lives
of several dolls with neoprene skin.
Her tinny voice trills across
my coffee, the forgotten words
of some long ago song-
“On the wings of a snow white dove-”
It shudders behind my eyes,
the goose-fleshed imprints linger all day.
End of day finds her
at the edge of my yard;
scuffed hands cupped around a dead bird.
She offers it like truth-
quick, free of fanfare.
“Bullshit,” she says, nodding her head
to some secret agreement.
“The wings are just grey, after all.”
Tuesday
Incident
He was a small man
made to seem tall by a two button pinstripe
and a chevron tie, all in muted shades
of classic gray; bottom button undone
of course-
reclined against the polished pearl door
of a businessman's sedan, he tapped
a black Bostonian against the curb with
an impatient rhythm and his socks were
ribbed, certainly-
he drew two cards from a leather tri-fold,
passed them with manicured hands to a big man
in a cheap suit and wondered loudly what the matter
was; it was clearly not his fault
how could it be
when anyone with a good eye that happened
to be on the corner of South and Main
at the particular moment of the incident could see
that the signal was, of course it was
in his favor
and he wanted to know why yellow tape was being
strung, why photos were being taken and why weren’t
the medics allowed to bag it up, get it off the street
before it offended the ladies who lunched al fresco
after all
it was only a little nigger
that thought he could break the law, beat the light
anytime he wanted because everyone knows that they
think they own the road and besides, he would only have
grown up to be a Democrat.
made to seem tall by a two button pinstripe
and a chevron tie, all in muted shades
of classic gray; bottom button undone
of course-
reclined against the polished pearl door
of a businessman's sedan, he tapped
a black Bostonian against the curb with
an impatient rhythm and his socks were
ribbed, certainly-
he drew two cards from a leather tri-fold,
passed them with manicured hands to a big man
in a cheap suit and wondered loudly what the matter
was; it was clearly not his fault
how could it be
when anyone with a good eye that happened
to be on the corner of South and Main
at the particular moment of the incident could see
that the signal was, of course it was
in his favor
and he wanted to know why yellow tape was being
strung, why photos were being taken and why weren’t
the medics allowed to bag it up, get it off the street
before it offended the ladies who lunched al fresco
after all
it was only a little nigger
that thought he could break the law, beat the light
anytime he wanted because everyone knows that they
think they own the road and besides, he would only have
grown up to be a Democrat.
Wednesday
Acts Of Diffusion
I.
Half-light scatters through sundowned trees,
their leaves turned against the cusp of night.
It silvers itself across a deadfall floor,
casts long reflections from the rough surface
that reach up, sweep back in particled waves
to dust the saw palmettos like crushed glass.
II.
Warblers throw their voices along nodding banks,
the sound spans the gaps between day and dusk.
Fog and branch catch notes full-throated in webs
of mist, scarves of bark until their range is sieved;
becomes shadow song that sifts down on winter’s chill,
a fallen silence translucent as frost on a breath.
III.
Across the scope of night, little deaths count time
on the faces of fawn, fox, red-tipped squirrel.
The dark primeval eats its heart, follows its cycle
through copse and covert by motion, by memory;
seasons imbrue lineage in dispassionate blood,
seed their continuance on a vanishing pulse.
Half-light scatters through sundowned trees,
their leaves turned against the cusp of night.
It silvers itself across a deadfall floor,
casts long reflections from the rough surface
that reach up, sweep back in particled waves
to dust the saw palmettos like crushed glass.
II.
Warblers throw their voices along nodding banks,
the sound spans the gaps between day and dusk.
Fog and branch catch notes full-throated in webs
of mist, scarves of bark until their range is sieved;
becomes shadow song that sifts down on winter’s chill,
a fallen silence translucent as frost on a breath.
III.
Across the scope of night, little deaths count time
on the faces of fawn, fox, red-tipped squirrel.
The dark primeval eats its heart, follows its cycle
through copse and covert by motion, by memory;
seasons imbrue lineage in dispassionate blood,
seed their continuance on a vanishing pulse.
Thursday
Theory Of Relaxation
Chest deep in bramble and bog,
pre-dawn chill rubs my shoulders,
kisses the back of my neck
where collar parts company with hair.
Fingers shoved in my pocket
fondle rounds stored there; loose extras
in case the three slips in my pack
are not enough to piss off Pan.
Core-Lokt soft-point, "The deadliest mushroom
in the woods", or so says Remington
on the back of their olive green box.
It's here I flirt with madness-
watch day lift above a night of sweats
and rapid-fire recall; not the hunter but
the hunted, bound to the now by thread, by thorn.
Dali has brushed me onto yesteryears' canvas,
a warped study in camouflaged oils, crossing Thai Binh
on a sampan heavy with mortars and babies dressed
in drab rolling weed in yellow papers that taste of banana.
Cramped joints bid my mind relax; relax,
for you have seen mushrooms in the bush with
nary a round to finger, no thirty-ought-six nestled
against your crotch like salvation's erection-
just a clap bag full of mud and morphine.
Dismal smells like Haiphong. Dank peat, moldered moss;
the sulpher taint of swamp milkweed lines nostrils
with a burn of memory. Fog-hung lowlands shine silver
and purple and green; the dead men beneath those canopies
grow bulrushes from their bones that sing in the breeze.
Crouched deep in last year's deadfall,
marsh sucks my boots with hungry insistence, holds
the hunter's pose with rooted grip. My chest rises,
falls; cold exhalations alone mark my presence.
Whitetail watch from the woodline.
when they move, I will not hear it; no crack of twig
or rustle of leaf to signify their range.
Soon, the bucks will forage the ground cover for fall bulbs,
their racks dipped towards papered hooves-
And I will fire into the wakening sky,
round after round until muscles are loosed; until
my tight canvas relaxes its stretch and spills a voice
into the empty air- sharp retorts that hold no echo.
pre-dawn chill rubs my shoulders,
kisses the back of my neck
where collar parts company with hair.
Fingers shoved in my pocket
fondle rounds stored there; loose extras
in case the three slips in my pack
are not enough to piss off Pan.
Core-Lokt soft-point, "The deadliest mushroom
in the woods", or so says Remington
on the back of their olive green box.
It's here I flirt with madness-
watch day lift above a night of sweats
and rapid-fire recall; not the hunter but
the hunted, bound to the now by thread, by thorn.
Dali has brushed me onto yesteryears' canvas,
a warped study in camouflaged oils, crossing Thai Binh
on a sampan heavy with mortars and babies dressed
in drab rolling weed in yellow papers that taste of banana.
Cramped joints bid my mind relax; relax,
for you have seen mushrooms in the bush with
nary a round to finger, no thirty-ought-six nestled
against your crotch like salvation's erection-
just a clap bag full of mud and morphine.
Dismal smells like Haiphong. Dank peat, moldered moss;
the sulpher taint of swamp milkweed lines nostrils
with a burn of memory. Fog-hung lowlands shine silver
and purple and green; the dead men beneath those canopies
grow bulrushes from their bones that sing in the breeze.
Crouched deep in last year's deadfall,
marsh sucks my boots with hungry insistence, holds
the hunter's pose with rooted grip. My chest rises,
falls; cold exhalations alone mark my presence.
Whitetail watch from the woodline.
when they move, I will not hear it; no crack of twig
or rustle of leaf to signify their range.
Soon, the bucks will forage the ground cover for fall bulbs,
their racks dipped towards papered hooves-
And I will fire into the wakening sky,
round after round until muscles are loosed; until
my tight canvas relaxes its stretch and spills a voice
into the empty air- sharp retorts that hold no echo.
Sunday
Mudkats
A man in a filthy ballcap
sits the curb in front of the Circle K.
The hat reads MUDKATS in red letters so raveled
they sway busily in the random breeze.
go Mudkats, he mutters to himself.
Beside him sits a yellow dog,
an old girl by anyone's account.
The man screams at it, a chorus of names.
"You don't wanna piss me off! Goddamned dog!"
The dog sits very still.
She doesn't want to piss him off.
The man has a rucksack that was blue once;
but now is as faded as his eyes.
It's stuffed with something enough to burst its seams
in several strategic places, but nothing spills out.
Its smell rivals the dumpster parked on a slant
in the back lot.
Later, he pulls a bottle from his sack
and slugs himself sleepy.
He takes off his cap and rests his head on the dog's haunch-
a sleep so deep that someone might steal his cap
if it wasn't for the goddamned dog.
sits the curb in front of the Circle K.
The hat reads MUDKATS in red letters so raveled
they sway busily in the random breeze.
go Mudkats, he mutters to himself.
Beside him sits a yellow dog,
an old girl by anyone's account.
The man screams at it, a chorus of names.
"You don't wanna piss me off! Goddamned dog!"
The dog sits very still.
She doesn't want to piss him off.
The man has a rucksack that was blue once;
but now is as faded as his eyes.
It's stuffed with something enough to burst its seams
in several strategic places, but nothing spills out.
Its smell rivals the dumpster parked on a slant
in the back lot.
Later, he pulls a bottle from his sack
and slugs himself sleepy.
He takes off his cap and rests his head on the dog's haunch-
a sleep so deep that someone might steal his cap
if it wasn't for the goddamned dog.
Saturday
God and the Jayhawke
I found God
holed up with a jayhawke in my corn crib.
They were quietly discussing Cain and knocking back mescal
like nobody's business; certainly not mine.
"He thought I was a vegetarian," said God, "brought me
three sheaves of corn then got pissed because I rejected them;
but I made his parents in my image and everyone knows
that you eat the world or the world eats you-
I ask you, friend hawke, how simple a truth is that?"
Seems Cain rose right on up, iced Abel's ass with a sharp slate;
then offered up a ribroast to granddad in an effort to keep the peace,
because of the corn. " I of course had to send him packing;
Abel was a tough old bird, too tough to tenderize."
The hawke nodded in commiseration while wiping mescal
from his blue breast with one wing.
But Cain prospered anyway; built a city on corn and babble-
"But what can you do," said God, "they are only grandkids after all.
Played too much with the ravens when they were kids;
nasty birds with evil dispositions" The hawke seemed to agree,
his head tilted slightly to the left, the better to hear by.
I walked away then, never an interloper, wondering why
silence can be so goddamned loud; loud enough to wake the dead-
send them slope-footed up my back stairs to sit at my kitchen table,
we, the oldest of friends, comfortable in the weight of our skins,
listening as the stilted truth pushes through a rusty sieve.
You eat the world or the world eats you said somebody in some long ago.
And everyone knows, as God and the hawke will tell you if you ask;
We lie best when we lie to ourselves.
holed up with a jayhawke in my corn crib.
They were quietly discussing Cain and knocking back mescal
like nobody's business; certainly not mine.
"He thought I was a vegetarian," said God, "brought me
three sheaves of corn then got pissed because I rejected them;
but I made his parents in my image and everyone knows
that you eat the world or the world eats you-
I ask you, friend hawke, how simple a truth is that?"
Seems Cain rose right on up, iced Abel's ass with a sharp slate;
then offered up a ribroast to granddad in an effort to keep the peace,
because of the corn. " I of course had to send him packing;
Abel was a tough old bird, too tough to tenderize."
The hawke nodded in commiseration while wiping mescal
from his blue breast with one wing.
But Cain prospered anyway; built a city on corn and babble-
"But what can you do," said God, "they are only grandkids after all.
Played too much with the ravens when they were kids;
nasty birds with evil dispositions" The hawke seemed to agree,
his head tilted slightly to the left, the better to hear by.
I walked away then, never an interloper, wondering why
silence can be so goddamned loud; loud enough to wake the dead-
send them slope-footed up my back stairs to sit at my kitchen table,
we, the oldest of friends, comfortable in the weight of our skins,
listening as the stilted truth pushes through a rusty sieve.
You eat the world or the world eats you said somebody in some long ago.
And everyone knows, as God and the hawke will tell you if you ask;
We lie best when we lie to ourselves.
Thursday
Untitled
There are things carved in relief.
Like the skeletons of churches,
a sub-rosa apparatus beneath bone.
I am always drowning in marrow.
Decision tips an hourglass;
what was sand is smoke.
She got her first tattoo
in a shop on second street;
a kite that ribboned its tail
around her wrist.
Years later, a diner in Trent;
a backwash of Bakelite and teak.
She smoked clove cigarettes,
lips drawn in stichlines.
We questioned, teeth to skin,
reflections in a third eye;
images fell from an iris' edge-
impressions lost in the drift.
Borromean dropped a ring,
what was left was crossed.
Behind a heavy door,
a kite with a faded tail
identifies the wrist.
A man in a smock with sleeves
too short for his arms
traces its marbled flight;
beneath his palm he knows
every scar is a victory.
Like the skeletons of churches,
a sub-rosa apparatus beneath bone.
I am always drowning in marrow.
Decision tips an hourglass;
what was sand is smoke.
She got her first tattoo
in a shop on second street;
a kite that ribboned its tail
around her wrist.
Years later, a diner in Trent;
a backwash of Bakelite and teak.
She smoked clove cigarettes,
lips drawn in stichlines.
We questioned, teeth to skin,
reflections in a third eye;
images fell from an iris' edge-
impressions lost in the drift.
Borromean dropped a ring,
what was left was crossed.
Behind a heavy door,
a kite with a faded tail
identifies the wrist.
A man in a smock with sleeves
too short for his arms
traces its marbled flight;
beneath his palm he knows
every scar is a victory.
