Since Engagement

Since Engagement

We talk about our relationship
as if we are giving congressional testimony,
you always probing
always questioning why I love you,
why I would choose to stay with you
when you obviously don't give me what I want.
This last month has been harder than the 5 years before.

I hear you,
Under oath, I deny that I am not getting what I want
because what you don't say, is that I am not giving you what you want.
You want nights of long conversations
about the nature of self loathing
and the voices in your head
about the inner self and why, always why.
I often neglect the inner self
as if it was a goldfish I forgot to feed over vacation.

Our relationship is dying,
and its not because we don't love each other,
but because strangely,
you don't love your self,
and every time we talk about our relationship,
its me not being interested in your process,
you "descending to the goddess,"
and coming out whole on the other side.

We may never be whole;
we may always hide this cancerous cell
and still be capable of being loved,
which may make the cancerous growth benign
instead of malignant.

I am interested but I also want to be standing here
with a rope if you come out the other side
and find yourself still falling,
your depression
water running down a very deep canyon.
My writing,
where I pour my concerns out,
where the words pull tears from my eyes
as if I am removing cactus spines,
keep me firmly on the ledge.
I can't descend for you,
I can't.
I spent too many years
caught in my own descent
to want anyone else to rescue me from it
or go there with me.
I had to hit bottom,
had to careen off the walls like a dislodged rock
and climb my way out,
on my own.
And when I hit bottom,
which wasn't really the bottom,
I didn't want anyone else there,
I wanted someone to throw me a line,
but writing,
was the only thing I had
and I grabbed it and I haven't let it go.

I'll be here when you stop falling,
when you realize
that depression is a bottomless hole,
that you can fall into,
and only you can climb back out.

Detox

Detox

Blonde, dirty locks clumped together.
Left to their own device
the locks would dread into
a maze of tangles, split ends,
and grime from the gutter,
the dumpsters, the random cardboard box
where, reluctantly, he'd slept.
Had the cops not picked him up, awake,
he'd be prowling around the entrances to grocery stores,
liquor stores,
bumming cigarettes
and making his way down to East Colfax
where he'd blow strange men
from Peterson Air Force Base.

He was tired,
that was a given,
and yet, I, a college freshmen,
from the suburbs,
couldn't help but stare.
My mother, a detox and alcohol counselor,
was asking him the series of questions,
that meant intake.

Out of his pockets,
they found some sort of smelling salts,
which my mother later explained
was some sort of over-the-counter upper.
Popular with homosexuals
they'd take it right before orgasm.
He was sick,
covered in various welts, scars,
bruises that didn't heal very fast.

Yet, it wasn't his physical appearance
that made me rethink my decision to come here,
today,
to investigate this as a possible job option,
or, at the very least, a good topic
for a English 102 paper using primary sources.
The primary source was supposed to be an interview with my mom,
cops,
nurses,
and maybe a client or two.
But, him,
blue eyed and shivering in a ratty flannel shirt
was more than I really wanted to investigate.
Even the abstraction of becoming the topic of a research paper
wasn't enough to anesthetize my emotions
shield me from the vagaries of life on the street.

Every decision that made my life,
by comparison,
comfortable,
and for my relatives,
who lived a more luxurious lifestyle:
hired maids and cooks,
private tutors and teachers,
soccer coaches and baby sitters.
Did their life,
my life, have to be counter-balanced
by the rapidly deteriorating
conditions of people on the street.
People released to the street
by Reagan gutting the funding
for mental health,
cutting the social fabric
because of ideology.

Life for a sizable percentage,
was still medieval,
and I knew he knew this.
I knew, as I tried to explain upon my leaving,
actually fleeing the detox ward,
racing back up into the suburbs,
tears streaming down my face,
he knew that life was misery.

Despite my parents attempts at shielding me from it,
life was suffering,
and he knew it.
He knew that no matter what the system did for him,
he'd still be alone,
nothing more than a statistic that may or may not recover,
Either way, he'd be no more human within the system than without,
and he knew I understood,
looking up at me:
a thin clean cut kid from the suburbs
in a red t-shirt,
taking notes in a blue spiral.
He never said a word to me directly,
but answered my mother's questions
and looked off into space
as if he was looking into an alternate universe,
a universe where he'd made a different set of decisions,
where the significant people in his life:
his mother,
his father,
his first teachers,
the uncle who sexually molested him,
his first lover
who never told him that he was sick
and maybe for a while they should use a condom.

