this is life reduced: good music in a small room –
the light from the video flickers off the screen
and illuminates my basement, past midnight
listening to break up songs in the most modern way.
I’ve nothing to be sad about but the desire to cry
ranks up among sudden cravings for cookies and milk
or my collection of unusual hats, piled on a closet shelf.
I remember my own nights years back in ireland
in shoddy three room flats pounding on hand drums,
improvising choruses to drink along side tonic wine.
we were full of youth and optimism and pity – I feel it now
born anew watching video of live performances, pity for
the people in the rooms below, because I know
all the wrong notes are bleeding through the floorboards
leaving just the shadows of laughter and random noise.
I add this wish to my growing list for the world,
that everyone could be in the room, gently lilting their heads
off to the side – one moment at least to thrash on strings
and skill or sound doesn’t matter, more than social animals
we are musical beings, made of song and we need it
like air.
I’ve forgotten how to put a pen onto paper,
the daily habit reduced to hunting and pecking
and joyless keys, my menagerie of pens waiting
in a backpack pouch still full to bursting.
the ideas are just too big for the pocket sized pages,
the swath and the breadth of my emotion
vast and desolate and resonating, it hums
inside of me, follows me like a forlorn companion –
a shadow in the corner of my eye, sitting on trains
wondering if this is apathy sitting next to me?
it feels a part of myself and close to me,
like a name on the tip of my tongue, or
an appointment I’ve forgotten, the dullness
and throb in the joints of your bones.
I tell myself as often as I tell others
that the silence is voluntary, the gray
threads in my hair aren’t new –
I’m not special and my burden
isn’t any heavier. truth is sharp,
clear and sometimes cold, like
pressing your face against
a pane of glass.
the temptation is to turn away,
to try not to look, but out the windows
buds are blossoming on the trees –
a slender branch erupting out
the stub of an amputated limb
on the bradford pear out front,
because they cannot give up.
I worry that this all reads like
a long list of sour tastes and
daily disappointments.
this much is clear to me, though
pulling the words from my mouth
feels like prying knots out of string –
that these hurts also shine
like polished stones in a field.
find comfort then, like I do.
I take the bruises and missteps
and gently discard them all,
arrange them neatly
and leave them behind –
never far out of sight,
always casually lying
on the corner of my desk.
a shimmering semicircle
asserted itself in the center
of my vision, warping all
the letters on the page –
the happy mystery was
not the benign diagnosis
but the ease with which
I was ready to have my
sight leave me – the first
moments of dread melting
into acceptance, the comfort
that wind still rustles leaves
and I would still
hear myself sing, her
breath rising and falling
in the morning.
life is one long precarious moment,
the same tenuous balance as earth’s lazy orbit,
the moon tethering us to that twenty degree tilt.
you can feel it for yourself, laying on your back
on a grassy hill – look to the sky, and
think on the unseen hands that keep us
bound to the surface – for that moment
feel yourself falling toward the sun.
I can endure silence, even embrace it.
It is not an absence but it’s own beauty,
an attentive companion content to listen
and let you fill it with your own sound.
it is not the loneliness I cannot bear,
the one I carry inside myself.
it hides around corners, I catch it
outside windowsills, briefly –
like floaters in your eye
it’s too quick and subtle
to really understand,
to make a friend.
it’s easy to forget there are different suns
setting over new horizons, ground made
of red clay and trees stretching up like
eager fingers to rake the sky.
they say the grass is always greener in the places
you aren’t – of this I’m sure, the stubborn lawn
choked by the salt water sprayed into the air
just barely able to thrive.
lately I can sense a hole within me. I’m drafty,
and I feel it as acutely as a window left ajar.
maybe it’s because I’m expanding, somehow –
comsuming and reaching out into my own emptyness
like the lazy stretch of the universe.
this hollowness is strange, to me –
not a space left behind by something removed,
but more like the shoebox a younger self kept,
a repository for the manivaried victims of my
indiscriminate and frantic sentimentalism.
it’s like a knothole in a tree, a necessary
and irrevocable part of my whole, waiting
for an occupant to nest inside and call it home.
it would be comforting to think that
the stars that exploded eons ago
to form the atoms of my constituent parts
did so as part of some noble sacrifice,
some christ-like cosmic cruxifixtion
done for our benefit.
but then, to look at this planet
cast in the light of our own star,
hemorrhaging and bleeding out slowly
to warm the only lively planet
tumbling through space, to feel
the weight of that sacrifice and
to look out onto the filthy streets,
to see that this is what we’ve done with it.
which is more confusing – where the sudden terror
comes from, four in the morning upright in bed,
or where it goes? morning breaks through the damp haze
of the morning, burning away the dewy film on the windows
and with it my fear, not gone but subsided and aching
in the pit of my stomach, like hunger pangs.