Tuesday
Love Is Relative
In my father's private closet,
scotch-taped to the inside door
(not tacked; tacks will mar the grain, John...)
was a picture of Rita Hayworth
all slink and smoke in that Gilda dress,
no straps and a poised Pall Mall,
cherry lipstick on its air-brushed filter
(I go to bed at night with her, son, but wake to your mother)
The picture was tattered, torn at the edges;
peeled down in a place or two like black satin gloves
it was signed at the bottom corner, in faded ink
that read 'To John...Love, Margarita'
(Close the closet, dear, I can't stand the excitement)
I asked my father once who signed that blue name
but it turned out to be 'just a girl from Brooklyn, kid'
who danced at the Palace Theater where he ushered
society couples to their seats for 10 cents an hour
(but now he is a faithful and obedient servant)
That picture hung there as long as I did, and longer;
it warmed him, it was the only thing that ever did and
when my father died, I found it folded neatly beneath
his unionsuits, in a drawer my mother never touched
(more women in the world than anything, else, son)
except insects. But what I want to know is
did it bother you?
scotch-taped to the inside door
(not tacked; tacks will mar the grain, John...)
was a picture of Rita Hayworth
all slink and smoke in that Gilda dress,
no straps and a poised Pall Mall,
cherry lipstick on its air-brushed filter
(I go to bed at night with her, son, but wake to your mother)
The picture was tattered, torn at the edges;
peeled down in a place or two like black satin gloves
it was signed at the bottom corner, in faded ink
that read 'To John...Love, Margarita'
(Close the closet, dear, I can't stand the excitement)
I asked my father once who signed that blue name
but it turned out to be 'just a girl from Brooklyn, kid'
who danced at the Palace Theater where he ushered
society couples to their seats for 10 cents an hour
(but now he is a faithful and obedient servant)
That picture hung there as long as I did, and longer;
it warmed him, it was the only thing that ever did and
when my father died, I found it folded neatly beneath
his unionsuits, in a drawer my mother never touched
(more women in the world than anything, else, son)
except insects. But what I want to know is
did it bother you?
Sunday
Just So
I.
There are fine scars across my back
that belong to someone else; every now and then
when she turns from a mirror hung just so,
the lilt of her lip remembers a smile.
I speak to her once and again, sentences whole
and without sound; the deadfall of yesteryear.
We feel the push of breath in an answer,
what words are there tangle the distance in between.
II.
A mirror hung just so catches a thought of smile
and remembers the involuntary pull of muscle.
I taste the stir of conversation across my skin;
silence settles there in the cool drifts of its tone.
Hands climb a ladder of scars, hip to nape;
fingers trace each rung, draw questions in sweat.
A whist of words ravel in this separation of air;
echoes whisper one to another the burden of reply.
There are fine scars across my back
that belong to someone else; every now and then
when she turns from a mirror hung just so,
the lilt of her lip remembers a smile.
I speak to her once and again, sentences whole
and without sound; the deadfall of yesteryear.
We feel the push of breath in an answer,
what words are there tangle the distance in between.
II.
A mirror hung just so catches a thought of smile
and remembers the involuntary pull of muscle.
I taste the stir of conversation across my skin;
silence settles there in the cool drifts of its tone.
Hands climb a ladder of scars, hip to nape;
fingers trace each rung, draw questions in sweat.
A whist of words ravel in this separation of air;
echoes whisper one to another the burden of reply.
Tuesday
The Night
ends in layers
on her kitchen floor;
jackets, boots and kitten heels
form conclusions on stained tile.
I wasn't in her
apartment five minutes
before the phone rang; low talk
in another room that meant nothing.
Later, in bed, she explained
the call as a boyfriend, suspicious;
we both pretended that it might matter.
She was the first woman
to acknowledge the scars
laddered from my shoulder to my hip;
she walked her fingers down the raised
rungs without asking why.
On the bedside stand,
familar icons: Schnapps, seconal,
lamp with a pink ruffled shade.
Somewhere in the room, a cat growled
its disapproval. After, she slept-
on her side, a locked blade.
I sat on the edge, tried but couldn't
remember her name. The cat appeared,
wound between my feet,
its censure forgotten. I stroked its fur,
felt flesh shiver over bone.
"Your'e a good cat," I said. "A good cat."
on her kitchen floor;
jackets, boots and kitten heels
form conclusions on stained tile.
I wasn't in her
apartment five minutes
before the phone rang; low talk
in another room that meant nothing.
Later, in bed, she explained
the call as a boyfriend, suspicious;
we both pretended that it might matter.
She was the first woman
to acknowledge the scars
laddered from my shoulder to my hip;
she walked her fingers down the raised
rungs without asking why.
On the bedside stand,
familar icons: Schnapps, seconal,
lamp with a pink ruffled shade.
Somewhere in the room, a cat growled
its disapproval. After, she slept-
on her side, a locked blade.
I sat on the edge, tried but couldn't
remember her name. The cat appeared,
wound between my feet,
its censure forgotten. I stroked its fur,
felt flesh shiver over bone.
"Your'e a good cat," I said. "A good cat."
Yardbird
When I was young,
my mother had a cat she called yardbird,
because, she said, the ripples his shanks
made as he strolled our street
reminded her of a night in Tunisia;
a place that waited for her most evenings
beneath a diamond wieghted with nickles,
under shades draped in faded red.
Bird would follow her there,
a slink of sinew and strut around shadow.
Sphinx-posed on her lap, she would offer him
dips in a glass of warm Dewars,
run rough hands through his black coat
and whisper "I would wear you like a skin,
heat-heavy in alleys and jazz dives, my tongue
tight for the taste of something more than this."
When he died, alone while the house slept,
she buried him by the back steps; his cool bones
left to dust themselves in a shoebox laced
with shots of scotch, shards of pressed wax.
She never went back to Tunisia; sat instead,
when the weather was good, on the last rise
of a low stoop, and watched the paper mill stacks
flick their soot tails against the smooth night sky.
my mother had a cat she called yardbird,
because, she said, the ripples his shanks
made as he strolled our street
reminded her of a night in Tunisia;
a place that waited for her most evenings
beneath a diamond wieghted with nickles,
under shades draped in faded red.
Bird would follow her there,
a slink of sinew and strut around shadow.
Sphinx-posed on her lap, she would offer him
dips in a glass of warm Dewars,
run rough hands through his black coat
and whisper "I would wear you like a skin,
heat-heavy in alleys and jazz dives, my tongue
tight for the taste of something more than this."
When he died, alone while the house slept,
she buried him by the back steps; his cool bones
left to dust themselves in a shoebox laced
with shots of scotch, shards of pressed wax.
She never went back to Tunisia; sat instead,
when the weather was good, on the last rise
of a low stoop, and watched the paper mill stacks
flick their soot tails against the smooth night sky.
Around The Night Kitchen
Mama got implants
the year the Sox traded that lousy southpaw,
because she wanted her audience of one
sorry son-of-a-bitchin' bricklayer to pay
more attention but it only made him tease-
he said they made her teeter worse
than those jade-colored juleps
she was constantly sipping because she thought
they were so couth, so uptown Savannah
but mama always did wear
her avarice on her pink velour sleeves;
even bought parquet-patterned linoleum
for our rented kitchen floor and when
the son-of-a-bitch caught that last caboose
to Birmingham one hot July night
she woke us all up; put Percy on the box-
slow-dragged us around the black and white,
her breath like mint against our upturned faces.
the year the Sox traded that lousy southpaw,
because she wanted her audience of one
sorry son-of-a-bitchin' bricklayer to pay
more attention but it only made him tease-
he said they made her teeter worse
than those jade-colored juleps
she was constantly sipping because she thought
they were so couth, so uptown Savannah
but mama always did wear
her avarice on her pink velour sleeves;
even bought parquet-patterned linoleum
for our rented kitchen floor and when
the son-of-a-bitch caught that last caboose
to Birmingham one hot July night
she woke us all up; put Percy on the box-
slow-dragged us around the black and white,
her breath like mint against our upturned faces.
Monday
Five Days (A Compilation)
Prologue:
A view from my flying jimmy.
Listen: hounds loose their run trill reveille behind the lines
of white pine and cedar and elm that guard my seclusion.
I pretend I'm dreaming-then I am-waltzing with Jane
barefoot and ballgowned through a wood: music howls
somewhere beyond the grey, somewhere in the black.
So I oversleep and wonder when I wake why my feet are ice.
I fly to work down back roads that turn suddenly
into streets miles from my driveway graveled and
tucked between menacing rows of black-hulled pecans:
they bear on the third year and I keep their fallen ancestors
packed naked in blue Tupperware tubs stacked in my freezer.
The cockpit of my jimmy is strewn with dead coffee cups.
Jack-in-the-boxes lay discarded and dying on the floorboards
-similar slaughters of necessity-ketchup clotted to their sides.
Last month's cable bill flaps under the visor like a battle flag.
Tobacco whips by on the left and on the right so fast
each leaf on every stalk stands out in surreal base-relief.
I taste the sharp and bitter tang of suckering plants:
it reminds me of my father's pall malls and politics and
the smell of money seeded from blood.
Barn swallows rise in lazy tourbillions from the fields
their beaks and bellies full of yellow and green hornworms.
I wing past Buck's BBQ Pit (You Can't Beat Our Meat)-past
Lucy's Do-Lounge where the girls serve more than shots
-past Big Jim's Quick Mart: the stoner kid who pumps gas
raises a hand in reflex. I don't wave back in sympathetic apathy.
Most mornings I stop to kill coffee cups but today I'm late.
Tenant houses rush by on either side, their concrete blocks
painted with Kudzu and mildew: I think of abattoirs and
oubliettes and other inevitable exits. Children and dogs and
cheap molded toys from the plastic plant over in Elroy dot
the tiny dirt yards-little boys and little girls stand in stagnant
ditches chunking rocks at death while their mamas are inside
fucking the mailman or watching General Hospital on TV.
I see slideshow flashes of their faces and I hope I don't
have to come back out this way: scrape them up, heads
cracked open, futures frying on asphalt like so many eggs.
I pass the city limit sign-some of the holes are mine-ringed
in rust and canted to one side. Courthouse looms right,
county buildings lurch left and blocks ahead day meets night
where tracks split the city: segregation in iron ties old as time.
I pull into my lot-number six, section twelve-filled with cars
and trucks and bikes but I am the only flying jimmy.
Everything ticks: engine, watch, pulse-alpha papa charlie-
the people that mill outside my windshield tick with tension.
I want to turn the key, turn around, turn into my driveway
where squirrels sit stuffing my sweet meats in their jaws:
instead I clinch mine-name rank serial number-open the door
and step out.
Listen: animals sprung their cages snarl in angry unavoce
behind walls of brick and steel and glass that guard nothing.
Day One.
Today I reached a milestone; no morphine. It's now been
almost 24 hours since my last hit, and it's got me a bit...well...
strange. A good friend I've never had the pleasure of meeting
suggested I try Ketamine as a weener for the opiate,
and for awhile, it worked. But it made me nervous.
I don't like nervous.
So I've just been backing it down and yesterday, 5 mg. Today,
zero. Considering that 6 months ago it was at least 60 mics a day,
I think I'm doing OK.
Circa 6 months ago
Day breaks
(how cliched is THAT)
over some North Carolina
backwater
mosquitoes dance
in pulsed pockets
above stagnant runs
that glimmer with rainbowed
slicks across the surface
and in the arc
of a dirty pane
(it looks out at an equally
dirty alley that leads
to some inconsequential river)
an 18 gauge cath
will glimmer
as soon as it unsheaths
it's equally 18 gauged
needle
loaded
(HAHA! What a LOADED word)
with a loading dose-
best painkillers
deft fingers can cop
when no one is watching
where the latexed hand went
after the sting
is gone
comes the calm
that stays awhile
awhile
awhile
before going back home
with all its little perks
packed on its glass back
but there's always
more
more
more
where that came from-
it lurks and smiles
(make that GRINS,
it grins with metered teeth)
among versed and valium
(those paens of blessed slumber)
tossed in with toredal and
sucs...sucs rocks!
on such a permanent
level
maybe that's the level
I need
to
sink
to.
I find I miss the ritual almost as much as the calm. Drawing up
my morning fix, opening the alchohol prep, carefully swabbing
the spot on my thigh that has grown a little thick with scar tissue.
The thin needle resembles the probiscus of an insistent
mosquito, intent on the sting. I miss that sting, too.
I've been a junkie since 'Nam, where smack was so plentiful
it practically fell from every duffle.
It was a necessary thing, a thing to be done
so things could be done. Once the body becomes
aclimated to the opiate, the 'high' subsides and only that strange
and languid calm remains. It enabled you to wade through endless
days of mindless horror with blinders on. I was there four years,
and by the first 8 months it all seemed surreal;
a vampire flick where all the bloodsuckers
were named Charlie, wore black pajamas
and paper slippers...hello, Harold and Jim.
Harold and Jim.
The people who people my town wear paper shoes,
a lot like charlie did in days of yore, slipping
through fields of gore with barely a bone to rattle
their presence; nothing to signify sound or fury and
it was just so today in the Piggly Wiggly;
10:30 of a bright blue Monday with a hand basket sporting
the latest in milk and brown eggs, at the end
of aisle 6 where they (they?) keep canned peaches,
behind attractive stacks of green and orange cans I hear
this:
"...only a nigger kid, who gives a righteous fuck? Held me up
for two hours because the little coon didn't have enough sense
to cross on the light; now I ask you, Jim, what's a law
abiding white man to do when the po-lice officer's a nigger
too?"
Never heard them come up the peach aisle, Jim and his
good buddy Harold (because it said so in neat red stitch
above the pocket of his blue chambrey workshirt) the paper
shoes that covered their approach looked a lot like Redwing
boots that I know Jim and Harold valued almost as much
as the 410's that surely hung against the back glass of their
F150 Fords and when they started noticing my not noticing
I moved on around the corner to aisle 8 (isn't that strange)
where all the things I'll never need like Pampers and Gerber
and Bottle (warmers?) are kept and through the open shelves
that line all the aisles in the neighborly Piggly Wiggly the
conversation continues and from behind strained bananas I hear
this:
"...that dyke who works for the Rescue squad that's who, some
of us went to the county meeting about those types picking up
our wives and such, having to touch 'em and all and sometimes
even taking off their clothes but it didn't do no good and now
I just take my women to town myself if they need hospital help..."