And now, he was destined to die,
like so many were dying in the 80's from a disease
that no one knew how to cure.
He was the face of a pandemic,
the face I'd see whenever AIDS was mentioned.

October 22, 2005

Anthem

Anthem

This is for the cleaners,
protectors,
healers,
enforcers,
bullshit artists,
over-your-head warriors that is the American economy

For every glamorous job,
we told our guidance counselor at school that we wanted,
and now 5 years, 10 years, 20 years later
we don’t even remember what that was;
this is for you.
For every person who comes home from work
and has to think of ways to unwind
this is for you.

This is for the intake nurse at the detox center;
the barista brewing espresso on bad poetry night;
the janitor sweeping up shit who’s really a tenor;
the teacher in the detention room breaking up a fight;

This is for those who flag traffic in construction zones;
the chip manufacturer wearing a “clean” suit;
the maintenance man at the sewage treatment plant enjoying headphones:
the constipated who don’t like fruit;

This is for those working security at any of the president’s visits;
the press secretary after the administration’s been indicted;
the janitorial staff at the White House after Bush has taken a shit;
the mother burping artificially inseminated quintuplets,
who’s not the least bit delighted;

This is for the trash man responsible for picking up fridges after Hurricane Katrina
the Creative Writing major judging a poetry slam,
the critic who’s got to say something positive when J’Lo plays Athena;
the cocaine addict mysteriously losing his last gram.
This is for dreamers who’ve stopped remembering
the hopeful who’ve stopped being ambitious,
the hungry who’ve stopped coveting
the gullible who’ve started being suspicious.

You, who dreamed big
and thought talent, desire, hard work enough,
in the fixed game of the American economy.
This is for you.

This is for the people who think Roger Ebert really likes all those movies;
that adolescent males enjoy a good tease
and monkeys are happy living in trees.
This is for those who think the editors of Best American Poetry
really think W.S. Merwyn writes a great fucking poem every year.
This is for the people who like really bad beer.
This is for those who can’t remember becoming a “Sir,”
and had crushes on girls who thought of you as a brother.
This is for those who don’t even know who W.S. Merwyn is,
and think listening to some poems is about as much fun as taking a quiz.
This is for you.

You, whose life feels like a prison
who buy a new car that’s a lemon,
whose trips to dentist result in pulled teeth
who never take down their holiday wreath.
This is for you.
This poem’s for you.
You who live to forget,
who live to escape,
who are marking your time.

These words are for you,
Take them, do what you want,
I’m through.

October 20, 2005

Underwater

Underwater
I want to write a poem that can be understood under water,
that can be listened to half submerged with just your eyes,
nostrils,
and mouth a part of air.
Your lover holds you
the poem is transmuted through the filter,
the long slow sound waves through liquid
no louder than your breath,
which at times is the loudest sound you hear.
Your skull's an echo chamber
as you realize even your breath carries a tune,
varies pitch and frequency.

I want to write a poem that would announce the coming of a tsunami,
a hurricane of thought as the words lack clarity,
a series of vowel sounds.
In the water,the consonants don't make sense:
a "K" sounds like an "A,"
a "T" is nothing more than an "E."
I want to write a poem that does this,
yet also says, "I love you,"or "This shit is fucked, jack,"
or "Let me tell you about somethin'" under water,
where fish can rise and say, "That is deep," and want to cry.
And may be they do cry,
you'd never know,
cause your bodies submerged in tears as well.

October 8, 2005

At a University Poetry Reading

At a University Poetry Reading

In the small makeshift auditorium,
she’s introduced by her own words.
Some term I don’t understand,
but is supposed to convey a sense of how precise,
how talented, how much of a better poet
she is than the thirty of us assembled in the fold-up chairs.

