Regrets
Regrets
Should we be grateful
for our regrets?
Are they what make
us what we are?
Are they how we learn
and grow?
Is it only they
that can soften,
shape us
into a more agreeable being?
It’s as though you were a time traveler,
showing up in my life unexpectedly
and then leaving, again and again.
The cat in the photograph is dead now,
as are the flowers in the vase,
the bird in the tree outside the window.
It’s not that I want them to be absent,
or that they did. They had no say in the matter,
no more than I might, stranded here forever.
The picture is as old as my memories of times,
so they and I have no hope for resurrection.
Unless, of course, you bring them back with you.
The cool-headed coolie and his coon
played cooncan at Coon Rapids.
Donned in coonskins
they sat under the contie
next to a coop with a cooper.
They spied a coot, ate a cooter
watched a copperhead emerge from a copse
with intent to copulate with a coquette
hidden behind a coquito.
Four thousand carousel lights burn at the fairground
If it’s not a choice, it’s not chastity.
It’s not because he’s honest that he hasn’t lied to you; it’s because he can’t talk.
If it’s over 40 pounds, it’s not bestiality in Kentucky.
The whiskey berm made the old distillery a home for raccoons.
Magnets cannot stick to socks.
These carnies think they’re coming into my town
and give me a cold corn dog?
Some fat Mason on a four wheeler
gonna tell me where to park?
Tell me if my mouth is set right.
In a sea of tarp,
Light and salt to a dark and flavorless world
Like water spilled on the ground which cannot be gather up again.
Poem 3, June 3
The Wisdom of Jim Wayne Miller
Good poetry will deal with ordinary things…
and still manage to evoke a sense of wonder,
of the miraculous.
To disagree, I would be blasphemous
to Jim, to clear pools wherein tourists blunder,
to poetry from which the reader comes up shivering.
These spring days I carry images of mountains,
of Old Seventy Creek, cold & clear,
of packsaddle stings in corn rows.
I have an image of Jim, walking behind cows
around a hillside path cut deep, a near
way, a crow’s flight, unfettered by mountains.
I hear Jim’s voice from the past:
I travel everywhere on native ground.
I have been so often blessed.
I want to throw a shadow into life, to go wild in the best
of Appalachian ways, to sit on common ground
without having to be asked.
I want to idle on the bank of Hay Creek & write
where thoughts swarm like shoaling redhorse
& become a poem, its dorsal fin splitting water.
got a letter
from Midnight Butterfly
tattern and worn
hand painted haiku moon
stained by indigo blood
only has frostbitten shoulders
to lean on. The better half
of his days touch nothing
more than a slender
snooze button. The residue
of dreamy crust
that falls from his eyelids
is stardust upon every body
of water.
He spends his life getting confused
for Sorrow’s little helper,
even though they look nothing alike.
When he and Sorrow first started
a school band, he plucked rib
strings from a cage to use them
as drumsticks.
Truth be told, he hasn’t stopped
falling since he learned
how to crawl,
but when he gets back up
he’ll play you the blues like it was
all he was born to do.
He was raised in the scavenged coalmines
of hearts gone grey, he searched for the worn
off shine of forever like blood on a diamond
on a poor woman’s tired hand.
He would kiss every floorboard
of Miss Misery’s basement
just to spend the night tied up
under her unlocked doors
of flesh. She says, Yes,
it takes a cosmos
of repression to not see
that Sorrow only
keeps you around so sometimes
he can pretend
he’s someone else.
“You’re in five colors/you inspire my mind” — Arcade Fire
Today the black and white speckle of the flooring
Is more of a splatter, the desk handles gleam
bold and cheap and hateful
like a Big Lots knife set from your aunt at Christmas, the
bright blue Ethernet cable snakes in piles
like electric nooses, the bookshelf sits dust-coated and empty,
splotchy red, an infected mouth, and the children’s voices,
God, their stupid voices,
giving asinine explanations to each other
for why things are cheaper in Mexico,
twitterpated over Snapchat tiddies,
threatening to piss in their seats,
they tumble over my eardrums
bodies
slamming into windshields. Last Friday
this was a tolerable mass
of bland and comfortable squalor,
banal,
something I could endure; Monday,
well,
there’s a difference
between a corpse and a body,
and this place is fit
for only one of those things. Now I’m stuck
in this skin
chaffing against the rough surface
of such a mean structure,
wondering why
I asked you do this to me
yet again.
blink
blink and your dead
isn’t
isn’t
isn’t that stealing
says the voice in my head
the cadence is off
so are my thoughts–
that hoe over there
caught naught but oughts
double zero she scored
daily double she bet
it all and she lost
–is it time for bed yet?
my rhyme scheme’s absurd
more, too, are my words
and two more will make four
for flight with the birds–
two yellow, too yellow
and too red, two red–
for sex and, forsooth,
to the bushes they fled
irrevocable they sang
next to her window: she heard
over fake moans and fake names
one small little word
a verb, an indictment
adjectively thrown
against her (against me?–
is she not my own?
fake lives we whip up
contain some nugget of truth,
some small piece of us)
while fulfilling her youth
in bed with a boy,-
paying cheaply- but still,
her soul, recompensed,
with ten dollar bills
as green as the leaves
(all leaves must fall)
that surrounded the birds
in coitus enthralled.
and yet, once done,
once come and once gone,
all six, after sex,
beleaguer the dawn–
Hold out, oh ye youth!
Hold tight, to the night
for quickly it goes
with its absence of light
Starve out the day break!
(or break fast while you can)
kill the sun rise
kill the boy, let the man
have your body for little
or, if desperate, maybe less,
and dare not to remember
that deep chill of winter
that comes for us all
that comes for us all
that takes our innocence
that murders and creates
and murders once more, finally
—-
I dare to disturb the universe
and it dare disturb me/
I write down its lies
and, with you, we make three,
three know the past darkness
three know the coming light
three living in betwixt them
within fight or flight
like those little birds
two yellow, too red,
a girl and her boy,
a boy and his bed,
complete with each other
replete with themselves
forget their own lies
become their disguise
and stop the eternal search for just a brief while
and then
blink