But I've picked up your wife, Jim, and your sister too, both
of them too drunk to have sense enough to not drive home and
if you knew what all they promised the nigger cops we called
if only they wouldn't tell you where they were or what they
had been doing, why, you would just SHIT Jim, I swear-
On those same paper feet two little old ladies who favored
my forgotten ma had sidled up beside me and I realized that
I was giggling to myself, probably looked like I was drunk myself
so I walked away to aisle 10 (?) and as I tried to look
oh-so-interested in pickled okra and sweet rind pickles
some kid without any paper shoes
(just keds with dirty laces) walked
right up and asked me straight-out in a too-loud little kid voice
why my hair was cut just like a boy's and why was I wearing
Dickies just like his dad's- dont'cha know you're a girl-
says he and I never heard his mama (paper shoes) come out of
nowhere to grab him up and whisk him off like I might be catching.
So I add a jar of those sweet rinds to my milk and eggs, find
myself seven aisles later standing in the checkout behind Jim
and Harold and their suitcase of after-work Schlitz, in front
of the ladies with their ensure and wild rice, and I looked
for the kid, but I guess his mama was busy somewhere in the back
teaching him not to talk to strangers with boy-hair
and I wondered if she remembered that it was me
who came to her assistance
the night her lawyer husband decided
that she might look better with bruises-
but then I decided we all must look alike with hats on.
All around me paper shoes shuffled and
Jim and Harold snickered and the older ladies
read the labels on their ensure
like it was the Sunday times; their lips drawn into tight lines.
Behind all those tight lips that never moved (except for Jim
and Harold's, who didn't give a righteous fuck), I could hear
this and this and some more of this:
niggers and dykes and faggots- OH MY!
And I wondered if they could hear
what I was thinking above the silence of their paper shoes.
Circa 1973:
Two klics outside the port city, thick
underbrush hid clusters of olive clad kids,
bellies flat against slick earth
wet with mud and blood. Days here went
fast into night, and when dark came,
you prayed for light. Nights were bad,
you listened with strained ears through
a din of strange sounds, for sounds that
were stranger still. Most times, constant fear
kept you awake in apprehension, like the
mummy did in the fifth grade; trembling in
your G.I. Joe sleeping bag on Timmy McPherson's
living room floor. None of us knew scared like
that, but we all caught on real quick. Our
backyard battle plans and monster movie
anecdotes didn't apply in this show. By the
second night in the bush, we had all lost faith
in Hollywood. Somebody forgot to yell cut so
the stand-ins could take our places. It all
made you wonder what Audie was singing about.
Sometimes, you imagined that you smelled fish sauce,
heavy, oily; the sour odor of charlies with full
bellies. Ready to hunt all night on papered feet,
mute yellow draculas with a taste for cold blood.
Every now and then we got lucky, and the point man
would hear the low squeak of black silk bat wings
in time to thwart the midnight buffet. But most times
we weren't lucky, and some of us joined the army of
the undead; coming back to feast within the nightmares
of the rest of us. And we wondered what G.I. Joe
might do on a bad night in Haiphong, where the matinee
horrors were real, and none of us could find the
zippers down the backs of the monster suits.
At times I feel like what I write about this period of my life
is just so much cliched hack; a lot of it is old, some of it the new stuff of resurfaced memory. My partner at work, Henry, is constantly questioning my decision to become a trauma queen; says my life as a ditch doc was a poor life choice. He doesn't know that I need the adrenalin as much as I need the calm to face it. What an odd conundrum; a labyrinth of my own design.
Mostly, it's days full of nothing special; parade after parade of the sick, the dying, the dead. You have to find a way to black out the faces; for me, it's morphine. I can wander through blood, guts, and puke all day without a flinch. It's only late at night, when I'm alone with myself that the black peels away and the faces float to the surface. But every once in awhile, in the bright light of day, something will come along and hit me behind the knees, make me lose my balance and when it comes, it lingers.
Circa 1987:
"Edgecombe County unit 268 to Heritage ED on 340,
I need an MICN or physician to the mic, come back-"
-quick come back quick talk to me talk to me
hurry goddamnit hurry hurry hurry-
"This is Heritage, 268, physician standing by,
go ahead with your traffic"
"10-4, Heritage, we're en-route to your facility
with an approximately eight year old female-"
-six seven eight who knows there's no pubes
not even shadow only blood and blue and motherfucker
tach it out come on come on come on-
"-found in a field this AM, bound, gagged, patient does
show evidence of extensive trauma, numerous lacerations
and abrasions to the head and neck and-"
-fields narrow fields of napalm-charred children
limbs like struck matches raped first gutted second
dead but still running running running-
"-upper extremities show defensive wounds with left
shoulder dislocation, lower extremities present bilateral
femur fractures with the left compound in nature and-"
-butts they break legs and skulls with butts because
the sharp cracks make their dicks hard bayonets only
make sibilant sounds machetes go whicka whicka whicka-
"-pelvis is unstable on side-to-side rock, abdomen shows
obvious distention with rigidity, genitals present evidence
of forced penetration with intestinal protrusion and-"
-the smell is wrong no kerosene no fish copper minus
sulpher ozone missing smoke make this fucker smoke
I'm losing pressure DRIVE goddamnit goddamnit-
"-B/P is 70/40 and falling, respirations at 6 per and
shallow, pupils equal but non-reactive and-"
-focus focus focus this ain't Dragon valley or Tam Ky or
even Phu Bai where Medi-vacs couldn't fly it's just
another day another dollar another kid another-
"-I have two 16 gauge lines of LR going at WO rates,
intubation is precluded due to facial trauma however patient
has an oropharyengeal in place and is being bagged with
100% supplemental o2, patient showing junctional brady
on 12 leads and I have administered 5 of morphine and-"
-day in a field, narrow fields of dead men wearing their
gods on their faces but there are no gods is no god only
purple and silver and green and-
"-Heritage be advised we have a 9 minute ETA,
prepare for trauma code,
patient is bradying down to unnacceptable levels,
CPR begun due to age with one atropine push in
at this time come back-"
-sounds, sounds that lose rhythm and order become wails
become sobs and to cry is to realize and I won't I won't I-
"-10-4, 268, we copy your traffic, continue CPR and give
one Epi push, we are awaiting your arrival in room three;
see you in nine, Heritage is clear on 340."
But I've discovered that the mind is a powerful entity all by itself. When this episode in the day in the life of Blue, Paramedic-addict extraordinaire occurred, I clocked out early...
went home, gathered up my 22 and went out into the woods I live in and stayed there for two days, drawing beads on anything that moved. I killed 8 or 9 squirrels and all memory of that little girl; she resurfaced three years later when I happened to be the medic on duty the night her mother died. I went home and spilled it out on a yellow legal pad admid a flurry of mescal shooters and sweat. Now I can't forget her, no matter how many squirrels I off in the pursuit of sanity.
Boy, I can RAMBLE, can't I? I started out at my keyboard, trying to shake off that nagging itch, that almighty yearning for my mosquito, and now here I am walking backwards again; only this time the colors have lost their primaries. I guess I need to stop before I bore the hell out of everyone who might be reading this long-winded trip down memory lane. But it was good in a self-searching way that I wasn't prepared for or aware of until my skin was already peeling away in painful strips, bloodless yet weeping-
I feel them fall, drifting in dry and dusty piles beneath my anonymous desk somewhere in a river town and I want to gather them up, stick them back to my naked self, shivering and unprotected,
weak and wanting.
My idle words bare me like a lover couldn't, like a confessor might
like a surgeon skilled at the craft; and voices scream from these opened wounds, voices with names that can't be counted, faces that won't be gone. Their tongues scrape my edges,dig furrows through the bone yards that carry my weight- and I stumble, I tire, I wonder will it always be the same.
Dismal rain feeds a restless mind. Before the world went red, I would watch it from the windows of my life; its sound as soothing as Coltrain on a weary night. Now it leaves me caught, a lightning bug in a sealed jar; it dampens my skin with an ill-defined apprehension, and on the chill of its breath rides the scent of fear. It distills geographies, turns dirt to mud. My temples hold its hum verbatim.
Today finds Dismal gray beneath a laden sky. She welcomes it, adds its weight to her mire; continuance ensured. She has not changed; the passage of centuries add nothing but knots to cypress and take away nothing but legend. I am the one who cowers within my walls, trapped by a past I cannot forget, teased by a god I cannot forgive. A dead god, shopping for attention, selling tickets for bone and dust.
I want to put in a box those things that went different- a sturdy box made of what is left after the battle is done, before war becomes epitaph. But there is so little left, the box is just a ramshackle thing held together by spit and blood- and all that was turned is too heavy for its spit-licked sides to hold. Rain makes me drag it out, sends me on a mad search for reasons that were never there; and I know when Dismal has her fill and the sky becomes the slate-blue color of empty, I'll walk for miles in the company of water-shed ghosts.
They rise as the mist lifts, unnamed graves that surface and lay scattered across fresh-wet earth; the bones within clatter and clack against their crumbling lids.
I listen as the bones grow flesh, feel years shift their weight beneath my feet;
and I am in another place- a parallel plane that mirrors my memory, reflects against my mind's eye, casts shadow without sun. Familiar voices whisper from
the other side of time; they ask how do I see my dreams behind closed eyes?
What about the other side? The difference between here and there is logistics; countless miles that separate then and now. Three times I went, three times I came back; decades since spent filling the void left by what I left behind. I count backwards, wait for bruises to fade. Yes, time passes; but not much changes. Memory is like water in my clenched fist; it runs out, heads to earth- everywhere, earth; the odor of turned ground.
And the distance is but the sharp crack of a branch-
a second of sound that blurs into the hard snap of butt against bone, blends
into the soft whicka whicka of machetes through razor grass, becomes the deafening silence of the lull between what was and what will always be. The soft kiss of moments turn today to yesterday, brush back years with lips so gentle the seduction is barely felt; a rape of will that has no defense.
Quick glints of mica shoot through underbrush and fall; instinct ducks my head, bends my knees low against an unseen aim. A rush of wing sends startled swallows upwards in a sudden spiral; in their shadow medivacs pitch and vie for space.
Somewhere behind me, hounds howl for their dinner, the wails desolate, forlorn-
and in their voices I see black-haired women kneeling in tank ruts, children
cradled to their chests like bundled sticks.
The difference is that, the distance is this; this that, that this. Now means sometimes and other times. Whatever it is that looks back is without longing, does not lose itself in the tremble and click of limbs caught in a heavy wind. Tangles of cypress root grip river rock like ribs grip lung, like I grip the visceral strings
that connect what was and what will never be. All night, the hounds will keen lament for the rain, and bullrushes, fragile as burnt matches, will break in the breeze.
The rain is back. It hammers the tin roof, tiny spears like bullets. I feel the muscle rise in my throat, a knot I try to drink clear. My fourth shot finds me here,
stiff in front of a ghost-blue screen. I write; etch words against white that have no meaning, make no sense. In a far corner, the dead pile up, get ripe where they lay; I can smell their insistence move from breath to breath.
The present is ethereous, a documentary of spring in a jungle; olive-clad boys with terror on their faces search through thatch while I struggle to remember the alphabet doesn't string along a keyboard in sing-song harmony. I don't know where they went, wrapped in black and flown home in the cold bellies of planes. On my best nights, I pretend that none of them fell past my fingers on their journey there.
Dismal is like that; a wet spring in another jungle, a place that has never heard of me or my absence. I try for balance, some equal ground where the great Axis Mundi never slips her spokes and lets the green world turn red; but in the end, I'm not much different now from the girl who crawled through mud and guts, an aid-bag clutched in her hand. I still carry that bag, only now I walk instead of crawl and I don't bother to dodge the fire anymore.
My vision is a relentless understanding, no longer able to look away, obligated by depth and a yolk of light. In its field, a universe; an eye engulfed by the far-gone tides of what holds it there. I watch the ceiling fan turn in my kitchen, I try to blink and can't. The whickering blades converge, intrude on each other in endless repetition. I sit in my chair, this necessity of skin, and strip myself to bone.
Day Two.
It's 2 AM here in dismal swamp, the bottom end of the second day of my idiotic cleansing process. It's been a real pisser most of the day. Off work with nothing but time on my hands and mosquitoes on my mind. I think it's only because I have removed my remaining vials that I haven't given in. I clearly didn't remember the nightmare of withdrawal, and I wish I had thought about it a while longer before making this impulsive leap towards a non-existent light. I itch.
I've itched all day; there are millions of ants (that's as close a thing as I can relate it to, having been stung by the fire ants that build condos in my back forty) beneath my skin trying to find a way out. It's maddening, nothing stops it and I keep thinking about what I know will. But I haven't caved, ladies and gents, not YET. I hate admitting defeat, even when it's a sure winner.
I went hunting. Packed a sandwich and a legal pad or two (because I take them everywhere; yellow paper flutters about my house like giant moths) and cruised my land for a couple of hours or three. I have 72 acres of woods with a four room house (cabin, actually) planted in a small clearing in the middle. Today, it seemed like 72 feet. The more I walked the smaller those familiar tracts became. The squirrels were laughing at me; I couldn't draw a good bead on the broadside of a barn. They chittered in the tops of the Pines like gossiping women, tossed pine nuts from their roofs in obvious derision.
