Pen that can’t write
200 pounds of muscle
In a zero gravity room
Eating without a gut
It all comes back chewed
Bon mots
When no one around
Clean cleats of a rainout, the
Emptiness of wet dreams.
Something came
And ransacked
An unsuspecting mind
Left nothing but
A poem behind
6/23/21
It takes one needle stick
A couple millimeters
Just to the right
To lash an artery,
Puncture a child’s lung.
So tempting to wander off the path
Toward that forest of surly pines
Hundreds of years imbibing
From a surging river of blood
Leaching into the soil.
Current is too quick to clot.
And all you can do is pack and pack and pack
As much pressure as it takes
To plug an empty space
Flooding like water into the cabin
Of a rapidly sinking yacht.
One match
Struck
Near a refinery
One prion clinging
To a cutlet of beef
An uncovered cough,
That elicits a missed glance.
A stone dropped plop
Into a pond from a bridge
Ripples into tsunami
Butterfly effects
One thing into the next
The black ice
On the downslope
Of the hill you've
Already rolled down
Laughing
All
The way.
I can't help but slip.
It’s not a pin prick,
Scarlet proof of life,
That you suck to stanch
It’s an impalement ,
Razor thin sharp
And just as bitter
To taste.
It won’t clot
Until I press myself
Hard against
Lacerated flesh
And never let you go
We lift our baby boys
High above our heads
When they are born
Like ancestral offerings.
It’s on us to show our sons
This holy view from on high,
The one they won't remember
Until looking down on us in bed
Days before we die.
I took my own dad’s absences
And surreptitiously hid them
In the hollows of my bones.
Bones hold their hardness
But rarely empty until
Long after we’re dead.
My boy’s bones are flush
With a seething fleshy marrow
That I’d never ask him to share.
I’m still here.
I’ve flung myself into rivers
From great arching heights,
Emptying my lungs
With long expiring howls
On the way down.
It’s my bones that
Helped me stay afloat.
I’ve tried to chart a path
But he always finds his own way,
Anxious splashing across the Chagrin
Soaking his socks and shoes
After I’d meticulously
Hopscotched across,
Stone after stone,
In order to stay dry.
But he’s the one having all the fun.
How can I be the dad
When I still feel like a son?
What view will I recall
When my old man is gone?
Maybe I’ll just pour the rest
Of what I have left into my boy,
See how it goes.
Maybe that’s how it goes,
Fullness passing into emptiness,
Voids giving rise to the robust,
Alternating, generation after generation.
One, light as air
Straining to lift
Away into the sky
Like helium balloons
But tethered by sons
Who become dads
Firmly anchored
In the ground.
6/20/21
Lashing us to an iron stake on shore.
We never quite launch even
Though our ship is loaded and ready.
Every minute that goes by, our
Craft sinks deeper into sediment.
But we’re always on the verge of starting
Our speeches, our finely honed
Discourses on love or rage
Without ever saying a single word.
We make listeners uncomfortable
And we’ve learned to play it off like John Cage
But we don’t get it; it isn’t the silence
That makes our audiences
Look down at their shoes;
It’s the ineffectual efforts to break it.
I’m like a golfer with the yips,
Overthinking the simplest of things.
Right grip light, pretend you're
Holding an infant by the hand.
Easy oscillant backswing like grandpa’s
Metronymic head shaking in derision.
Practice swing upon practice swing,
It's the only way not to miss.
I also have this unfortunate stutter of the heart
That happens at the most inopportune times.
Like when everything melts away
Except for the one true thing
And it's up to me
To best express it.
But just as I commence
Something always goes awry.
In that moment when a good heart
Ought to swell before it flutters,
Mine tends to skip a few beats
And I mistake the fluency
Of the silences for esoteric profundity.
It doesn’t hold up to scrutiny
All this self induced suffering.
But I know of no quick fixes.
There’s more in the silences
Than you can possibly hear.
You’d have to look to realize this.
If I had to depict it on the page
You’d see dashes and commas
In the gaps between the words
And a series of periods of ellipses.
Everyone is down-low relieved
All the shouting and frantic
Bustling can finally cease.
We all back slowly away from the gurney.
Time of death, four thirty-three.
It's quite a mess.
Blood like spilt wine
On the gray linoleum floor.
A pale bloated body exposed
Under phosphorescent lights.
Tubes jutting from orifices.
The smell of urine and shit.
A nurse goes to get a blanket.
It isn’t like the movies or even TV
Where the dead are shocked back to life.
It generally ends like this:
Cracked ribs, split lips
The guy on chest compressions
Bent over gasping against a wall.
A newly dead body is a colorless rainbow
Arching across space in the expected pattern
But drained of all defining hues.
