Op Note XXX
Tuesday, August 30, 2022
poem
Saturday, August 27, 2022
poem
Word Count
Love is a book
Which has exactly 237 pages
I am 51.8% of the way through.
I paid for this book with pennies and dimes
Banked from years of 9 to 5 loneliness
When I finish, the book will belong to me
And then I will share some of it with you
I will read it out loud
I will reenact certain passages
But you won't be able to touch it
Or even look at it
You will have to get your own
I’ve measured its length and width
And yes it fits perfectly on the bookcase
At home. I can read it as often as I wish
But someone has to cast a spell
In order to turn the page
And something has to happen
To the space around my heart
If I want to understand it well
I'm not explaining it very well
There are things beyond
The reach of novice pedantry
Everyone has to read it themselves
Here’s what they don’t teach:
If you read it just once, it stops being a book
It becomes a dusty space on a shelf
An empty slot where I’d put all my hopes
A giant tome of everything
That can't be written down
An absence that is the sum
Of all its words added up
Monday, August 22, 2022
poem
Rainbow
Low plumes of white clouds on the horizon suggest a distant fire. I'm always driving toward conflagration. I’m drawn to all blazes. I chase after storms. Chuck stones at hornet’s nests. Wave my hand over the licking flames. Always getting a little too close. Fascinated by the flickerings of fire, the way it turns good wood to ash. My first word was “hot”, learned the hard way, touching the orange glow of our electric stove. Mom said I hissed it like a feral cat. I watch the shivering people at bus stops in the winter and their little misted clouds of exhalation tell me everything will be alright. That everyone still has a fire burning inside. Chimneys spewing smoke reassure me. I feel safe. We’re all burning what we can to keep warm. Musings on my own death bring me around to the idea of cremation. I’d be a quick clean burn. Dry as the August grass. Spare the earth a long fetid rotting. May we all end in fire rather than ice. Dispersed like salt from ocean bluffs, drifting on the wind. Nothing for the worms and bacteria to desecrate. Terrified billionaires and their cryonic dreams of reanimation. Heaven is worse. No end at all. God gave fire to the devil as a gift to the damned. Smoldering for eons to an ashen residue. But at least it ends. Rain is how the world puts out its irrepressible wildfires. Rain is giving up. Rain is starting over. Drenching the earth in regret. Rainbows aren’t apologies. Rainbows are a reminder that even light can be broken, fractured into its component parts. I take the good and don’t make it better. I've screwed everything up. No recourse but to burn it all down. Light it on fire once again. I’m getting closer and closer. Maybe I’ll get lucky this time. Maybe it’s all just big beautiful white clouds.
Thursday, August 18, 2022
poem
Op Note XXIX
I introduced myself as the surgeon. The room was darkened. The curtains were drawn. The patient was pale and waifish in the bed. Nurses had layered her in blankets. All you could see was her head. She was 95 years old. So the chart said. She still lived alone. Her wince when I pressed her abdomen confirmed the suspicion. What to do? She smiled at me, a pink edentulous grin, and whispered “ask them”, nodding toward the pleather couch by the window. Funny, I hadn't noticed anyone when I came in. But there they were: a little girl in a tartan dress whispering to a raggedy cloth doll, a young pregnant lady distractedly playing with the curls of her own hair, a silver haired woman holding a basket of freshly baked bread. Family? I asked. No, the old woman said, it’s all me. The room began to fill up with figures of various ages. It was getting rather crowded. Which of you will know? Who should I ask? I went up to each and every one. Hours passed. The old crone started laughing. Oh doctor, you should have been here yesterday. The person you’re looking for is already gone. No one here will know. I looked around just to be sure and turned back to an empty bed. The blankets were folded. I saw myself from five minutes ago listening to an old woman’s heart. I was beginning to think everyone here was already dead.