I went in a little deeper until I found a nice copse of magnolia; grand old things whose umbrella branches full of heavy, waxy leaves formed a dense wall at least 20 feet around. I dug out a pad and wrote...and wrote and wrote and wrote and none of it made any sense at all. Disconnected spurts of recall and regret. I thought about Calicoe and her saying that my writing was so much better on the ween...but it's not. It just isn't and then I thought about her question; what does Blue love most? The thinking on this quelled the itch, pushed it back a bit and after giving it a few minutes, I could tell her this:
I love the smell of Magnolia on the bloom. Sweet, thick; it's heady scent brings Jessie back from the dead on a waft of recollect so sudden it left gooseflesh in it's wake. Jessie was my first sexual experience. I was fourteen, she was a year older; beautiful in the way that young foals are...all long limbs and awkward grace. I didn't know I was Bi then, it was a term still undefined in those days, but I knew I was different; the tone my mother employed when she called me a tomboy was my first dim clue.
Jessie went on to become the epitome of small-town girlhood; cheerleader, prom queen, tobacco rose in the fall parade...clap as the floats pass, dear; show some respect for the real girls.
Jessie caught pregnant in our senior year, and like all good southern girls who daddy's aren't white trash, she married the guy and had two more babies before she was thirty. Every now and then, I'll see her in town somewhere, her coltish legs grown thick at the ankles, her beautiful face now a ghost in the mirror.
Circa 1978:
It was summer
when I first tasted a girl-
and I can't stop remembering
bare feet on asphalt, hot;
sweat popping above our lips
as we walked through empty lots,
past houses that watched behind
pulled blinds and barking dogs,
beyond the school where the next year
we would not know ourselves.
You look like a boy, she said
(her daddy wouldn't let her out with boys)
and the smile that tilted her face
tugged all my muscles at once
I can't forget a junked Dodge
half-buried in the woods off Cypress street,
its inside smelling of burnt oil and smoke
and how she felt like wet suede stretched
across the seat; whispers salt-glazed-
our mouths like wind on open wounds.
I put Jessie away, and not wanting the itch back so soon, I kept thinking...thank you, Calicoe...my thoughts breaking apart, flying down different paths in search of elusive love. I never cared for the word itself; I find it overused and overwrought and the subject of countless tomes of bad poetry and Harlequin romances. Never been in love, either; at least not what I perceive love to be. I've been in lust, swam in infatuation until the waters grew cold, dipped my toe a couple of times in actual relationships. But those are not for me, the constant loner. I'm not an easy person to know, much less get along with...I have my ways and I'm set in them like stone.
The last woman that lived with me (and that was 15 years past) was named Billie. She was a real stunner; red hair and gray eyes and possessed of a fair amount of guile. She was great in bed, better in the kitchen and she didn't seem to mind that I spent most of my free time either in the woods with my (much beloved) hounds or scribbling furiously on all that yellow paper. The problems started with all these bottles of lotion and little tins of make-up she sat all over the counter tops in my bathroom.
It took about three months of pantyhose hanging across my shower bar and lipstick love notes on my mirrors to realize the true meaning of the word MISTAKE. It took just a little longer to figure out that she loved my money way more than she professed to love me. It finally sunk into my perfume-fogged brain that snakes with pretty, colorful markings are still snakes. Billie was the last reptile that I didn't aim a 22 at.
Circa 1989:
"She walked in beauty like the night"
and all that bullshit.
If she had a name I can't recall it;
and it never mattered anyway,
all she ever wanted she got from me;
great head and greater circumstance.
All I ever wanted I got from her,
devotion, emotion, even a decent tear or two,
as long as my wallet fell open
whenever her whims got hungry;
and boy,could that bitch eat.
But it ended one cold November,
when I read somewhere
that if the greed outweighed the need,
the harmonious balance of things
was interrupted.
So we came to an agreeable settlement,
she and I,
and she left before I killed her.
So, from all that rambling train of thought I can surmise that I love my privacy. I like being alone, I tolerate my own company well. I love bare bathroom counter tops and naked shower rods. I love red-headed women and red-bone hounds. I love a good squirrel stew with lots of onions...Boy, Calicoe, you've really started a roll; and I thank you from the bottom of my barely-there heart. That itch stayed away for a good while, and as I thought a little longer on the subject of love and where to find it I discovered, buried under several layers of hard, blue slate; this:
I love the feel of the weights; the tension of muscle against bone.
It helps me to remember that certain pains bring perspective.
I love the dip at the base of a woman's spine,
and the way it curves inward if the stroke is just so.
I love Harlan Ellison and Jerzy Kosinski and James Dickey.
I love Lady Day and Sarah Vaughn and Gerry Mulligan.
I love Lenny Bruce
I love the smell of woodsmoke on winter nights, the way Silver Birch cups its leaves before a rain, and the graceful fall of spanish moss from the cypress trees along the river.
I love chocolate Necco Wafers. All the other colors suck like an electrolux.
But Calicoe, my friend, my hand-up, my unlikely Gibralter (Oh, how I wish I could meet you in the flesh!)...you were right. The thing I love most are those damned yellow legal pads. Without them, I would be a dead thing; a shell of bone and blood.
It's close to 4 AM now. The itch grows worse, the thinking done, the things I love lost beneath the rise of demons and dawn. Having held it so long in my hands, seen too often the set of its jaw, I think of death; the sweet release of poets and pawns.
Do not go gently.
Do NOT go gently...
Do not...
In the tick-down of days,
in barely an open and close of years,
I choose not to die, but to cheat death;
slow the wind of anatomy
that is no more than body,
take back from the gods what was never theirs.
To remain here forever,
a single voice in the silence of time,
a shadow above the soil of the dead.
I will not die denied,
next to an unknown madness,
but wait the birth of each mute hour,
and know the past was never better
than in small seconds.
Day Three.
I started the day with hands. The first thing I saw when waking, they seemed to glow in the half-light that slid through the blind slats...eerie ghost-hands that were seperate from the rest of everything, still and quiet on the red plaid comforter. They looked blue, like corpse hands.
I began to think of them as entities of their own, even though they behaved normally and went through the usual morning rituals just as they always did...they showered, brushed teeth, ran their cool fingers through my hair; they even selected the cracked mug with the faded smiley face when the coffee was ready. The cup barely shook; a minor miracle. Maybe they weren't my hands after all, because my hands were always trembling long before the coffee was done, and never failed to spill a fair amount across the table as I read yesterday's paper.
Yet on the surface of this strange morning, calm. A natural calm that came all alone (On little cat feet, ha ha) without the benefit of narcotics. Amazed at my new hands, I took off to work. They gripped the wheel with confidence, seemed to know the way just like my old hands...they even waved at Mrs. Campos when we passed the Shop 'N Save. She stared and didn't wave back; I don't think she recognized the hands.
Once at work, the hands revealed themselves as imposters. My partner Henry knew at once that they were replicants, a duo far different from my original pair. They were helpful...cleaned our rig, checked our equipment, turned our radio to country music; and this was the REAL betrayal, my true hands would have cut themselves off before performing that blasphemy. Henry kept looking at me sideways, but didn't say much. I think he was scared of the hands.
Our first call was a crackhead frequent flyer named Aaron. He called 911 at least twice a week, complaining of nausea, of vomiting, of explosive diarrhea. We hated Aaron; he always puked in the rig, spit on the floor, shit on our clean sheets. The real hands would have accidentally hit him up side his pea-head with the O2 tank...but not these hands. These hands helped him to the rig, gave him an emesis basin, started an IV and pushed phenergan to ease his nausea; they even placed Aaron on the defib to access his heart rhythm. They seemed to actually care.
Aaron watched them do all of this with guarded eyes, he flinched at each procedure. It was clear that even Aaron knew these hands were faux...he kept his eyes on them like a mouse keeps his eye on the snake. Henry was silent, but obviously siding with Aaron.
And that's how it went all day...the hands did it all. They attended every patient as if every patient was really in need of their expertise. They patted brows, pushed meds, administered painkillers like candy. They changed stretcher sheets, assisted the astounded nurses in the ER, filled out forms in a timely manner, never flipped one doctor the bird. They left the radio alone the whole shift. When our shift was over, they clocked out on time. They waved goodbye to Henry, to the Chief...they didn't wave back, either.
Then we were home, them and I. They opened the door, turned on the light, ran their fingers through my hair...and stopped. I could feel my scalp pulsing beneath, felt the blood pushing past the roots. The mirror by my bed showed a face that looked like me, hands trapped in a short tangle of black and gray...shaking. My hands, my true pair. I wondered where they had been, I knew where they were going. Opening a small drawer in the bed stand, they took up a leather pouch, took out a familiar friend; slender, sharp, 20 CC.
Somewhere in the dark, the replicants died.
Day Four.
A lot of my time is spent contemplating purpose, how it does or doesn't apply to my life. I never thought I had one, not really...for so many years now, the only issue has been survival; learning to wake successfully to another sorry dawn seemed purpose enough. Three tours worth of years before that were spent the same way; in that endless quest for survival. The only difference was the dawn...to wake to it then was a rush I have yet to equal; the particular and peculiar thrill of realizing that yes, you breathe on for a while longer...no one is sweeping you into an anonymous rubber bag as the sun rises over mountains at once beautiful and deadly; their backs packed with their own purpose.
My days come and go like gray shifts of inconsequence, spills of time that run unnoticed into more of the same. Days spent as a mannequin of the self I once was; the shell is there but the turtle moved out long before Saigon fell...now the face that looks into mine from the peeled-back silver of passing mirrors is unfamiliar; and it is only recently that I find myself wondering where I went, what happened to that fearless girl who pretended not to care and did...when did the pretense become the fact?
I could blame it all on Nam, I suppose, as so many do...pile the great non-purpose on the dead heads of all those soldier-boys that poured their lives across the toes of my boots, spilled their thoughts into my waiting hands and lost any memory of those ladies who were lovely once. But to lay it on that lap would be a lie, because it was just a place, a span of miles I ran through when I was young, chased by tigers let loose from someone else' nightmare. Nam didn't mold me; I molded it...shaped it into a bullet that I would never chamber, never fire. That gun doesn't belong to me, the tigers that creep down it's barrel were never mine. Instead, I pulled from it a profession; skills I learned then I use now, the waiting hands are now replicants that act as if they give a damn when all they really give is time.
So I sit and I wonder, why do it? What purpose do I serve spending hour after hour trying to fix people who care even less than I? Most of them addicts, criminals, would-be suicides, drunks...very few runs turn out to be actual accidents or of a natural cause. And then I remember...who am I to judge, an addict myself? Dependent on Heroin as I ran those long ago miles; my own dragon set to fend off tigers. Then later, morphine; another dragon for another generation of nightmares...only this time, the guns are mine; their barrels sleek, disposable stainless steel. I seek the same calm they all do, it's just that my search is private, not left lying in the street or in some seedy by-the-hour room...the difference is really only one of logistics. It doesn't make me better, just better-off...I think my actual purpose all along has been to bury the details, throw everyone's dirt on my truth.
I try to remember why it was once worthwhile...why the effort mattered; why it might matter still. I recall faces, write down names, sort it out on paper as if the words are purpose enough. I think of an old man, dead ten years or more; but it's his wife that I still see, pacing the floors of my memory...countless shots of mescal and morphine won't wash away her face; so I write this:
They lived in a perpetual past,
three dim and heat-heavy rooms
encased them in the crumbling husk
of a brownstone on a forgotten side
of the city.
We ran suicide shifts down dead streets,
and some midnights found our pulsing
red and white outside their stoop,
spinning strobes slapping brick with
bright kisses.
He was the Phantom of the Opera,
she was his Christine. She would rush us in,
blue eyes wide in a thin plane.
Her scent reminded me of tabbouleh,
scallion sweet.
He was ancient, breath like smegma,
face like a leather mask. Cirrhosis ate
his body, drank his mind; accompanied by
strains of Wagner in unrelenting drones.
While we worked, she hovered-
frail wasp patting his brow, humming.
I saw her hug herself, fingers
dripping panic down her back
like slow sweat.
He was a wicked Raoul, hateful in his extremis.
He struck at her, called her a brainless zygote,
rotten whore. She gave him the radius
of her smile and crooned "Papa, papa,"
in dulcet tones.
We lifted him to the stretcher-
she cried when we strapped the belts
and clutched our sleeves in nervous desperation.
She made quiet, pleading noises
in a strange tongue.
They had been someone once;
he a producer of this, she an actress in that.
She had worn diaphanous gowns that clung
to her mons veneris, danced in hot abandon
for his pleasure.
We left her standing in the doorway on that
last night of our aquaintance, calling papa
in a pitiful litany that was at once beautiful
and sad.
Once out, put down on my blank sheets like the scattered rows in an untended cemetary, I find the ghosts remain. Face upon face, they bob the surface of my mind and break the black water pooled there with an uncomfortable ease. I think of dragons, of tigers chasing miles into decades; their purpose leaps from my pen, ink like blood across the page.
I entertain the demons that follow me from room to room. Vague shifts of space direct me here to here; they follow on the cat's feet of some other time poet my fogged mind cannot name. We have surely danced, them and I; they have led me, I have led them...we have chased each the other across spans of lost years. Now I pirouette alone, spin without brakes into varying shades of black; they seem content to watch. Sometimes, I notice the tightness in the air as they clap.
I find myself at my kitchen table, elbows set on an oilcloth that I must have purchased; I struggle to catch the memory of when. My oilcloth is singular in its ugliness, blocks of blue and white connected by tiny sunflowers that resemble flies cocooned in perfect symmetry within a square web. Burn marks track the path of the spider. I light a cigarette with my Zippo, its pewter body as battered as my own. The thumb wheel is loose; three strikes to fire and I wonder if the snipers are watching alongside my snickering demons. The itch between my shoulders has grown numb, a disabled target. I smell the bite of ozone, and beneath that, copper; always the copper, heavy and sweet.
