Someone asked me the other day,
"Why do you no longer write poems,
As you did on these old rummaged pages,
Where your heart was on your sleeve
(So to speak),
Though young and without knowledge
Of a life's accumulated agonies,
Suffered like soliloquies
Upon unlikely, impromptu stages?"
"Ah, but why do we stop anything?"
I replied, gazing good-humoredly
At those forgotten pieces--paper thin--
Of a youth half-steeped in wonder,
Half in sin.
"As we grow older, our thoughts turn
Elsewhere to more pressing concerns:
A too, too intimate knowledge of time,
The uncertain career,
And raucous jokes told over a stale beer.
Besides, these crude lines you eulogize
Are only flimsy harbingers
(Stolen moments cramped tight
Against the margins of myriad math problems
I worked once, and to no more returned)
Of a life that has now forgotten
Such things as a schoolboy might dream
Amid a thousand half-earnest tries.
But worse,
What their absence to me has cost
On such sleepless nights as this,
When the moon only faintly glimmers
Through the stupor of a responsible bedtime--
Which a poem visits so rarely now--
Is nothing more than the insomnia
Of late night apparitions,
Or befuddled ghosts of chances
Lying barely awake
Between unkempt sheets of memory."
And later, I thought of another reason too,
Why I abandoned that juvenile vocation
Of words offered up
To that scribbled down sanctity of purpose
That is the pen's cherubic office,
When it plays a mute, moving angel
Betraying my familiar indifference
To stranger thoughts.
The reason was the pursuit of prayer,
The timeless moment stolen
Between the formal gesture at Mass
And a mind's careless wandering,
The moment packed tight against
The margins of straight lined pews
And held strongly with hands
That have known love's unflinching grip.
Because now I find myself wondering,
With thoughts that are all prayers,
How I can blaspheme
With this sacrilege of words--
Chewed off an old muse and bitten--
The unspoken language uttered
In your pew, Linda, the day
I first saw your family
Sitting together in the church,
Forming always the line
I should have long ago written.
__________________ And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister.
Sometimes in the still of November nights,
When the darkness is only palpable
And not to be heard,
You can't tell the patter of raindrops
From your own heart beating.
More often then not,
The tender age of twenty-one
Will find you in that predicament--
An exiled Southern student
On a New Hampshire farm
Looking out of his window
At midnight.
Breath clouds the window pane
As you listen to the Sundays
Over and over again
And think of your fugitive status
Amongst the living.
Why do we love the dark,
Even as we fear it?
Estranged from past and present,
You ask yourself that question,
Your face pressed against
The pane's cold glass.
When you were a child,
There was no love for the night.
Its coming you would only dread,
Because closing your eyes for sleep
Was a little too much like death,
The loss of self to dreaming
Otherness.
"Don't turn out the nightlight, mommy."
Later in youth,
After Eden, East of Nod,
You see in darkness
Another meaning:
The persona non grata
Hiding under the bed,
And winking in the mirror--
The face of all you wish
Would never have been.
Never.
Now you find yourself directing
Your whole secret being
To the night's coming
With a suspense that is a kind of listening
Also.
Because to hear the night
Is to listen to your own soul speaking
And know yourself for the first time.
And you could yourself accuse
(Of such things)
Oh horrible!
Crawling between earth and heaven.
Such things...
"So here we are,"
You say.
"A diaspora hiding behind
Falling rain water,
Listening in the dark,
And I can hear nothing
But familiar ruin."
You speak,
To punctuate the void.
With false bravado.
But you have not learned yet
That on some November nights,
There is a kind of magic
Disappointing silence--
A Word that did not speak,
But is always speaking,
A Word that drags you away from all recourse
To time and place.
And, after all,
How could you know
Before hearing it
That only in darkness is the Word
Sharp
"Like a double edged sword,
Cleaving bone and marrow",
Bone and blood.
Not sight,
But hearing tells you the cold winter night
Has become its own midwinter spring.
And you know that
Though you no longer see the dead,
Their voice is joined too
With the living.
Outside, the rain falls.
The Sundays play over and over
Again.
And sometimes,
On a cold, November night,
At the tender age of twenty-one.
You breathe for the very first time.
__________________ And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister.
Kneeling at the church pew
Ten days before my twenty-third Christmas,
I don't feel any more sanctified
Than Tuesday of last week.
What's more--
My joints pop,
My breath stinks,
And that chrism
Stuck on my forehead
Is oily.
They never tell you in catechism,
But the texture of the here-and-now
Is bones and blood,
Aches and farts.
Go figure.
The stranger sitting next to me stinks.
Bad odors always chase off my muse.
As a matter of fact,
Its bye, bye birdie this time
As the offering of hands
Lets me know its time
For the "peace"
And I can think of
Nothing
But...
Back in my refrigerator,
I love last night's pork chops
More than my neighbor.