Tuesday, August 16, 2022
poem
Punching Bag
Monday, August 15, 2022
poem
Dad was a ______ man who lived without _____. He collected ____ and never clung to a single ____. When it rained he had a tendency to _____. At his best he was a desert storm: brief, cataclysmic, quenching but____. When _____ , the world seemed brighter and he was the first to point out why. I remember him reading ____ to me at night. Afterward he would sing _____. He hated ____ adverbs. He emphasized ____ and form. His best qualities were ___ and _____, which rarely occurred together and when they did it became his worst quality. He was secretly _____ when I stopped calling him daddy. When he played with me I felt the _____ of his attention. He noticed how ____ always led to ____. He would say, watch, listen. Look at that. Pay attention. He liked to conjure an imaginary world of ____ that everyone else could ignore, at their peril. When he went to work I used to think _____. When he came home it was like ____ at the end of a long ____. He made us laugh. He was ____ at the hospital and sort of ____ when he came home, eating his re-heated dinner alone, late at night, bleary eyed, surgeon cap hair sticking up. He would sit in the garage and watch the rain. He thought he was good at ____ and no one had the nerve to tell him otherwise. His ____ used to drive us insane. Once, I looked out my window during a ______ and he was _____. When he was on, we all experienced an electrifying ______. He could make time disappear. His clouds cast darker shadows than most, though. His thunder was guttural, the volcanic rumble just before the deluge. Sometimes we looked for arks. When he was sad he reached for ____. When he cried he was like a little boy who had lost his favorite _____. He told us we could discern the important things from the unimportant by the ____ of their ____. He ____ joyously. He surreptitiously ____. He was afraid of ____. The best thing he ever gave me was a _____ that he had saved from _____. He made me promise never to waste it on anything ____. He was a conceptualist. He hated things. He lived in _____ ideas. He mourned the immaterial. Sometimes he made us feel like ghosts. He blamed his loss of faith on ____. I wish he had told me more about _____ and _____ and _____ and less about____. So much left unsaid. So many long wasted silences. He was reticent. He was shy. He didn’t fully believe in himself. He only believed in time. He never wore a ____. He used silence as a _____. He practiced long monologues in the car by whispering to himself. I used to pretend I didn’t hear. I wish I’d asked him to speak louder. He was hard on himself. He felt he was meant to suffer. He was hard on ____. He was ____. He was ____. He was ____. He was ____. He tried his best. He did suffer. He had a gaze that was tactile. He fiddled with his hands when ____. He loved his ______ . He loved _____. He loved.
poem
Stomach
Sometimes it seems the world is churning
Around us like we were trapped in a giant stomach,
Like something large had swallowed us,
So ravenously hungry it forgot to chew
And now we’re all being slowly digested
Tossed and frothed in a peptic darkness
Sorrows and joys, hair and bone
Dissolving in the hydrochloric acid
Of a burning inevitability.
But all to good purposes—
Corroding us into a bilious muck
That improbably nourishes.
Tuesday, August 9, 2022
poem
The Force of Time
Holding this ball over the precipice
Assuming it's the law of gravity
That takes over if I let go.
Everyone knows this.
But if I stopped time
The loosed ball doesn’t fall
No matter how much gravity pulls
All happenings of applied force
Are subject to the dominion of time
Without time
Nothing happens
Nobody reaches
There is no kiss
I see you down below me
Wondering when I’ll come
It isn’t electricity that attracted me
It isn’t gravity that I fear
I just need a little more time
To take me away from here
Sunday, August 7, 2022
poem
Desert Silence
The dead silence of the desert
Draws us here for the serenity
Such soundless deaf austerity
Sometimes it’s so quiet
I start to hear things
That aren’t really there
Just to fill in the void
Brain unable to weather
The utter absconsion of sound
From this scorching desolation
Unfurling to brown mountains
In far off hazy distances
It gets to be too much
I have to retreat
From all the noise
And return to the benign
Tumult of life as we know it
poem
Op Note XXVIII
Well there comes a time when you have to just cut it all out. All the grit and gristle. The uncooked fat. The bad dad. The bad husband. Bad son. That’s me. Never mastered any of it. Time for a little chop chop. Terrible poet so this will be the last one. All the others I’ll change author status to anonymous. Too embarrassing. Can’t run anymore, ankles breaking like balsa sticks. Cut the gym membership card in half. Burned out surgeon. Give it a rest. A nest of gray on my chest at the barber shop. Bad drinker. Bad tipper. Bad road trip companion. Bad friend. Bad at golf. All the balls in the pond. Terrible taste in fashion. Button down collars fraying. Ridiculous pants. Holes in the heels of all of my socks. Clean it all out. Make piles for pyres. Rip up the carpet. Smash all the plates. Hire someone to pack it all away in crates. What’s left? Nothing worth mentioning. Just this scrunched face in the mirror shaking slowly left to right, right to left. Even when the head is still.
Wednesday, August 3, 2022
poem
The Nominalist
We’re all seeking it
Can't quite put a finger on it
Not sure what to call it.