I must be the bravest creature alive, to my cat,
given the way he watches me as I step out the door –
his eyes wide, struggling to comprehend
how I survive the unknown in the vague out there.
I think on this as I climb down the stairs, or
while I watch him on the windowsill, where he jumps
when people are outside or the garbage truck rumbles by.
I tell him the best that I can that it scares me too.
there are photographs languishing on my hard drive,
folders hidden within folders placed well out of sight.
it’s a cache of evidence, proof of an older self
that I’ve already forgotten – hairstyles and facial hair
attempted and long abandoned, the expressions on my face eerily foreign.
it’s written in the corners of my mouth, the strange twist
of reckless happiness that I haven’t felt since then,
that all encompassing shroud that the weary years
have evaporated from my life like sun burning through mist.
it’s a stranger I’m staring at, quickly rattling off discrepancies
as if to prove it to myself – no, it isn’t me, it’s just
a borrowed posture – no-one would call my eyes haunting,
staring through the lens and through time, to me in this chair.
I couldn’t have known on that night, standing in the sand
while my shirt stretched down around my neck,
soaked and heavy from the ocean – I didn’t plan this –
that this picture would find me here tonight, a testimony
burning through the screen, quietly accusing me
of letting the years erode me down like those waves
beating against the shore. it isn’t something I would do.
but I see it written all over me, in the sand plastered
up my calves, dangling off my outstretched fingers –
whispering you’ve lost it for both of us.
you cannot apologize to a photograph, and regardless,
forgiving yourself is hard to do.
I am wanderlust, incarnate,
for all the attention I give to shoes
and sidewalks, my obsession with
tree limbs and the steady, inaudible
tick tick tick that I count off
as the white lines on the highway
slide past in the rear view mirror.
I’m tired of the view outside my window,
the whitecaps and the roiling ocean –
even the blaring horns that snap me back
from a quieter place, impatiently tapped out
on the steering wheel behind me when
the car ahead isn’t clairvoyant of traffic lights.
they begin to melt together, a broken record
of needless haste and graying hair.
he used to fit in my hands, when we got him.
I remember him huddled in the corner of a box,
how I tried to soothe him on the long trip home.
he was a basement rabbit – he would scurry back
to the safety of the stairs when taken outside in the yard –
the very finite grassy patch and open sky more than enough
to incite that inclination of all rabbits to panic and run.
he loped slowly, bumped into doors and haphazard stacks
of cassettes, chewed through live lamp wires and otherwise
fulfilled all the duties of a rabbit – their natures are kind
and constantly seeking peace and stability, a trait
I greatly admire. he was my velveteen rabbit –
even the most timid visitors would stroke his oreo fur.
he liked this, I’m fairly sure.
he wasn’t the pet I was expecting – too dim to train
and too dangerous to leave unattended, exemplified
by dozens of feet of frayed wire and that nervous jitter
he never seemed to shake as a result. he was quiet
and possessing of a personality it took all eight years
to define – too subtle to state but easy enough to glean
if you watched him, followed his eyes as they stared
into space – listening to the dark corners of the basement
for whispers of that rabbit wisdom.
I wasn’t home when he was found in the morning
splayed out on his side – never one to rest
it was a sure sign something was amiss. he was interred
into a shoebox – a temporary vessel while the hole was dug,
dead weight in my hands while I watched and thought on him.
more poignant than my foolish scraps of disappointment in him
is the very real disappointment in myself – adopting him to my family
for all of the wrong reasons, leaving him caged for stretches
of time far too long & too often – an eight year hurt in my heart
and a nervous jitter that I’ll never shake.
out of the shoe box and into the ground – my brother
placed him down reverently, the curve of his back to me
as the dirt was replaced on top of him, a smooth flagstone
placed on the bare patch of earth.
we joked half-heartedly all night, finding it hard
to mourn for such a quiet, simple creature.
but as we walked inside the sudden finality of it and
his peace was a momentary balm to the ache I carry still.
he died an old rabbit, his duty fulfilled – hops and leaps
executed flawlessly, quick playful sprints across the carpet.
it was not in his power to meet my selfish teenage expectations
but it was in mine to provide a better life – a hard lesson
taught by one of the simplest of creatures, and
a bitter blessing that I will never lose sight of.
