we should never forget who we were
and the sad thing is we do, and easily –
or maybe the sadness is how we should
get better over time, aging and maturing
like wine, but I look in the mirror and see
the same petulant child that I recognize
in these haunting mannerisms I’ve tried
so desperately to shed.
but the thing is that I still cry like I did
in the schoolyard, kneeling on asphalt
and shoving my brother’s loving hands
off of my shoulders, except now
I’m alone, listening to nessun dorma
bounce off the apartment walls, alone,
filling my glass and emptying myself.
it’s a ritual, and I’m unclear as to whether
or not it’s of any benefit, any more –
there are many lines that have blurred.
things I left behind –
a small library of novels and classics
bought in a second-hand store so I could
ostensibly better myself – never read,
beer steins my mother bought me in germany,
a battered art portfolio from high school with
the handwriting on the front too familiar for comfort,
stacks of photographs and love notes pushing
a decade that I haven’t looked at for just as long.
something I brought with me – guilt,
like when my father told me how he paced
about the house after I left, the tears
corroborated by my mother that I avoided
with great purpose and deliberation and
hang about me now like a chandelier
above my head – delicate and beautiful
and too far beyond me to approach.
this is a careful dance
that I don’t know the steps to,
and maybe my clumsiness is
a symptom of a larger and
more dangerous whole –
there’s something graceful
and fluid inside of me
that I just cannot find,
and it’s just as tiring for me
to write about it without end
as it is for you to read.
things I am full of –
questions and half-answers,
fatigue and optimism,
misdirections and piles of
discarded disillusionment
that just wouldn’t do any longer.
it’s been one of those weeks
where you cannot see yourself
even if you look in the mirror –
too many conflicting voices
and questions to disturb
the waters surface and set it to waves.
there might have been a voice inside
familiar to and part of me
but I’ve lost him,
and am writing to
listen better.
On the edge of the Cliffs of Moher, ducking for safety and listening closely.it’s always been when I’m standing at the edge
where the cosmos has spoken loud enough
for me to listen.
there was that first whisper at the car accident, when
I saw the horizon of red and blue forming a blockade
surrounding the tree my brother’s car wrapped around.
it was after I saw him sitting on the back of the ambulance,
shocked and unscathed. I pushed through the sea of sirens
and broke through to the wreck, pulling free his scattered things,
when I heard it – or felt it – a sureness and calm
that the moment didn’t seem to deserve.
I found it again on the beach – years later, as if deliberately
discarded and buried in the sand. it was a late summer night,
we were perfectly drunk on beer and the moment –
standing young and proud on the edge of the world
as it bled down into the ocean. it was sudden, I looked
but no-one else heard it, carried soft on the breeze
and booming as the tide crashed onto the shore, but
I wrote what I heard, even a year later – when
just the thought of it was enough to turn my heart
into a tremor in my chest.
I’ll be standing on the subway platform tomorrow morning,
watching the sun climb up to set the tracks glowing white hot
and I hope I’ll find it there, lost somewhere in the mobs of people
or shuffled aside by pigeon feet so I can take it
and know how to say it at this crucially insignificant moment –
one where all of the words are already written, waiting
for the voices at the edges of things to set them astir.
it’s good to know that they don’t die away,
that we can find them again and again
sitting together on wooden picnic tables –
just like we don’t die away, only growing
outward and upward like tree branches,
one part of the same whole, no worse
for the weather and wear along the way.
take your melancholy, the bags under your eyes –
take the hunger pangs and the ache of anxiety
that sits like sediment in your diaphragm –
take the shyness in your voice, the whispers
that berate you and slip unbidden into your dreams –
take them all and leave them behind you,
these parts of a life not meant for us.
it’s never the important questions
that I meditate over in the shower,
my most wasteful vice – hot water
against the small of my back for
minutes on end – the white noise
of the water drumming on porcelain
is when I think about if trees sleep
and what they would dream about,
after the sun drops over the rooftops
and the leaves cool in their own shade.