Not quite white, not quite blue
Death only seems inevitable once it’s here.
The corpse is covered.
The doors are closed
To seal the tomb
By the last person to leave.
Then the idle chatter resumes
In the spaces outside the silent room.
Monitors start beeping again.
Everything is in motion again.
EMT's usher in new arrivals
That are accepted like droplets of rain.
About the body, nothing more is said
We've returned to the living
And the not quite dead.
Letting Be
I gave up on myself
Before I learned to let it go.
You ever chase a squirrel
Or an anxious puppy
Or a backyard butterfly darting
Just out of reach?
After a while it seems hopeless
You’ll never catch it
The fun doesn't last.
You end up frustrated, breathless.
Like chasing after a love
That's right in front of your face.
Everything I have
I really shouldn’t keep.
Like this little brown toad
Cupped between my palms.
When I show it a sliver of light
It doesn’t need to be told when to leap.
But you cant let all the things go.
Some stick, like scabs
That slough only when they’re ready.
The best is to learn to let things be.
6/5/21
To see a surgeon wielding a stethoscope.
I wouldn’t know a murmur from a rumor
Of a cracked record's skipped beat.
I listen to my own heart
Though, when I’m alone
Or waiting at a stop light
Trying to decide which way to turn.
It’s good to know
Something inside is sure.
Doesn’t need to be told
When to race, when to cease.
I have to remind myself
To be kinder, more equable.
But the heart just beats
As fast as it needs.
I should listen more
To all the things of the world.
Like the trunk of this dying birch,
The rain drenched yard
Pushing up grass and clover,
Pulsing with surge after surge of sound.
I don't need this stethoscope to hear
The steady percussive thrum all around.
6/2/21
McMansion
We bought the right house, only ten years old,
In the right neighborhood for the right price.
But then it all went to shit.
It was too much house
Too much space.
I could never keep up
With all the maintenance tasks.
Patching holes
Sealing leaks
Clearing clogs
Doors that didn’t lock
Windows like sieves.
Microwave handles kept ripping off.
Now it's the refrigerator with
A handle on the ground
After someone yanked too hard.
The ceilings are all starting to yellow
And the walls are streaked and forlorn
Like they’d been up crying all night.
The stairs have cracks in the seams
And the carpet is a vitiligo of stains.
The garden out back is overrun with weeds.
I ought to just plow it under
And sprinkle down handfuls of seed.
But it’s all so much work
Trying to make it my own.
Maybe it’s too late for that.
It already is what we have become.
Maybe it was always too much space
To fill, too much house.
Something smaller would suffice.
And I would like another chance
To not break something nice.
5/31/21
Diagnosis
They put a call out to surgery
When they don’t know what else to do,
When they’ve run out of ideas,
Exhausted all the tests.
Do something, they plead,
There has to be something you can offer.
Sure, I say, I can do lots of things:
Cut, lance, incise, debulk, eviscerate.
I have scalpels and staplers and sutures.
I’m well trained and highly degreed,
Have studied the literature, the relevant readings.
The things I can do I’ve done plenty of times.
But what are we going to call this?
What’s the diagnosis?
It has to have a name
In order to get fixed.
It’s not enough to say she hurts.
It’s not enough to notice she’s distracted
By small men in blue shirts,
That she traces words in marbled counters
When she thinks no one is looking,
That she’s afraid of being under water,
Alone, in a place absent of all sound
Except for the pounding of her own pulse.
It’s not enough to rue the way
She doesn’t laugh at all my clever jokes,
That she insists on eating
When I only have time for a drink.
It’s not enough, I say.
I see her over there
Raking her hands through her hair,
Mistaking shadows for ghosts.
I know I can help.
But first I need a diagnostic code.
I can patch the hole in her heart
Or attach prosthetics to fill
The voids of her missing parts.
With this sharp knife, this bright light, I will
Excise the rotten, the festering, the fluctuant.
But I’ve only been trained
To manage the known,
The things that have been named.
5/4/21
Sometimes the dreary cloudy morning
That augurs an afternoon deluge
Is just what I need.
Don’t want to wake up
But can’t go back to sleep.
I’m already showered and out the door,
Driven to earn my daily bread.
The sky is an unmade bed
Of heaped up blankets and tousled comforters
That I reach for through the window.
I want to wrap myself in its sodden softness,
Float along in the gray unfallen
Rain straining at the edges of gaseous nothing.
Not because I’m cold or avoidant.
I just want to be cocooned,
Cloaked in layers of billowing
Obscurity just for one day.
The sun will appear tomorrow,
Or someday soon,
Amidst an infinite expanse,
So high and impossibly blue.
I’ll shed my coverings then
And emerge from the mists anew.
5/2/21