The floor under my feet peels and fades; its pattern lost to countless steps. Once blue or rose or green, it now lays gray and dead across boards gone soft with rot. There's a hole to the left of my right foot, neither small or large and shaped like a grin, it yawns a welcome; the demons at my back nudge against my ear. I inch my toes through the smile, feel the air of the cellar below, cold, damp. I wonder if any corpses before me have found this hole, slid though it to rest at last nestled in rat shit and dirt. I try to force my foot past the limits of the hole; the edges give without complaint. I take a long drag and wait for the dark below to yank me in; the air clutches my ovation.
Dusk drawing from the blinds finds me on my knees with butter knife and bleeding fingers; splinters pile up on either side like dead soldiers. I think of foxholes and fire pits and the blackened maws of buried screams that have found breath beneath the give of my floorboards. The smile has widened into a laugh; its cool trill dries my efforts to salt. Behind me, whispers of applause pull past my shoulders and fall between my hands; I can hear it echo somewhere in the black.
Demons sleep by daylight. I wake with cheek pressed against a table leg, fingers sore and curled under my chin. For a moment, I can't remember; my eyes, sideways at floor level, pick out shards of wood, a settled haze of smoke, spatters of tacky blood. I smell dirt and damp and the sour odor of spoil; again I think of foxholes, I wonder where the sniper is perched. A ringing phone startles me to my feet, the steady thump thump of the evacs melt into morning traffic that hums from the streets below my window. Shadows of sun shaft through my cracked blinds; the hole reveals itself...only a hole. Jagged at its edges, bigger, empty. I dump the ashtray over its lip; scatter my night cremations and watch as ash sifts into nothing.
Day Five.
Someone asked me today what 'Blue Tattoo' meant and why I chose it as a tag name. Well, for millions it means identification; stamped on wrists and forearms by some long-ago hatred. It's countless bad images and forgotten names forever etched onto skins by home-made artists; they fade and warp as time goes by. It's a book of poems by Lynn Lifshin...'The Blue Tattoo'. Pretty good ones, too. But for me, it's a cool image of a tattoo parlor that I found...I just like the sound of it. It's a start-over, a second chance, it's the wrinkle that my time can't forget. It's my own warp 'n fade, my personal two-step, my sideways shuffle. It's what my life FEELS like most days...a faded, homemade tattoo that isn't quite what it used to be; isn't the beautiful thing it looked like thirty years ago under bad fluorescent lights. It's just a few crooked lines wrapped around a foolish idiom that no longer rings true.
But it's mine, and I love it, in the twisted way you love the scar you got in some bar fight back in the day; the way you love a bad toothache because it reminds you that you can still feel...even if it's only pain. I love it because it won't go away, it's as faithful as a whipped puppy. Every now and then I trace it's face with my finger and wonder where the cobalt went, wonder when the ink clouded into slate...was it the year mama died, or did it happen somewhere in Haiphong while I was busy looking for trip wires? Maybe it was a gradual thing, and I only noticed when someone pointed it out. Maybe it's MY identification, a symbol of self-hatred that I'm not qualified or ready to sort out, that I'm not ready to forget.
So I'll stay up late tonight and find tattoo flash on the net. I'll stare at all the skin art and perhaps pick out a new one to grace my falling flesh...something to remember me by. A vivid dust of color to cover my own faded shade of pale. It'll make me feel young again; bring back memories of when I didn't care and thought I never would. A celtic cross, a rose dagger, a sacred heart with my name across it's apex...or maybe just a zipper down my chest to remind me how easily some things open.
But I'll probably just get drunk, instead.
I read an interview recently where a good man said:
"Blue whacks hard, hits 'em where it hurts; but a little
of that can go a long way..." and of course it got me thinking,
sent me off on a backwards journey that went and came
such a long way that I wonder if I'll recognize the end when it nears.
I thought of my brother Eddie; 10 years older and dead
by 1970, hanging from the chandelier in my mother's great room
because he wanted to run off to Paris or some gay somewhere
to sling paint against curling canvas and that just wasn't done;
couldn't happen said dear old dad; it's a doctorate for you...
So there hung Eddie on a crisp May morning, sneakered feet
drawing lazy circles in shadows on the black and white parquet.
And I remember how my mother didn't scream; or cry or even
drop her bone cup but instead instructed (now there's a word)
the housekeeper to "send for the authorities, Helen", and
instruct (there it is again) them to come quietly, please.
When they cut Eddie down a crystal was somehow broken
in the process and as I watched the fine glass shimmer to the floor
I thought now there's beauty; such a beautiful irony...
Eddie has broken mother's chandelier but he'll never get to see
the distaste that bent her mouth downwards beyond the borders
allotted to his death. At dinner, my father remarked
on the high cost of a replacement. (not Eddie; the crystal)
So there it is; a little that went a long way.
Every time I see wisteria I remember,
it blossomed early that year and framed
the windows of the great room where Eddie dangled in defiance...
I associate it's heavy, purple scent with that final up yours.
Soon after I ran away, joined the army...thus fucking my mother
and my father in the best three-way ever; I was supposed
to be a lawyer and carry on tradition in the time-honored manner.
All the years in between then and now lay markers for that
backwards journey; and today I find myself stumbling upon them,
fascinated that with each mile back the colors still remain vivid
and true; even if most of it is red and black. So along my
reverse search I look for blue, yellow, green, orange; bright bits
that I bury because the dark seems easiest to cover...
but looking down at the buckled road I find this:
A girl named Grace in 1973, just after Saigon fell, living
in a Charlotte loft decorated with prints of Dali and Pollack
that made you dizzy but she said they freed her mind, made
her think and she liked Brautigan because he understood love, she said; she read to me "The Wait' and later,
as we made love on a sprung sofa she cried
and called me by a name that wasn't
mine...I color her blue and sometimes when it rains so light
you can't see it I remember how her hair stuck to her cheeks
after the sweat was dry.
And this:
A man who said his name was Jerry gave me a ride one cold afternoon just outside of Chesterfield; and seeing I had no money and no motive took me to his apartment, fed me soup
and pimento cheese sandwiches that were very near how manna must have tasted. We talked for hours sitting at his kitchen table;
and at some point he showed me his collection of jazz wax
that had to be priceless and just before I left he played
Betty Roche and the Savoy Sultans...I can still hear the soul inflection of that voice. Color Jerry orange; and now whenever I eat pimento cheese I think of him and his 33's.
And This:
A small boy and his sister who found their way onto my property
not too long ago. Out with my squirrel gun, looking for snakes, I come upon the two of them sitting on the bank of the Tar river that borders my land on the north side. They never heard my approach, being apt at walking the woods line in near silence, but my red-bone Millie startled the shit out of them with a high-pitched howl that set my teeth on edge. They jumped as if shot, and the girl (probably all of sis or seven) screamed and then began to cry miserably. "Don't shoot us, mister", said the boy, who was not much older than the girl, "we was only digging night crawlers..." (I guess I looked like a mister in camouflage; it made me smile) They calmed down when they saw I was no boogeyman, I gave them some of the kisses I always carry in one pocket or another and we spent a pleasant hour or so pulling worms out of the rich river earth and talking about things like why the river runs just one way and why coon dogs are always so skinny.
After they left, I sat awhile on the bank and thought of how
everything goes a long way, but none of it ever seems
to go on long enough. I'll color these two green, for growth...
maybe they'll come back; I'll remember to haul extra kisses.
I'm still looking for yellow.
.jpg)
But on a clear day, You can see through sclera, past the color-wheel of iris, into the natural lens. If you're quick enough, or good enough, you can watch bright fade to dull, see what was drift into what could have been. It's said that the last image perceived is reflected in the corneal eye; but that's bullshit. The only thing left is an eclipse too dim to cast back.
Like the shut of a door against a heated room, what remains is cold. I've watched more doors close than I care to count, seen so much of what could have been...now I wear that cold, an unseen insulation keeping heat at mind's length. To remember warmth is to recall faces, names, the end of every story. Cold is better; numb and hard. I need the feel of the shell.
Then today, a kid grabbed my arm. A hopeless kid with a hopeless wound, face-up in the middle of State street, the familiar aftermath of a common war. No fix here, no TV save. His eyes were green and deep; bending close, I watched frost rise in them like water...and through the fingers that circled my skin, I felt the heat slide away, felt the slam of the door. Hours later, I heard the click of the latch.
Isn't it funny how we return to the places where things happened, old soldiers drawn to land consecrated by battle and cross...just as I sit here tonight, swallowing warmth shot after shot. I remember faces, write down names, turn the pages of an unfinished book and wonder if the story ever really ends. I feel the air thicken, I know that what I've come to find has not dimmed, or waned away.
And in the back of my mind, night storms gather dust.
Epilogue:
Dismal sleeps.
The Dismal is quiet in that hour before dawn,
when the sun is not here or there but suspended;
a faint breath of light caught on the edge of nothing.
In that hour she sleeps, and tucked within her gnarled arms
sleep all that name her mother; otter and coon, bear and bobcat-
gray fox, red fox, white-tail deer; mink nestle their pelts
deep into moss beds spread like comfort along bank and bough.
Even the cottonmouth lie still beneath rock and log, copperheads
lie above; their night-damp skins shimmer like new pennies.
I alone am awake, but I am not awake alone.
In the Dismal silence ride the voices of time; they travel
years in a whisper, hiss at my ear in the low tones of the damned.
They speak with dead tongues, spin memory from dust and it settles-
kisses my sweat-wet cheeks and drapes my consciousness in webs of what was.
Outside my window, swamp bleeds into delta as night becomes day.
Listen:
Cicadas, slow to wake, rub their legs together and I hear clackers
popping through razor grass; my fists clinch, I wait for the dull thud
of claymores to follow the din. I can see foxfire blooms in the peat,
but my mind sees arc light through the trees; air bursts over Albany-
and the voices hiss "run, run..." I reach for an aid kit that's never there.
A Pileated woodpecker drills his perch and M-60's rattle my teeth
in mad minutes without end. Tracers fire above the ledge of my sill,
their red tails trail smoke like drifts of fog. Along the rim of reason,
concertinas trip with pings and snaps that nails my flesh to sheet.
The Dismal comes alive by degrees; her children wear paper shoes
that slide through brush and leaf with deadly ease. Squirrels rustle their nests,
warblers call for their mates, and somewhere in between the voices pull away-
threads of their goodbyes knit tight stitches down my spine.
Morning brings life. Otters slap the river in search of brim, they break surface
in pairs. Coons scuttle the deadfall in search of snakes, snakes take to the flats
in search of sun. Deer circle the cypress, stretch long and lovely necks
to prune moss from their canopies; black bears sing to their cubs.
My hounds edge their run on anxious feet, their hungry howls echo in the trees.
Somewhere in the swamp's heart, mink skirt my traps with skilled indifference-
their pelts stained moss green. When the wind is low I can hear them laugh.
And I am awake, alone.
A view from my flying jimmy.
Listen: hounds loose their run trill reveille behind the lines
of white pine and cedar and elm that guard my seclusion.
I pretend I'm dreaming-then I am-waltzing with Jane
barefoot and ballgowned through a wood: music howls
somewhere beyond the grey, somewhere in the black.
So I oversleep and wonder when I wake why my feet are ice.
I fly to work down back roads that turn suddenly
into streets miles from my driveway graveled and
tucked between menacing rows of black-hulled pecans:
they bear on the third year and I keep their fallen ancestors
packed naked in blue Tupperware tubs stacked in my freezer.
The cockpit of my jimmy is strewn with dead coffee cups.
Jack-in-the-boxes lay discarded and dying on the floorboards
-similar slaughters of necessity-ketchup clotted to their sides.
Last month's cable bill flaps under the visor like a battle flag.
Tobacco whips by on the left and on the right so fast
each leaf on every stalk stands out in surreal base-relief.
I taste the sharp and bitter tang of suckering plants:
it reminds me of my father's pall malls and politics and
the smell of money seeded from blood.
Barn swallows rise in lazy tourbillions from the fields
their beaks and bellies full of yellow and green hornworms.
I wing past Buck's BBQ Pit (You Can't Beat Our Meat)-past
Lucy's Do-Lounge where the girls serve more than shots
-past Big Jim's Quick Mart: the stoner kid who pumps gas
raises a hand in reflex. I don't wave back in sympathetic apathy.
Most mornings I stop to kill coffee cups but today I'm late.
Tenant houses rush by on either side, their concrete blocks
painted with Kudzu and mildew: I think of abattoirs and
oubliettes and other inevitable exits. Children and dogs and
cheap molded toys from the plastic plant over in Elroy dot
the tiny dirt yards-little boys and little girls stand in stagnant
ditches chunking rocks at death while their mamas are inside
fucking the mailman or watching General Hospital on TV.
I see slideshow flashes of their faces and I hope I don't
have to come back out this way: scrape them up, heads
cracked open, futures frying on asphalt like so many eggs.
I pass the city limit sign-some of the holes are mine-ringed
in rust and canted to one side. Courthouse looms right,
county buildings lurch left and blocks ahead day meets night
where tracks split the city: segregation in iron ties old as time.
I pull into my lot-number six, section twelve-filled with cars
and trucks and bikes but I am the only flying jimmy.
Everything ticks: engine, watch, pulse-alpha papa charlie-
the people that mill outside my windshield tick with tension.
I want to turn the key, turn around, turn into my driveway
where squirrels sit stuffing my sweet meats in their jaws:
instead I clinch mine-name rank serial number-open the door
and step out.
Listen: animals sprung their cages snarl in angry unavoce
behind walls of brick and steel and glass that guard nothing.
Day One.
Today I reached a milestone; no morphine. It's now been
almost 24 hours since my last hit, and it's got me a bit...well...
strange. A good friend I've never had the pleasure of meeting
suggested I try Ketamine as a weener for the opiate,
and for awhile, it worked. But it made me nervous.
I don't like nervous.