bare walls, wooden crosshatching
make squares on the floor, one
rectangle of rug which our cat
sharpens his claws on – windows
perpetually fogged by some film –
I took it as a sign that the drawers
were just large enough to fit my clothes,
that all my belongings fit neatly into
one small box, that I was home,
and that it was waiting for me.
listen out the window and tell me
which are the right kinds of noise
to pay attention to? car horns
defiantly blare through the afternoon
while footsteps and skateboard wheels
rattle down the sidewalk, punctuating
the minutes. meanwhile I’m sitting here
captivated by the steady draw
of my own breath, wondering is this enough, is this enough
my shadow is long, thrown onto the sidewalk
as the sun burns through coastal fog, mist
wrapping up and around my twiggish legs,
and I realize I cannot remember when it was
that I learned to walk on them, if I ever did.
I’m a newborn giraffe, stumbling about
on skinny stilts, my jeans hugging my knees,
flaring out and falling on my flat feet.
sometimes it’s like an extra set of eyes
fixed on the outside and looking in.
I can see the look on my face as they form,
solemn nods to passersby, the dark rings
that settle into the corners.
look at me – do you see it too?
that amorphous tint that stalks me in mirrors
and keeps me hanging a second too long,
doubting if these eyes belong to me –
epileptic flashes of a stranger staring back.
Photograph by Alan Voorheeshe’s somewhere up north and coming home.
I imagine him ripping the posters off the walls,
torn corners of photographs stubbornly fixed
to the sheet rock with masking tape and blue tack –
the only part of that annual ablution I enjoyed,
the moment when the walls are clean and bare
and for a second you feel just the same.
I’m thinking about what he said just a few nights ago,
catching me late at night as I was ready to give in
and go to sleep, an off-hand comment profuse
with that beautiful kind of vulnerability,
delivered cooly, a shameless edge to it. he knew
exactly what he was saying and I was too slow
to tell him how fully I understood.
among other things it’s these moments
that keep him close to my heart.
I’m thinking about the beer I’ll buy
to offer in hospitality when I see him,
the proper sentiment for the situation.
already I’m picturing his hands, how I hate them –
prematurely calloused and old, stoically wrapped
around the bottle. I see that dimness in his eyes
I’m hoping will be absent. it’s not anything
that I’m ready to see again, not enough time passed
since I’ve forced it out of my own sight, grown used to it
or forgotten about it – whichever came first.
I’m thinking about what I’ll say and how I can bear to.
this weighs on me heavily, another decision
that makes me feel hundreds of years old and
full of sad wisdom only good for filling pages.
I feel it’s my responsibility, sometimes,
to find the words, the right way to say goodbye.
these are the moments that language leaves you.
this is how I’ll say it – taking him in my ancient arms
and telling him with that beautiful kind of vulnerability god be with you – hoping beyond reason that
he will understand what I mean. if he does,
I’ll see it in his eyes and be satisfied.
the best I can explain
is that it’s in the trees,
tucked into the branches like
the nest above the driveway –
or that I felt it descend
in the cloud that’s now
draped over the rooftops,
the same cloud I mistook
for smoke from a distant fire.
I find it in all small things,
discarded like dimes on the street
which my mother says are signs
of my grandfather – the dimes –
small kindnesses that sustain me
and compell me to write them down.
ostensibly I was watching
so when it finally comes time
for me to iron my own shirts
I won’t burn the house down –
I was raised to know better and
she deserves this much, at least,
that I present myself to the world
unwrinkled and with dignity.
what happened was I watched her hands
as she told the familiar story,
working guilt into the fabric with
short, sure strokes of the iron.
the feeling isn’t unfamiliar, my heart
becoming a quick tremor in my chest –
as she placed the shirt on the hanger
her love and perfect motherliness
was reaffirmed in the thousandth way
she knew how.
what happened in the morning
when I put in on, fingers dancing
over the buttons and looking in the mirror –
I was swimming in it. I looked
like a ten year old in his fathers shirt
and briefly felt the part, too.
if I was worried, then, what I’d wear
it only lasted a second – she’d left
another shirt waiting in the bedroom
when I went to search.
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.
CALL ME BELOVED 