__________________ And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister.
only the anonymous non-origin
where father's tales accumulate
in a dark, forgotten attic
with the rest of the forgone
keepsakes.
and those,
all too valuable now,
or at least so inextricable
from what is not-me,
that I cannot share
myself
with you...
lest it be also from
the communal dustbin
of all hope and desire,
bloody self-abnegation,
and even,
most terribly,
love--
laid hold of
violently with the words
that whisper the world's
quiet unspeaking.
shhhh.
__________________ And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister.
Gender: Female Location: every which way but loose
All your pieces are very good, but I like this one the most. The last few lines made me laugh aloud. Have you entered the poetry competition? I think you should
Gender: Female Location: every which way but loose
Please do, we hold them regularly but definitely not often enough for my liking. Hopefully more people will enter this time around and give us cause enough to hold a contest every couple of months or so. I can't believe how popular the P&P forum has become, when I suggested having one dedicated solely to poetry and prose I'm ashamed to admit I didn't see it lasting beyond its trial
In the sweet, dark, ambient
She paused,
Mid-drag,
Exhaling impatient, Greek hecatombs
From the cigarette
Poised, dagger-like,
Pre-flick,
Between thumb and forefinger,
Like a castaway thought
Hurled carelessly
At thoughts tending to...
Otis Redding on the jukebox,
A curb-side brawl,
The bartender's casual obsenity.
At the bar,
Inside my own
Abstemious, self-loathing
Sinecure,
I dream of sodium arc light
On the I-10 split
And look over at the girl
With the cigarette,
Now crushed
Underfoot,
And think of the time,
Me and Jules
We went racing mad
Down the highway
In all our pre-dawn lust,
And she...
Pressed up close,
And on top,
With hardly anything left on,
Brought me back
To something resembling
Life,
Kicking up a fury
Of Burger King wrappers
And used-up Coke cans
In the discrete,
Uncaring,
Infinite slipstream.
These days,
The empty glasses
Lined up on the bar
Look like all the excuses
I no longer remember.
These days
I leave the bar
Later and later...
__________________ And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister.
Frightening Verse For a Bucktoothed Girl in Luxembourg
I found it the other day,
Your favorite Smiths tape,
"Louder Than Bombs",
Underneath a pile of old
Philosophy texts--
Heidegger and a Pre-Socratic
Or two--
Right by a tube of
Discarded'
Lipstick that I don't
Recall you ever wearing.
Once, years ago,
In your car,
Or in your dorm,
This tape was part
And parcel to every
Conscious second of
A remembrance
We thought
Invincible
In the face of
Any stray chasm
Time and chance
Could bury us
Under.
Now,
It lay,
Forgotten,
A nowhere
Artifact
In a nevermore
History that no one
Will ever read
At the bottom
Of a closet,
Packed ramshackle
In a box
Sealed tight
With duct tape,
Against the pain of
Recollection,
Possible future, any.
I,
An archaeologist of
All the forlorn, forgotten
Impossible.
You,
Us,
Nothing more now,
Except this
Brushed-off anachronism,
That won't even play
In the jam box
Neither...
Of us has
Anymore.
__________________ And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister.
Re: Dr. Zaius Poetry. I Was A Lit Major, You Know.
A shorter answer would have been: "Because I'm bad at it."
__________________ Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Premature he came into the world,
headfirst, and crying.
Full of surprises.
He was, you might say, unexpected--
but, by all means, cute,
and that was, at least, a consolation to all,
holding their breath at the whiff of such words
the frantic grandmother shouted angrily
in moments he remembered from childhood,
words such as "bastard" and "unfortunate".
"Yes, unfortunate," he mused later,
"Child of sin,
naked baby's bottom of the world's fault."
And his inheritance too,
discovered only later in idle adolescence, and
you might say this knowledge also was
premature, knowledge of what was lost,
not to be recovered in this mortal time--
Surety of silence in the crib's lullaby hour,
before quiet was a burden,
like the uncomfortable lulls
in a thousand ridiculous conversations
that could be any party,
any gathering of friends,
at any inopportune moment.
Clink, clink go the early teacups
and the perfunctory, "Leaving so soon?"
follows hard upon.
Then, breathless,
Without complete willingness,
yet absolutely resigned,
the feigned gesture, a yawn, perhaps,
or the casual glance behind
to assure beyond reasonable doubt
this is not so much a premature goodbye,
as precocious surrender.
__________________ And the good Saint Francis that said Little Sister Death, that never had a sister.
Re: Re: Re: Dr. Zaius Poetry. I Was A Lit Major, You Know.
Actually, there are parts of me that are not *******. When I come to think of it, the only part of me that is ******* is my *******. Is that weird?
__________________ Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
KMC Community Forums
Jul 29th, 2006 02:39 AM
good job.
Thank you, Pittman! ^_^