So I've just been backing it down and yesterday, 5 mg. Today,
zero. Considering that 6 months ago it was at least 60 mics a day,
I think I'm doing OK.
Circa 6 months ago
Day breaks
(how cliched is THAT)
over some North Carolina
backwater
mosquitoes dance
in pulsed pockets
above stagnant runs
that glimmer with rainbowed
slicks across the surface
and in the arc
of a dirty pane
(it looks out at an equally
dirty alley that leads
to some inconsequential river)
an 18 gauge cath
will glimmer
as soon as it unsheaths
it's equally 18 gauged
needle
loaded
(HAHA! What a LOADED word)
with a loading dose-
best painkillers
deft fingers can cop
when no one is watching
where the latexed hand went
after the sting
is gone
comes the calm
that stays awhile
awhile
awhile
before going back home
with all its little perks
packed on its glass back
but there's always
more
more
more
where that came from-
it lurks and smiles
(make that GRINS,
it grins with metered teeth)
among versed and valium
(those paens of blessed slumber)
tossed in with toredal and
sucs...sucs rocks!
on such a permanent
level
maybe that's the level
I need
to
sink
to.
I find I miss the ritual almost as much as the calm. Drawing up
my morning fix, opening the alchohol prep, carefully swabbing
the spot on my thigh that has grown a little thick with scar tissue.
The thin needle resembles the probiscus of an insistent
mosquito, intent on the sting. I miss that sting, too.
I've been a junkie since 'Nam, where smack was so plentiful
it practically fell from every duffle.
It was a necessary thing, a thing to be done
so things could be done. Once the body becomes
aclimated to the opiate, the 'high' subsides and only that strange
and languid calm remains. It enabled you to wade through endless
days of mindless horror with blinders on. I was there four years,
and by the first 8 months it all seemed surreal;
a vampire flick where all the bloodsuckers
were named Charlie, wore black pajamas
and paper slippers...hello, Harold and Jim.
Harold and Jim.
The people who people my town wear paper shoes,
a lot like charlie did in days of yore, slipping
through fields of gore with barely a bone to rattle
their presence; nothing to signify sound or fury and
it was just so today in the Piggly Wiggly;
10:30 of a bright blue Monday with a hand basket sporting
the latest in milk and brown eggs, at the end
of aisle 6 where they (they?) keep canned peaches,
behind attractive stacks of green and orange cans I hear
this:
"...only a nigger kid, who gives a righteous fuck? Held me up
for two hours because the little coon didn't have enough sense
to cross on the light; now I ask you, Jim, what's a law
abiding white man to do when the po-lice officer's a nigger
too?"
Never heard them come up the peach aisle, Jim and his
good buddy Harold (because it said so in neat red stitch
above the pocket of his blue chambrey workshirt) the paper
shoes that covered their approach looked a lot like Redwing
boots that I know Jim and Harold valued almost as much
as the 410's that surely hung against the back glass of their
F150 Fords and when they started noticing my not noticing
I moved on around the corner to aisle 8 (isn't that strange)
where all the things I'll never need like Pampers and Gerber
and Bottle (warmers?) are kept and through the open shelves
that line all the aisles in the neighborly Piggly Wiggly the
conversation continues and from behind strained bananas I hear
this:
"...that dyke who works for the Rescue squad that's who, some
of us went to the county meeting about those types picking up
our wives and such, having to touch 'em and all and sometimes
even taking off their clothes but it didn't do no good and now
I just take my women to town myself if they need hospital help..."
But I've picked up your wife, Jim, and your sister too, both
of them too drunk to have sense enough to not drive home and
if you knew what all they promised the nigger cops we called
if only they wouldn't tell you where they were or what they
had been doing, why, you would just SHIT Jim, I swear-
On those same paper feet two little old ladies who favored
my forgotten ma had sidled up beside me and I realized that
I was giggling to myself, probably looked like I was drunk myself
so I walked away to aisle 10 (?) and as I tried to look
oh-so-interested in pickled okra and sweet rind pickles
some kid without any paper shoes
(just keds with dirty laces) walked
right up and asked me straight-out in a too-loud little kid voice
why my hair was cut just like a boy's and why was I wearing
Dickies just like his dad's- dont'cha know you're a girl-
says he and I never heard his mama (paper shoes) come out of
nowhere to grab him up and whisk him off like I might be catching.
So I add a jar of those sweet rinds to my milk and eggs, find
myself seven aisles later standing in the checkout behind Jim
and Harold and their suitcase of after-work Schlitz, in front
of the ladies with their ensure and wild rice, and I looked
for the kid, but I guess his mama was busy somewhere in the back
teaching him not to talk to strangers with boy-hair
and I wondered if she remembered that it was me
who came to her assistance
the night her lawyer husband decided
that she might look better with bruises-
but then I decided we all must look alike with hats on.
All around me paper shoes shuffled and
Jim and Harold snickered and the older ladies
read the labels on their ensure
like it was the Sunday times; their lips drawn into tight lines.
Behind all those tight lips that never moved (except for Jim
and Harold's, who didn't give a righteous fuck), I could hear
this and this and some more of this:
niggers and dykes and faggots- OH MY!
And I wondered if they could hear
what I was thinking above the silence of their paper shoes.
Circa 1973:
Two klics outside the port city, thick
underbrush hid clusters of olive clad kids,
bellies flat against slick earth
wet with mud and blood. Days here went
fast into night, and when dark came,
you prayed for light. Nights were bad,
you listened with strained ears through
a din of strange sounds, for sounds that
were stranger still. Most times, constant fear
kept you awake in apprehension, like the
mummy did in the fifth grade; trembling in
your G.I. Joe sleeping bag on Timmy McPherson's
living room floor. None of us knew scared like
that, but we all caught on real quick. Our
backyard battle plans and monster movie
anecdotes didn't apply in this show. By the
second night in the bush, we had all lost faith
in Hollywood. Somebody forgot to yell cut so
the stand-ins could take our places. It all
made you wonder what Audie was singing about.
Sometimes, you imagined that you smelled fish sauce,
heavy, oily; the sour odor of charlies with full
bellies. Ready to hunt all night on papered feet,
mute yellow draculas with a taste for cold blood.
Every now and then we got lucky, and the point man
would hear the low squeak of black silk bat wings
in time to thwart the midnight buffet. But most times
we weren't lucky, and some of us joined the army of
the undead; coming back to feast within the nightmares
of the rest of us. And we wondered what G.I. Joe
might do on a bad night in Haiphong, where the matinee
horrors were real, and none of us could find the
zippers down the backs of the monster suits.
At times I feel like what I write about this period of my life
is just so much cliched hack; a lot of it is old, some of it the new stuff of resurfaced memory. My partner at work, Henry, is constantly questioning my decision to become a trauma queen; says my life as a ditch doc was a poor life choice. He doesn't know that I need the adrenalin as much as I need the calm to face it. What an odd conundrum; a labyrinth of my own design.
Mostly, it's days full of nothing special; parade after parade of the sick, the dying, the dead. You have to find a way to black out the faces; for me, it's morphine. I can wander through blood, guts, and puke all day without a flinch. It's only late at night, when I'm alone with myself that the black peels away and the faces float to the surface. But every once in awhile, in the bright light of day, something will come along and hit me behind the knees, make me lose my balance and when it comes, it lingers.
Circa 1987:
"Edgecombe County unit 268 to Heritage ED on 340,
I need an MICN or physician to the mic, come back-"
-quick come back quick talk to me talk to me
hurry goddamnit hurry hurry hurry-
"This is Heritage, 268, physician standing by,
go ahead with your traffic"
"10-4, Heritage, we're en-route to your facility
with an approximately eight year old female-"
-six seven eight who knows there's no pubes
not even shadow only blood and blue and motherfucker
tach it out come on come on come on-
"-found in a field this AM, bound, gagged, patient does
show evidence of extensive trauma, numerous lacerations
and abrasions to the head and neck and-"
-fields narrow fields of napalm-charred children
limbs like struck matches raped first gutted second
dead but still running running running-
"-upper extremities show defensive wounds with left
shoulder dislocation, lower extremities present bilateral
femur fractures with the left compound in nature and-"
-butts they break legs and skulls with butts because
the sharp cracks make their dicks hard bayonets only
make sibilant sounds machetes go whicka whicka whicka-
"-pelvis is unstable on side-to-side rock, abdomen shows
obvious distention with rigidity, genitals present evidence
of forced penetration with intestinal protrusion and-"
-the smell is wrong no kerosene no fish copper minus
sulpher ozone missing smoke make this fucker smoke
I'm losing pressure DRIVE goddamnit goddamnit-
"-B/P is 70/40 and falling, respirations at 6 per and
shallow, pupils equal but non-reactive and-"
-focus focus focus this ain't Dragon valley or Tam Ky or
even Phu Bai where Medi-vacs couldn't fly it's just
another day another dollar another kid another-
"-I have two 16 gauge lines of LR going at WO rates,
intubation is precluded due to facial trauma however patient
has an oropharyengeal in place and is being bagged with
100% supplemental o2, patient showing junctional brady
on 12 leads and I have administered 5 of morphine and-"
-day in a field, narrow fields of dead men wearing their
gods on their faces but there are no gods is no god only
purple and silver and green and-
"-Heritage be advised we have a 9 minute ETA,
prepare for trauma code,
patient is bradying down to unnacceptable levels,
CPR begun due to age with one atropine push in
at this time come back-"
-sounds, sounds that lose rhythm and order become wails
become sobs and to cry is to realize and I won't I won't I-
"-10-4, 268, we copy your traffic, continue CPR and give
one Epi push, we are awaiting your arrival in room three;
see you in nine, Heritage is clear on 340."
But I've discovered that the mind is a powerful entity all by itself. When this episode in the day in the life of Blue, Paramedic-addict extraordinaire occurred, I clocked out early...
went home, gathered up my 22 and went out into the woods I live in and stayed there for two days, drawing beads on anything that moved. I killed 8 or 9 squirrels and all memory of that little girl; she resurfaced three years later when I happened to be the medic on duty the night her mother died. I went home and spilled it out on a yellow legal pad admid a flurry of mescal shooters and sweat. Now I can't forget her, no matter how many squirrels I off in the pursuit of sanity.
Boy, I can RAMBLE, can't I? I started out at my keyboard, trying to shake off that nagging itch, that almighty yearning for my mosquito, and now here I am walking backwards again; only this time the colors have lost their primaries. I guess I need to stop before I bore the hell out of everyone who might be reading this long-winded trip down memory lane. But it was good in a self-searching way that I wasn't prepared for or aware of until my skin was already peeling away in painful strips, bloodless yet weeping-
I feel them fall, drifting in dry and dusty piles beneath my anonymous desk somewhere in a river town and I want to gather them up, stick them back to my naked self, shivering and unprotected,
weak and wanting.
My idle words bare me like a lover couldn't, like a confessor might
like a surgeon skilled at the craft; and voices scream from these opened wounds, voices with names that can't be counted, faces that won't be gone. Their tongues scrape my edges,dig furrows through the bone yards that carry my weight- and I stumble, I tire, I wonder will it always be the same.
Dismal rain feeds a restless mind. Before the world went red, I would watch it from the windows of my life; its sound as soothing as Coltrain on a weary night. Now it leaves me caught, a lightning bug in a sealed jar; it dampens my skin with an ill-defined apprehension, and on the chill of its breath rides the scent of fear. It distills geographies, turns dirt to mud. My temples hold its hum verbatim.
Today finds Dismal gray beneath a laden sky. She welcomes it, adds its weight to her mire; continuance ensured. She has not changed; the passage of centuries add nothing but knots to cypress and take away nothing but legend. I am the one who cowers within my walls, trapped by a past I cannot forget, teased by a god I cannot forgive. A dead god, shopping for attention, selling tickets for bone and dust.
I want to put in a box those things that went different- a sturdy box made of what is left after the battle is done, before war becomes epitaph. But there is so little left, the box is just a ramshackle thing held together by spit and blood- and all that was turned is too heavy for its spit-licked sides to hold. Rain makes me drag it out, sends me on a mad search for reasons that were never there; and I know when Dismal has her fill and the sky becomes the slate-blue color of empty, I'll walk for miles in the company of water-shed ghosts.
They rise as the mist lifts, unnamed graves that surface and lay scattered across fresh-wet earth; the bones within clatter and clack against their crumbling lids.
I listen as the bones grow flesh, feel years shift their weight beneath my feet;
and I am in another place- a parallel plane that mirrors my memory, reflects against my mind's eye, casts shadow without sun. Familiar voices whisper from
the other side of time; they ask how do I see my dreams behind closed eyes?
What about the other side? The difference between here and there is logistics; countless miles that separate then and now. Three times I went, three times I came back; decades since spent filling the void left by what I left behind. I count backwards, wait for bruises to fade. Yes, time passes; but not much changes. Memory is like water in my clenched fist; it runs out, heads to earth- everywhere, earth; the odor of turned ground.
And the distance is but the sharp crack of a branch-
a second of sound that blurs into the hard snap of butt against bone, blends
into the soft whicka whicka of machetes through razor grass, becomes the deafening silence of the lull between what was and what will always be. The soft kiss of moments turn today to yesterday, brush back years with lips so gentle the seduction is barely felt; a rape of will that has no defense.
Quick glints of mica shoot through underbrush and fall; instinct ducks my head, bends my knees low against an unseen aim. A rush of wing sends startled swallows upwards in a sudden spiral; in their shadow medivacs pitch and vie for space.
Somewhere behind me, hounds howl for their dinner, the wails desolate, forlorn-
and in their voices I see black-haired women kneeling in tank ruts, children
cradled to their chests like bundled sticks.