Try to name it and there’s a gap
A skip in the record
A sigh instead of soothing words
A pause when the poet
Runs out of breath before
She can conjure the next rhyme
Leave some spaces on the pages
Where the words can breathe
And figure out for themselves
What they really want to mean
But that’s a lie.
The best pauses
Lack all meaning
While remaining indispensable.
Em dash periods of ellipses
Frantic gestures of her hands
Cutting and twirling through empty airs
Amplifying the clumsiness
Of hollow desiccated words
Some mutter my god, my lord, my savior
Not to knock prayer but
Silence is even better.
The best approach if you feel
The need to speak is a lousy poem
That careens down dusty halls,
Crashes through hedges and gardens
And tears a hole in your heart
Just before it brings it all together.
The root of all religion, in fact,
Is a poem not god,
For god is too busy
Locked in his study
Trying to find the perfect
Rhymes for shalt and begotten.
Just write your poem
If you want to find the proof
Of whatever god has left behind.
Let’s read it together,
This triumvirate of words
I love you I miss you
Do you like the sound of my voice
The caress of your fingers on my arm
Doesn’t it feel nice?
Let's call this kinship
Or consider it love
So I know what to call it
When I ask myself why.
I’m a nominalist
I don't know a damn thing
Except the words in front of my face.
All I see is a ledger of script
Line after line after line
Columns and rows, both sides of the page.
I see words everywhere:
In the wending together of vines
In the sprouting of weeds in asphalt cracks
In the sullen rook perched high up in a dead tree
The beautiful hidden language
Where the words mean nothing
Until they are spoken,
Like magical incantations
Animating all we can possibly mean.
Point at something
I'll tell you what it is
Start crying or laughing or clenching your fist
And I’ll tell you what you feel
But that’s the extent of it.
Comfort me begins with a C
Hold me half rhymes with holy.
Can we stop using the word poetry
Can we cut the words in half
Make the page bleed
And call it collateral damage?
I keep slashing at the void
With pencils and pens
And keyboard strikes
A fusillade of shots, mostly blanks.
I miss my mark
And often more than twice
But fire away, I say.
Give yourself the green light.
I’m not always accurate
But I aim to be precise
For even the unnameable
Must have its own label
Monday, August 1, 2022
poem
Sedona Koan
First they were mountains
For all phenomena deserve a name
And then they became faces
Stern and forlorn like old men
Gathered in the shade of a rickety porch
Gazing upon a baked red desert
Bored and uncaring
Seeking to name others now
Secretly considering the origin
Of their own names
Through the process
Of dogged endurance.
First I was a boy called by a name
Then I was a man staring into a mirror,
Whispering his name over and over
Until it lost all meaning
Until I became just a face in the mirror
Like a mountain against the clear blue sky
Mountains like old men’s faces
Ring the town of Sedona
Wizened with weary resignation
Gashed with vertical creases
Bored by a million years
Of runoff rain sluicing the rock
Of lashing winds and baked in the heat
I have come seeking wisdom
In this arid quiet place
Where thirst is never slaked
Even when the monsoon rains come.
Here my mouth is chalked with dust
And my last canteen is empty
And there is nothing but the dry rueful sadness
Of the completely desiccated
Who have no tears left to leak
In the evening after dinner
We try to climb Bell Rock
Hand over hand as high
As we can, the surprising cool smooth
Stone like bone against our palms
Like reptilian skins just
Before the rattlesnake strikes
Down below, we watched the pagans dancing
As the sun fell beneath the orange western hills
Mountains are holders of time
While faces trace the path of a life:
Every smile, every grimace
Every contorted cry
Captured in some wrinkled pattern.
This was an ice age
Here we see the deposition of silt
When the glaciers melted.
This is when he lost the thread.
That one deepened
In the kitchen solitude of the forsaken.
Here is the line left behind
When his nascent heart was first broken
By the end of the week
The faces were mountains again
And the pain was pain again
And the loss was still
An empty lacuna
Just where I had left it
And it was my own face
That had stiffened
Into red tinted
Limestone and shale
Pressed into perpetual solidity
Blood stained and hard
Resolute and intractable
Etched where water falls
Where the tears have
Streamed down shallow channels
Carved into cheeks
I’ve held back long enough
Let them flow
So the dusty earth can drink
While I return home not to live
But to age, to tacitly persist
No longer the face
I used to be
No longer the me
I thought would always exist
Something new rises from the horizon
Erupting from a molten pluripotent core
Frowning forever upon this sered valley of silence:
A desert range I lack the time to get to know,
That somebody here will surely blame,
That somebody else will someday name.