Poems, page 20

Hit my car
I’ll never cry
Just drive along
Keeping straight tonight

Shoot your gun
I’ll never cry
Pick my poisons
Maybe die tonight

Close your eyes
Tears break mine
Know I’m boring
Forget me tonight

Sleep against the stormy blue

In protest I say the word aubergine.
In protest I say the word gossamer.
Electrify. Soliloquy. There are, always,
a hundred thousand private horrors occurring
at any given second, but in protest
I set them all down, just for now.
For now I am busy loving
the cardinal that flits onto my porch
and shits on it, and the pain in my left knee
that is a real pain, not the ghost of sensation
in a limb that is no longer there.
What I mean is, this is my actual life
in this actual world. So in protest
I say the word filament. Galumphing.
I think abdicate is a beautiful word,
but in protest I do not say it.
There are so many better words
to be said. Like luminous.
Like tenacity. Like love.

I’ll wake when I sense the cold.
Head snaps towards heaven,
dialed in, arms clear as glass.
It’s with urgency, like I’ve left 
the door open. Time is already
missing. Invigorated by a slow
ache, the crystallization of blood.
The vein taps dry of all to give.
Stasis, old news, this familiar story.
Despise reciting my lines again.
Numb, unchanging, the world is
a pre-programmed message made
unintelligible with static. You
don’t need to translate this,
you just need to bear witness,
eyes wide, fizzling quiet. Erasure 
with no base text, just the siphon 
of syllable from thin air, crackling
in and out of ether. I am miniscule, 
insignificant, a single flake of snow
melting on the window of a car
left warm and empty, headlights
running out in the darkness beyond.

Do not change or rearrange
my words please.
Do not realign or reassign
their meaning.
I know I am protective,
but if they are defective,
just let them be.
They came from me, you see,
and my words, like my feelings,
are tender things.

Half a life later I have this green couch, which I lay on alone / belting melodies for my neighbors to hear as though I’m connected / but I’ve never been so disjointed / torn between zip codes and time zones and my body remains but my heart is elsewhere / searching, always yearning to find the way it felt to have your arms around me strumming / and laughing when I got it wrong but sliding closer with hope between us / but our lack of oxygen smothered the fire before it burned / and I smelled the smoke all night

A green velvet chaise
dad’s used guitar in your hands
you laid the blue print

And it got me thinking about what else I’ll never get back. 
I can’t pick up the phone and call my best friend to tell her.
Checkers will never again wiggle his (not very) little body next to mine on the couch. 
I’ve never been able to talk to my father about anything besides
The dog. And as I mentioned, the dog is dead.

Grinding, concrete dust flying, endless noise               
Whine of leveling compound mixing
Now it’s dusty, humid, and close
Sawing, pounding, more racket
Four days two late nights long
Suddenly, silence
and then we see 
at long last
new wood
floors

You give of yourself

effortlessly 

impossible magnitudes

solving our problems

soothing our pain. 

You refuse to rest

there’s so much you want to do

for us. 

The pressure 

to which you subject yourself

would crack me

like the brown eggshells 

discarded 

while the golden yolks you cook slowly

(Alton Brown’s way)

simmer in butter. 

And although the kids don’t love them

as they used to

I’ll always treasure

every–single–thing

you do for us. 

I hope

one day

you can see yourself

how we do

resplendent and breathtaking

tirelessly striving

towards the best life we could dream of. 

You are the centerpiece

the glue

the brains and the heart

the Fertile Crescent

you gave life

to our family. 

The way that hugged the knobs and wood
and threaded through emerald shade
led from home and back. A church
the road’s start (or end) conveyed.

A smear of years–I return and search
for the landmark but find a scorch
of straight lanes through treeless land–
a highway, no curves, no church.

Unrecognizeable heartland
is not the winding way I planned.
I am not lost, but a little afraid–
I know where I’m going but not where I am.

(A rubaiyat after Frost)