Blood Pools In My Ear
Blood pools in my ear from a cut I
made shaving this afternoon.
Not that it matters much, as
I’ve sweat trilling down the cleft of
my freshly showered spine still cooling
from my afternoon run.
Terrible Comfortable Silence (for Jonathan)
Terrible Comfortable Silence
A beautiful conceit
But that’s just telling, isn’t it?
What do you think your
(absent, imagined, clockwork god)
reader is going to get from that?
We sit on the balcony
slipping from Guinness
to Blue Ribbon as our taste for, well
taste, fades to the taste for, well,
pretension.
Is this painting working for you?
If you have lived a paucity of human
experience, it might! Show, don’t tell.
Maybe we shouldn’t show either.
Then we can be blind as well as deaf.
Let the rules go.
Is wayside still a word?
When was its last use?
How about the gutter? I’m sure that one
still has collateral (can we agree on this symbol?)
The old style gutter, you know the type,
where rain might collect in the spring, but
shit gets dumped morning and night.
Put your rules there.
And climbing back out
—phew, your shoes stink!—
you’ll have to pinch your nose to taste
a depth of human connectedness that
really does happen.
To say you’ll never really know or be known
is to take comfort, to own
self imposed
isolation in a lie.
Your argumental proof
(Rant at me now!)
these labels (we’re back on the beer,
but if that offends,
pretend we’re talking about billboards)
have reified us these
experiences made for projection.
I don’t think I’ve seen this poem,
those two lines offer lax control of language
in the service of beauty
(which is really a greater
control, one based on
love rather than law,
isn’t it?)
We (who?) prefer linguistic legalism
gilding tombs full of
bones (of course!), the ghosts of experience—
where the garden of life lived used be.
Or is it cliché to borrow Christian imagery
in this post-Christian now?
His conflation of physical contact with
emotional intimacy digs down to the
very core of this brief, intolerably long
human experience, and it’s vibrantly ghastly too!
(that’s three impossibilities we’ve lived now)
I caught that.
Did you?
When the are no absolutes,
the guides become rules become sacrosanct.
Let’s try another image.
Maybe we shouldn’t have cut that anchor loose.
Archetype, On Jack
Note: This post contains inappropriate language for the NWAG crowd. Please don’t read on if you intend to become offended.
After the dam broke I was empty
damned to stare across empty fields
washed clean of the bits that I’d scattered
empty bottles and fragments of thought
scared paper so I scrambled about for
pieces untouched in the flood I
gathered those stones like books
stacked on the shelf to begin again.
We need to talk about Jack, the wildcard, the unknown element in the equation. We met him for the first time when we were children just his age, and he did the impossible. He brought the big man down, cut the beanpole from below the giant, which would have been enough, but before he did that, he did what only the brave or the stupid—two traits always attributed to our antihero—would do, he ascended into the very castle of the Cyclops and stole away his greatest treasure. This was when we thought that we could be mythic, that we were meant for something more than our parents and teachers could ever imagine. But Jack’s feats weren’t only of the mythic type, for being the trickster, how could he help but get into trouble. Jack the giant-killer was also became Jack flash under ignoble circumstances, for in a spate of hyperactive unwillingness to go to bed, he sat himself on a candle and lit himself aflame.
Jack haunted our dreams as Jack Ketch, the executioner whose bloodied axe longed to sever spine and drip with our own guilty fluids, but as with all childhood frights, those dreams faded until all we saw in the night was a set of glowering eyes over a marble floor.
And then we thought we were through with Jack, so we grew to adulthood without ever recognizing the way that he had touched us, the way that he had changed our lives forever until someone else explained to us our history. Wait did I say “our?” It should be “Jack’s.” Or are they the same? What has he been up to in those years since we last saw Jack? Where did he go after he cut down that gigantic garden plant and burned his britches in that flame? I’ll tell you this, he didn’t just fade away into the dark of the subconscious. Oh no. He lit a fire in those dark corners to drive us to madness in every moment that the thought of becoming the expected began to assault our minds. Just look into the mythology of any culture, and you will find him there. We find him in the garden, disguised as a lizard. We find him refusing to bow before man, begging leave to tempt. We find him in the guise of the animal trickster, Coyote. But in these guises, we give him less than his due. We call him Devil, Tempter, Evil. He is really the trickster.