I won’t cry out to the cosmos to think of me,
my vanity has bled away over the decade
and washed out of myself, and I know that
I alone am the arbiter of my own happiness.
this doesn’t stop the haunting melancholy
that prods me awake at night, that I wish
the cosmos could pay some bit of attention
to the struggles in the word – the reason
I still listen rapt to hymns, bow my head
and cross myself passing ambulances –
why my wish of wishes is that there was
somebody paying attention, an underlying
beauty for the senselessness that tints my view.
the sprain in my back surfaced again today,
a thrice familiar friend since I slipped on ice
four februarys ago – it became the high note
in the chorus of aches I enjoyed this afternoon.
the line has blurred and I’m unsure of whether or not
my body is rebelling against me or I against it –
I’ve forced my appetite into a tidy corner
under the banner of self control, it’s capricious
as my moods and fits well into my general motto –
to do without.
today it is my body placed under the daily lens.
I study my long, swooping lines in the mirror,
much like I often do to my face – staring
as if locked in a constant attempt to recognize myself.
I remember first grade,
where I formed a mental picture of myself, what
I was sure to look like when I was thirty –
as if it were in my control, a decision to be made
like what to eat for breakfast.
to compare, from what I can remember of it:
I’ve turned out taller, significantly less blonde
(why I thought I would be forever a mystery)
and eight year old self will be disappointed to learn
my hair never did get tamed – it’s still unruly,
prone to erupt and expand like curling wisps of smoke
if tampered with, as if to comb it is some grave insult.
I’m watching my hands as I type, and thinking,
much like I often do, that these fingers racing
across the keys are mine – from time to time
they appear to belong to a stranger, the wrinkles
and creases unfamiliar and foreign. slowly
I’ll recognize them like a long forgotten friend
seen in passing, remember they’re the same hands
that have always been – this is a wonder to me.
those restless nights are confusing,
suddenly upright, bewildered and
swaddled in sweat-soaked sheets,
unsure of what this world is
that you’re waking up to.
you can’t just coax it out
like a rabbit from a hole
because it’s not as simple
as a matter of shyness.
I’ve heard people describe it
as if it were wrapped around the planet –
some ethereal atmosphere made up
by sentient and formless thoughts
all knit together – ideas
that want to be expressed,
with an all too human yearning.
maybe it’s when that desire to exist
and take shape grows to become unbearable
that they reach down to the surface
with ghostly outstretched fingers,
touching that metaphysical mystery
somewhere in these tangles of cells.
maybe they take root within us
and incubate, like parasites.
maybe it really is this simple
and ridiculous – that they deign
to call us worthy enough
to carry them within our heads – to
wrestle with the futility, the bruising
and the furious leaps it takes
to splay them out onto the page.
do they wonder, once they’re there
where they can read the letters I’ve used
to construct their blood and bones – where
they can study the breaks, the commas
and pauses that create their face,
do they wonder was this worth it?
the kindest afternoons are those
where the thousand worries ease away
to some vague and distant corner –
with only the one fear remaining,
that there aren’t enough simplicities
and beautiful nothings in the world
left to sustain me.
it wasn’t any easier as a child –
only the rules have changed,
the flickering fickle stories
that populate your nightmares.
when I was small
I was always being chased.
shapeless looming shadows just over my shoulder,
a frigid hand twisting around my bones
that would rip me back into wakefulness.
it was the mercy of the morning light, gentle
and diffused through the curtains
that took the lingering thoughts
and faded them like overexposed photographs
until nothing intelligible was left behind.
now I find myself upright in bed
preternaturally tired, worn ragged in dreams
after endlessly chasing vague shapes
I can never hope to reach, the nightmare
of never knowing what it is
I so desperately desire.
CALL ME BELOVED 