The difference is that, the distance is this; this that, that this. Now means sometimes and other times. Whatever it is that looks back is without longing, does not lose itself in the tremble and click of limbs caught in a heavy wind. Tangles of cypress root grip river rock like ribs grip lung, like I grip the visceral strings
that connect what was and what will never be. All night, the hounds will keen lament for the rain, and bullrushes, fragile as burnt matches, will break in the breeze.
The rain is back. It hammers the tin roof, tiny spears like bullets. I feel the muscle rise in my throat, a knot I try to drink clear. My fourth shot finds me here,
stiff in front of a ghost-blue screen. I write; etch words against white that have no meaning, make no sense. In a far corner, the dead pile up, get ripe where they lay; I can smell their insistence move from breath to breath.
The present is ethereous, a documentary of spring in a jungle; olive-clad boys with terror on their faces search through thatch while I struggle to remember the alphabet doesn't string along a keyboard in sing-song harmony. I don't know where they went, wrapped in black and flown home in the cold bellies of planes. On my best nights, I pretend that none of them fell past my fingers on their journey there.
Dismal is like that; a wet spring in another jungle, a place that has never heard of me or my absence. I try for balance, some equal ground where the great Axis Mundi never slips her spokes and lets the green world turn red; but in the end, I'm not much different now from the girl who crawled through mud and guts, an aid-bag clutched in her hand. I still carry that bag, only now I walk instead of crawl and I don't bother to dodge the fire anymore.
My vision is a relentless understanding, no longer able to look away, obligated by depth and a yolk of light. In its field, a universe; an eye engulfed by the far-gone tides of what holds it there. I watch the ceiling fan turn in my kitchen, I try to blink and can't. The whickering blades converge, intrude on each other in endless repetition. I sit in my chair, this necessity of skin, and strip myself to bone.
Day Two.
It's 2 AM here in dismal swamp, the bottom end of the second day of my idiotic cleansing process. It's been a real pisser most of the day. Off work with nothing but time on my hands and mosquitoes on my mind. I think it's only because I have removed my remaining vials that I haven't given in. I clearly didn't remember the nightmare of withdrawal, and I wish I had thought about it a while longer before making this impulsive leap towards a non-existent light. I itch.
I've itched all day; there are millions of ants (that's as close a thing as I can relate it to, having been stung by the fire ants that build condos in my back forty) beneath my skin trying to find a way out. It's maddening, nothing stops it and I keep thinking about what I know will. But I haven't caved, ladies and gents, not YET. I hate admitting defeat, even when it's a sure winner.
I went hunting. Packed a sandwich and a legal pad or two (because I take them everywhere; yellow paper flutters about my house like giant moths) and cruised my land for a couple of hours or three. I have 72 acres of woods with a four room house (cabin, actually) planted in a small clearing in the middle. Today, it seemed like 72 feet. The more I walked the smaller those familiar tracts became. The squirrels were laughing at me; I couldn't draw a good bead on the broadside of a barn. They chittered in the tops of the Pines like gossiping women, tossed pine nuts from their roofs in obvious derision.
I went in a little deeper until I found a nice copse of magnolia; grand old things whose umbrella branches full of heavy, waxy leaves formed a dense wall at least 20 feet around. I dug out a pad and wrote...and wrote and wrote and wrote and none of it made any sense at all. Disconnected spurts of recall and regret. I thought about Calicoe and her saying that my writing was so much better on the ween...but it's not. It just isn't and then I thought about her question; what does Blue love most? The thinking on this quelled the itch, pushed it back a bit and after giving it a few minutes, I could tell her this:
I love the smell of Magnolia on the bloom. Sweet, thick; it's heady scent brings Jessie back from the dead on a waft of recollect so sudden it left gooseflesh in it's wake. Jessie was my first sexual experience. I was fourteen, she was a year older; beautiful in the way that young foals are...all long limbs and awkward grace. I didn't know I was Bi then, it was a term still undefined in those days, but I knew I was different; the tone my mother employed when she called me a tomboy was my first dim clue.
Jessie went on to become the epitome of small-town girlhood; cheerleader, prom queen, tobacco rose in the fall parade...clap as the floats pass, dear; show some respect for the real girls.
Jessie caught pregnant in our senior year, and like all good southern girls who daddy's aren't white trash, she married the guy and had two more babies before she was thirty. Every now and then, I'll see her in town somewhere, her coltish legs grown thick at the ankles, her beautiful face now a ghost in the mirror.
Circa 1978:
It was summer
when I first tasted a girl-
and I can't stop remembering
bare feet on asphalt, hot;
sweat popping above our lips
as we walked through empty lots,
past houses that watched behind
pulled blinds and barking dogs,
beyond the school where the next year
we would not know ourselves.
You look like a boy, she said
(her daddy wouldn't let her out with boys)
and the smile that tilted her face
tugged all my muscles at once
I can't forget a junked Dodge
half-buried in the woods off Cypress street,
its inside smelling of burnt oil and smoke
and how she felt like wet suede stretched
across the seat; whispers salt-glazed-
our mouths like wind on open wounds.
I put Jessie away, and not wanting the itch back so soon, I kept thinking...thank you, Calicoe...my thoughts breaking apart, flying down different paths in search of elusive love. I never cared for the word itself; I find it overused and overwrought and the subject of countless tomes of bad poetry and Harlequin romances. Never been in love, either; at least not what I perceive love to be. I've been in lust, swam in infatuation until the waters grew cold, dipped my toe a couple of times in actual relationships. But those are not for me, the constant loner. I'm not an easy person to know, much less get along with...I have my ways and I'm set in them like stone.
The last woman that lived with me (and that was 15 years past) was named Billie. She was a real stunner; red hair and gray eyes and possessed of a fair amount of guile. She was great in bed, better in the kitchen and she didn't seem to mind that I spent most of my free time either in the woods with my (much beloved) hounds or scribbling furiously on all that yellow paper. The problems started with all these bottles of lotion and little tins of make-up she sat all over the counter tops in my bathroom.
It took about three months of pantyhose hanging across my shower bar and lipstick love notes on my mirrors to realize the true meaning of the word MISTAKE. It took just a little longer to figure out that she loved my money way more than she professed to love me. It finally sunk into my perfume-fogged brain that snakes with pretty, colorful markings are still snakes. Billie was the last reptile that I didn't aim a 22 at.
Circa 1989:
"She walked in beauty like the night"
and all that bullshit.
If she had a name I can't recall it;
and it never mattered anyway,
all she ever wanted she got from me;
great head and greater circumstance.
All I ever wanted I got from her,
devotion, emotion, even a decent tear or two,
as long as my wallet fell open
whenever her whims got hungry;
and boy,could that bitch eat.
But it ended one cold November,
when I read somewhere
that if the greed outweighed the need,
the harmonious balance of things
was interrupted.
So we came to an agreeable settlement,
she and I,
and she left before I killed her.
So, from all that rambling train of thought I can surmise that I love my privacy. I like being alone, I tolerate my own company well. I love bare bathroom counter tops and naked shower rods. I love red-headed women and red-bone hounds. I love a good squirrel stew with lots of onions...Boy, Calicoe, you've really started a roll; and I thank you from the bottom of my barely-there heart. That itch stayed away for a good while, and as I thought a little longer on the subject of love and where to find it I discovered, buried under several layers of hard, blue slate; this:
I love the feel of the weights; the tension of muscle against bone.
It helps me to remember that certain pains bring perspective.
I love the dip at the base of a woman's spine,
and the way it curves inward if the stroke is just so.
I love Harlan Ellison and Jerzy Kosinski and James Dickey.
I love Lady Day and Sarah Vaughn and Gerry Mulligan.
I love Lenny Bruce
I love the smell of woodsmoke on winter nights, the way Silver Birch cups its leaves before a rain, and the graceful fall of spanish moss from the cypress trees along the river.
I love chocolate Necco Wafers. All the other colors suck like an electrolux.
But Calicoe, my friend, my hand-up, my unlikely Gibralter (Oh, how I wish I could meet you in the flesh!)...you were right. The thing I love most are those damned yellow legal pads. Without them, I would be a dead thing; a shell of bone and blood.
It's close to 4 AM now. The itch grows worse, the thinking done, the things I love lost beneath the rise of demons and dawn. Having held it so long in my hands, seen too often the set of its jaw, I think of death; the sweet release of poets and pawns.
Do not go gently.
Do NOT go gently...
Do not...
In the tick-down of days,
in barely an open and close of years,
I choose not to die, but to cheat death;
slow the wind of anatomy
that is no more than body,
take back from the gods what was never theirs.
To remain here forever,
a single voice in the silence of time,
a shadow above the soil of the dead.
I will not die denied,
next to an unknown madness,
but wait the birth of each mute hour,
and know the past was never better
than in small seconds.
Day Three.
I started the day with hands. The first thing I saw when waking, they seemed to glow in the half-light that slid through the blind slats...eerie ghost-hands that were seperate from the rest of everything, still and quiet on the red plaid comforter. They looked blue, like corpse hands.
I began to think of them as entities of their own, even though they behaved normally and went through the usual morning rituals just as they always did...they showered, brushed teeth, ran their cool fingers through my hair; they even selected the cracked mug with the faded smiley face when the coffee was ready. The cup barely shook; a minor miracle. Maybe they weren't my hands after all, because my hands were always trembling long before the coffee was done, and never failed to spill a fair amount across the table as I read yesterday's paper.
Yet on the surface of this strange morning, calm. A natural calm that came all alone (On little cat feet, ha ha) without the benefit of narcotics. Amazed at my new hands, I took off to work. They gripped the wheel with confidence, seemed to know the way just like my old hands...they even waved at Mrs. Campos when we passed the Shop 'N Save. She stared and didn't wave back; I don't think she recognized the hands.
Once at work, the hands revealed themselves as imposters. My partner Henry knew at once that they were replicants, a duo far different from my original pair. They were helpful...cleaned our rig, checked our equipment, turned our radio to country music; and this was the REAL betrayal, my true hands would have cut themselves off before performing that blasphemy. Henry kept looking at me sideways, but didn't say much. I think he was scared of the hands.
Our first call was a crackhead frequent flyer named Aaron. He called 911 at least twice a week, complaining of nausea, of vomiting, of explosive diarrhea. We hated Aaron; he always puked in the rig, spit on the floor, shit on our clean sheets. The real hands would have accidentally hit him up side his pea-head with the O2 tank...but not these hands. These hands helped him to the rig, gave him an emesis basin, started an IV and pushed phenergan to ease his nausea; they even placed Aaron on the defib to access his heart rhythm. They seemed to actually care.
Aaron watched them do all of this with guarded eyes, he flinched at each procedure. It was clear that even Aaron knew these hands were faux...he kept his eyes on them like a mouse keeps his eye on the snake. Henry was silent, but obviously siding with Aaron.
And that's how it went all day...the hands did it all. They attended every patient as if every patient was really in need of their expertise. They patted brows, pushed meds, administered painkillers like candy. They changed stretcher sheets, assisted the astounded nurses in the ER, filled out forms in a timely manner, never flipped one doctor the bird. They left the radio alone the whole shift. When our shift was over, they clocked out on time. They waved goodbye to Henry, to the Chief...they didn't wave back, either.
Then we were home, them and I. They opened the door, turned on the light, ran their fingers through my hair...and stopped. I could feel my scalp pulsing beneath, felt the blood pushing past the roots. The mirror by my bed showed a face that looked like me, hands trapped in a short tangle of black and gray...shaking. My hands, my true pair. I wondered where they had been, I knew where they were going. Opening a small drawer in the bed stand, they took up a leather pouch, took out a familiar friend; slender, sharp, 20 CC.
Somewhere in the dark, the replicants died.
Day Four.
A lot of my time is spent contemplating purpose, how it does or doesn't apply to my life. I never thought I had one, not really...for so many years now, the only issue has been survival; learning to wake successfully to another sorry dawn seemed purpose enough. Three tours worth of years before that were spent the same way; in that endless quest for survival. The only difference was the dawn...to wake to it then was a rush I have yet to equal; the particular and peculiar thrill of realizing that yes, you breathe on for a while longer...no one is sweeping you into an anonymous rubber bag as the sun rises over mountains at once beautiful and deadly; their backs packed with their own purpose.
My days come and go like gray shifts of inconsequence, spills of time that run unnoticed into more of the same. Days spent as a mannequin of the self I once was; the shell is there but the turtle moved out long before Saigon fell...now the face that looks into mine from the peeled-back silver of passing mirrors is unfamiliar; and it is only recently that I find myself wondering where I went, what happened to that fearless girl who pretended not to care and did...when did the pretense become the fact?
I could blame it all on Nam, I suppose, as so many do...pile the great non-purpose on the dead heads of all those soldier-boys that poured their lives across the toes of my boots, spilled their thoughts into my waiting hands and lost any memory of those ladies who were lovely once. But to lay it on that lap would be a lie, because it was just a place, a span of miles I ran through when I was young, chased by tigers let loose from someone else' nightmare. Nam didn't mold me; I molded it...shaped it into a bullet that I would never chamber, never fire. That gun doesn't belong to me, the tigers that creep down it's barrel were never mine. Instead, I pulled from it a profession; skills I learned then I use now, the waiting hands are now replicants that act as if they give a damn when all they really give is time.
So I sit and I wonder, why do it? What purpose do I serve spending hour after hour trying to fix people who care even less than I? Most of them addicts, criminals, would-be suicides, drunks...very few runs turn out to be actual accidents or of a natural cause. And then I remember...who am I to judge, an addict myself? Dependent on Heroin as I ran those long ago miles; my own dragon set to fend off tigers. Then later, morphine; another dragon for another generation of nightmares...only this time, the guns are mine; their barrels sleek, disposable stainless steel. I seek the same calm they all do, it's just that my search is private, not left lying in the street or in some seedy by-the-hour room...the difference is really only one of logistics. It doesn't make me better, just better-off...I think my actual purpose all along has been to bury the details, throw everyone's dirt on my truth.