He is only us, us as we sometime imagined that we could be.
So where has he gone, what has he been up to in the years since we lost track of him, excepting that unfortunate incident in the garden?
Well, he assaulted the Tower of London at just that moment when Alchemy promised to grant us the secret of eternal life, sprinkling his heavy gold into the cauldron that Newton and the Immortal had prepared. So Jack became alchemist, turning our gold into lead. He learned that the world was written on parchment and reality could change with a word, but rather than save us from ourselves he screamed, “Fuck that shit!” into the dark, eloquent if nothing else, and stole a tattoo artist’s gun to write a new world into the skin of his sister. He sank into the ocean to rest in the white beaches of the dead, only to come back and banish the old gods from our seas.
And now he’s found his way into pop culture, perhaps afraid we’ve forgotten him. Jack the Coiner became Jack Bower, Jack Sparrow, Jack Ryan, Jack O’Neil, and the list goes on and on and on.
But if you’re wondering at his motivations, at why he would help us or why he didn’t, then you’ve missed the point because as I hinted before, he is only us as we wish to be. Jack doesn’t really think. He acts. The motivation, well, nothing but experience. The beast that rides his shoulder and goads him into every misadventure is you and me, just as he is the imp that pushes us toward our greatest achievements and defeats—those are the same thing too.
Jack is archetype, the one we love to hate, but still we love.
If you want to know more about Jack, to see him in all his glory, allow me to recommend some reading: Check out The Baroque Cycle by Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver first. After you’ve finished with those, read Hal Duncan’s Vellum and Ink, but prepare to be offended because Jack doesn’t care what you think. He isn’t what you want him to be, only what you need him to be.
A Poem, The Words They Build Up Like
These words they build up like
flood waters behind that dam where
as children we used to play in winter.
The river frozen climbing banks, we’d
drag our sled to the edge and stare
down the snowcapped spillway,
declaim the honor of steaming coco
to whomever braved first decent.
Denotata mounting, waves push tongue
into barriers searching out slightest
dry rot, the narrowest gap. Finding
void they push into space between
statement and thought to scoop away
pebble and stone joined years before
when the mixer shorted and I’d take a
shock every time he called for more
mortar to stack the bricks, me dancing angry
from naked hot wires.
Defensive banks fragment before the torrent
widening torn earth one quarts grain
crystal after lime dust cloud
the last fragment of reticent self-
preservation slides down the sloping
concrete escarpment and I call your name
with a voice you’ve never heard.
Spray widens invisible
cracks and sends great chunks careening
off precipice toward parched
valley below where just past those white
levies I lean against the wall we built and
take your gloved hand to whisper,
“I love you,” watching liquid turn
solid stone to gray cloaked sky.
A Poem, A Thought to a Tear
Close your eyes and look into blackness until
replaced by all colors beyond our
spectrum, you will see just how thin
our plane of optic perception remains. Stare into
nothing-become-everything the pressing
lack of vision forms infinite sight we never
find quotidian time to perceive. Reality is
film, stretched thin over the milky
unreality of infinite cosmos that
takes only a scratch, or a thought, to tear
here rolled back like paper in flame reveals
everywhere that grows behind the screen of today.
A Poem, Bury Me On the Mountain
Bury me on the mountain top where
I’ll become stone and soil to feed
there briars, lizards, and frightened mice
quivering under the bleaching
moon famished in days of dust.
Leave my bones to the bees for framing
their house in the arc of my skull
centipedes and serpents a domed cathedral
will make of spars where I once drew breath
food I will be to respite their tired
days, a search of shadow from desert aflame
Grown liquid I’ll creep down defiant
spurs across weary draws until
I green in the grass of the valley and
the trees raise me in their veins where
caressed by the wind I’ll be cast aside,
laughing, into the river racing toward sea.
A Poem, Smoking Last Night
Last night, standing under
a streetlight by the wall,
staring at my shadow and
wondering at its crispness, its poise
I raised a cheap, Afghani
cigarette to my mouth and
watched my shadow do the same.
I pulled smoke in to taste and watch
the cherry instead of brightening to
an amber glow in my eyes,
darken to blackness eclipsing the night like
the morning sun eclipses all stars
and I glanced at the wall just in time to see
my shadow grow blurred, a glow fading
from the tip of its grainy, concrete fingers.