I try to remember why it was once worthwhile...why the effort mattered; why it might matter still. I recall faces, write down names, sort it out on paper as if the words are purpose enough. I think of an old man, dead ten years or more; but it's his wife that I still see, pacing the floors of my memory...countless shots of mescal and morphine won't wash away her face; so I write this:
They lived in a perpetual past,
three dim and heat-heavy rooms
encased them in the crumbling husk
of a brownstone on a forgotten side
of the city.
We ran suicide shifts down dead streets,
and some midnights found our pulsing
red and white outside their stoop,
spinning strobes slapping brick with
bright kisses.
He was the Phantom of the Opera,
she was his Christine. She would rush us in,
blue eyes wide in a thin plane.
Her scent reminded me of tabbouleh,
scallion sweet.
He was ancient, breath like smegma,
face like a leather mask. Cirrhosis ate
his body, drank his mind; accompanied by
strains of Wagner in unrelenting drones.
While we worked, she hovered-
frail wasp patting his brow, humming.
I saw her hug herself, fingers
dripping panic down her back
like slow sweat.
He was a wicked Raoul, hateful in his extremis.
He struck at her, called her a brainless zygote,
rotten whore. She gave him the radius
of her smile and crooned "Papa, papa,"
in dulcet tones.
We lifted him to the stretcher-
she cried when we strapped the belts
and clutched our sleeves in nervous desperation.
She made quiet, pleading noises
in a strange tongue.
They had been someone once;
he a producer of this, she an actress in that.
She had worn diaphanous gowns that clung
to her mons veneris, danced in hot abandon
for his pleasure.
We left her standing in the doorway on that
last night of our aquaintance, calling papa
in a pitiful litany that was at once beautiful
and sad.
Once out, put down on my blank sheets like the scattered rows in an untended cemetary, I find the ghosts remain. Face upon face, they bob the surface of my mind and break the black water pooled there with an uncomfortable ease. I think of dragons, of tigers chasing miles into decades; their purpose leaps from my pen, ink like blood across the page.
I entertain the demons that follow me from room to room. Vague shifts of space direct me here to here; they follow on the cat's feet of some other time poet my fogged mind cannot name. We have surely danced, them and I; they have led me, I have led them...we have chased each the other across spans of lost years. Now I pirouette alone, spin without brakes into varying shades of black; they seem content to watch. Sometimes, I notice the tightness in the air as they clap.
I find myself at my kitchen table, elbows set on an oilcloth that I must have purchased; I struggle to catch the memory of when. My oilcloth is singular in its ugliness, blocks of blue and white connected by tiny sunflowers that resemble flies cocooned in perfect symmetry within a square web. Burn marks track the path of the spider. I light a cigarette with my Zippo, its pewter body as battered as my own. The thumb wheel is loose; three strikes to fire and I wonder if the snipers are watching alongside my snickering demons. The itch between my shoulders has grown numb, a disabled target. I smell the bite of ozone, and beneath that, copper; always the copper, heavy and sweet.
The floor under my feet peels and fades; its pattern lost to countless steps. Once blue or rose or green, it now lays gray and dead across boards gone soft with rot. There's a hole to the left of my right foot, neither small or large and shaped like a grin, it yawns a welcome; the demons at my back nudge against my ear. I inch my toes through the smile, feel the air of the cellar below, cold, damp. I wonder if any corpses before me have found this hole, slid though it to rest at last nestled in rat shit and dirt. I try to force my foot past the limits of the hole; the edges give without complaint. I take a long drag and wait for the dark below to yank me in; the air clutches my ovation.
Dusk drawing from the blinds finds me on my knees with butter knife and bleeding fingers; splinters pile up on either side like dead soldiers. I think of foxholes and fire pits and the blackened maws of buried screams that have found breath beneath the give of my floorboards. The smile has widened into a laugh; its cool trill dries my efforts to salt. Behind me, whispers of applause pull past my shoulders and fall between my hands; I can hear it echo somewhere in the black.
Demons sleep by daylight. I wake with cheek pressed against a table leg, fingers sore and curled under my chin. For a moment, I can't remember; my eyes, sideways at floor level, pick out shards of wood, a settled haze of smoke, spatters of tacky blood. I smell dirt and damp and the sour odor of spoil; again I think of foxholes, I wonder where the sniper is perched. A ringing phone startles me to my feet, the steady thump thump of the evacs melt into morning traffic that hums from the streets below my window. Shadows of sun shaft through my cracked blinds; the hole reveals itself...only a hole. Jagged at its edges, bigger, empty. I dump the ashtray over its lip; scatter my night cremations and watch as ash sifts into nothing.
Day Five.
Someone asked me today what 'Blue Tattoo' meant and why I chose it as a tag name. Well, for millions it means identification; stamped on wrists and forearms by some long-ago hatred. It's countless bad images and forgotten names forever etched onto skins by home-made artists; they fade and warp as time goes by. It's a book of poems by Lynn Lifshin...'The Blue Tattoo'. Pretty good ones, too. But for me, it's a cool image of a tattoo parlor that I found...I just like the sound of it. It's a start-over, a second chance, it's the wrinkle that my time can't forget. It's my own warp 'n fade, my personal two-step, my sideways shuffle. It's what my life FEELS like most days...a faded, homemade tattoo that isn't quite what it used to be; isn't the beautiful thing it looked like thirty years ago under bad fluorescent lights. It's just a few crooked lines wrapped around a foolish idiom that no longer rings true.
But it's mine, and I love it, in the twisted way you love the scar you got in some bar fight back in the day; the way you love a bad toothache because it reminds you that you can still feel...even if it's only pain. I love it because it won't go away, it's as faithful as a whipped puppy. Every now and then I trace it's face with my finger and wonder where the cobalt went, wonder when the ink clouded into slate...was it the year mama died, or did it happen somewhere in Haiphong while I was busy looking for trip wires? Maybe it was a gradual thing, and I only noticed when someone pointed it out. Maybe it's MY identification, a symbol of self-hatred that I'm not qualified or ready to sort out, that I'm not ready to forget.
So I'll stay up late tonight and find tattoo flash on the net. I'll stare at all the skin art and perhaps pick out a new one to grace my falling flesh...something to remember me by. A vivid dust of color to cover my own faded shade of pale. It'll make me feel young again; bring back memories of when I didn't care and thought I never would. A celtic cross, a rose dagger, a sacred heart with my name across it's apex...or maybe just a zipper down my chest to remind me how easily some things open.
But I'll probably just get drunk, instead.
I read an interview recently where a good man said:
"Blue whacks hard, hits 'em where it hurts; but a little
of that can go a long way..." and of course it got me thinking,
sent me off on a backwards journey that went and came
such a long way that I wonder if I'll recognize the end when it nears.
I thought of my brother Eddie; 10 years older and dead
by 1970, hanging from the chandelier in my mother's great room
because he wanted to run off to Paris or some gay somewhere
to sling paint against curling canvas and that just wasn't done;
couldn't happen said dear old dad; it's a doctorate for you...
So there hung Eddie on a crisp May morning, sneakered feet
drawing lazy circles in shadows on the black and white parquet.
And I remember how my mother didn't scream; or cry or even
drop her bone cup but instead instructed (now there's a word)
the housekeeper to "send for the authorities, Helen", and
instruct (there it is again) them to come quietly, please.
When they cut Eddie down a crystal was somehow broken
in the process and as I watched the fine glass shimmer to the floor
I thought now there's beauty; such a beautiful irony...
Eddie has broken mother's chandelier but he'll never get to see
the distaste that bent her mouth downwards beyond the borders
allotted to his death. At dinner, my father remarked
on the high cost of a replacement. (not Eddie; the crystal)
So there it is; a little that went a long way.
Every time I see wisteria I remember,
it blossomed early that year and framed
the windows of the great room where Eddie dangled in defiance...
I associate it's heavy, purple scent with that final up yours.
Soon after I ran away, joined the army...thus fucking my mother
and my father in the best three-way ever; I was supposed
to be a lawyer and carry on tradition in the time-honored manner.
All the years in between then and now lay markers for that
backwards journey; and today I find myself stumbling upon them,
fascinated that with each mile back the colors still remain vivid
and true; even if most of it is red and black. So along my
reverse search I look for blue, yellow, green, orange; bright bits
that I bury because the dark seems easiest to cover...
but looking down at the buckled road I find this:
A girl named Grace in 1973, just after Saigon fell, living
in a Charlotte loft decorated with prints of Dali and Pollack
that made you dizzy but she said they freed her mind, made
her think and she liked Brautigan because he understood love, she said; she read to me "The Wait' and later,
as we made love on a sprung sofa she cried
and called me by a name that wasn't
mine...I color her blue and sometimes when it rains so light
you can't see it I remember how her hair stuck to her cheeks
after the sweat was dry.
And this:
A man who said his name was Jerry gave me a ride one cold afternoon just outside of Chesterfield; and seeing I had no money and no motive took me to his apartment, fed me soup
and pimento cheese sandwiches that were very near how manna must have tasted. We talked for hours sitting at his kitchen table;
and at some point he showed me his collection of jazz wax
that had to be priceless and just before I left he played
Betty Roche and the Savoy Sultans...I can still hear the soul inflection of that voice. Color Jerry orange; and now whenever I eat pimento cheese I think of him and his 33's.
And This:
A small boy and his sister who found their way onto my property
not too long ago. Out with my squirrel gun, looking for snakes, I come upon the two of them sitting on the bank of the Tar river that borders my land on the north side. They never heard my approach, being apt at walking the woods line in near silence, but my red-bone Millie startled the shit out of them with a high-pitched howl that set my teeth on edge. They jumped as if shot, and the girl (probably all of sis or seven) screamed and then began to cry miserably. "Don't shoot us, mister", said the boy, who was not much older than the girl, "we was only digging night crawlers..." (I guess I looked like a mister in camouflage; it made me smile) They calmed down when they saw I was no boogeyman, I gave them some of the kisses I always carry in one pocket or another and we spent a pleasant hour or so pulling worms out of the rich river earth and talking about things like why the river runs just one way and why coon dogs are always so skinny.
After they left, I sat awhile on the bank and thought of how
everything goes a long way, but none of it ever seems
to go on long enough. I'll color these two green, for growth...
maybe they'll come back; I'll remember to haul extra kisses.
I'm still looking for yellow.
.jpg)
But on a clear day, You can see through sclera, past the color-wheel of iris, into the natural lens. If you're quick enough, or good enough, you can watch bright fade to dull, see what was drift into what could have been. It's said that the last image perceived is reflected in the corneal eye; but that's bullshit. The only thing left is an eclipse too dim to cast back.
Like the shut of a door against a heated room, what remains is cold. I've watched more doors close than I care to count, seen so much of what could have been...now I wear that cold, an unseen insulation keeping heat at mind's length. To remember warmth is to recall faces, names, the end of every story. Cold is better; numb and hard. I need the feel of the shell.
Then today, a kid grabbed my arm. A hopeless kid with a hopeless wound, face-up in the middle of State street, the familiar aftermath of a common war. No fix here, no TV save. His eyes were green and deep; bending close, I watched frost rise in them like water...and through the fingers that circled my skin, I felt the heat slide away, felt the slam of the door. Hours later, I heard the click of the latch.
Isn't it funny how we return to the places where things happened, old soldiers drawn to land consecrated by battle and cross...just as I sit here tonight, swallowing warmth shot after shot. I remember faces, write down names, turn the pages of an unfinished book and wonder if the story ever really ends. I feel the air thicken, I know that what I've come to find has not dimmed, or waned away.
And in the back of my mind, night storms gather dust.
Epilogue:
Dismal sleeps.
The Dismal is quiet in that hour before dawn,
when the sun is not here or there but suspended;
a faint breath of light caught on the edge of nothing.
In that hour she sleeps, and tucked within her gnarled arms
sleep all that name her mother; otter and coon, bear and bobcat-
gray fox, red fox, white-tail deer; mink nestle their pelts
deep into moss beds spread like comfort along bank and bough.
Even the cottonmouth lie still beneath rock and log, copperheads
lie above; their night-damp skins shimmer like new pennies.
I alone am awake, but I am not awake alone.
In the Dismal silence ride the voices of time; they travel
years in a whisper, hiss at my ear in the low tones of the damned.
They speak with dead tongues, spin memory from dust and it settles-
kisses my sweat-wet cheeks and drapes my consciousness in webs of what was.
Outside my window, swamp bleeds into delta as night becomes day.
Listen:
Cicadas, slow to wake, rub their legs together and I hear clackers
popping through razor grass; my fists clinch, I wait for the dull thud
of claymores to follow the din. I can see foxfire blooms in the peat,
but my mind sees arc light through the trees; air bursts over Albany-
and the voices hiss "run, run..." I reach for an aid kit that's never there.
A Pileated woodpecker drills his perch and M-60's rattle my teeth
in mad minutes without end. Tracers fire above the ledge of my sill,
their red tails trail smoke like drifts of fog. Along the rim of reason,
concertinas trip with pings and snaps that nails my flesh to sheet.
The Dismal comes alive by degrees; her children wear paper shoes
that slide through brush and leaf with deadly ease. Squirrels rustle their nests,
warblers call for their mates, and somewhere in between the voices pull away-
threads of their goodbyes knit tight stitches down my spine.
Morning brings life. Otters slap the river in search of brim, they break surface
in pairs. Coons scuttle the deadfall in search of snakes, snakes take to the flats
in search of sun. Deer circle the cypress, stretch long and lovely necks
to prune moss from their canopies; black bears sing to their cubs.
My hounds edge their run on anxious feet, their hungry howls echo in the trees.
Somewhere in the swamp's heart, mink skirt my traps with skilled indifference-
their pelts stained moss green. When the wind is low I can hear them laugh.
And I am awake, alone.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)