We could learn a lot from her and this reading,
from her first book,
a second due to be published next year,
and a third she’s working on called “The Guardians,”
but will probably be entitled something else
because she’s probably not going to include that poem.
No one seems to like it.

I’ll admit I get lost every time she starts to read,
and find myself drifting to the corner of the room,
and staring at the cobweb silhouette
projected on the back wall.
I’m wondering if maybe,
just maybe, she’d be open to performing her poems a bit more.

A couple of times she gets caught up in her own words,
and I want to say,
“Why don’t you just start over?”
Or, “Maybe if you actually read that poem out loud
before today,
you’d know that that combination of consonants
wouldn’t roll off the tongue as easily as it rolled out of your pen.”
There are things you notice when you look at your reading as a performance
instead of as a lecture,
or dissertation defense.

Now, I’m not saying she’s a bad writer,
because she isn’t,
and I’m not saying she’s a bad reader,
because she was clear,
didn’t have too many annoying habits that distracted from the poem,
but she left way too many things up to my imagination.
When she talked about the killing of the polar bear that escaped from the zoo,
and then followed with the line that went,
“900 pounds of polar bear is a lot of polar bear,”
I wanted to leap from my seat and say,
“You know, if you delivered that line just right,
you could actually get a couple guffaws.”
Though you’d never know it from the reaction,
she was funny.

Why does an academic poetry reading have to be so damn serious?
What’s wrong with engaging the audience?
Don’t we want the audience to be engaged in our books, our words?
How much of the audience wasn’t a poet, a student of poetry,
or somehow affiliated with the English Department that brought her here?
Is that a problem?
Is reading poems to poets
somehow like joining some country club
where everyone looks and thinks like you?
Aren’t poets supposed to be the “inclusive” ones?
Aren’t poets “supposed” to be speaking for people, all people?
Where are all these non-poet people?
Cause they certainly aren’t here,
at the makeshift auditorium
on the 3rd floor of the Student Union Building
eating a white cake
and drinking tea.

No one claps, which startles me,
because this is art after all,
and she’s reading.
We’re paying attention
and there is absolutely no clue in her performancethat now is when the poem is over.

Two Fold Skin

Two Fold Skin

The young, cocky, word-sure boy is gone now.
He's been replaced two-fold times,
cell by cell.
All that's left of him are memories.

Though you had no way of knowing,
it was the first time he ever felt like he belonged,
and he'd found his place,
so he made sure every one else stayed in theirs.

He was the one who'd say things no one else would say,
who'd harass, berate, belittle, mock
anyone who didn't conform to his notion
of being the big cheese in the Burger King kitchen;
the go-to guy for odd jobs that needed doing.
Not with his size, he'd bully.
How could he?
Barely six feet tall and maybe one fifty.
Rail thin
and awkwardly uncomfortable.
No.
He'd bully with his words.

Given his background,
you would think that
he would've been more sensitive to how different you were in looks only
and, how much like the rest of them you were.
He should've known better.
Instead, he joked with you,
asked how things were going for you, African-American,
and your lilly white Anglo wife.
He joked,
"How do you stop 5 black guys from raping a white woman?"
Never mind the obvious offense.
That was not the point,
though it was.
"You throw 'em a basketball,"
though you weren't a basketball player.

He was, but he told the joke anyway
to let you know he didn't see you as African-American,
or so he rationalized.
How many other jokes did other people tell you:
the only African-American employee,
at a Burger King in the suburbs?
The total population of minorities:
not ten percent.

Not that he was from the streets,
or other stereotypes of why some people aren't racist and others are.
From the south-an easy stereotype-some might've said he was racist.
His family had, at one time, a live-in maid named Lizzy Tee:
his blue-blood grandmother's maid for 40 years.
Yet, he was also from the rural south,
where the lines blurred a bit,
and Curtis and Johnny called him their “best friend.”
He mocked you at the same time
he dated an African-American,
but he didn't tell her these jokes.

Maybe it wasn't about the color of your skin?
Maybe it was more about your gender, your personality, your competence
and he used your skin color just to keep you down;
to let you know your place?

I don't even know, anymore.
It's that kid, that punk, that mouthy, arrogant,
unapologetic word-sure jerk
who inhabited this body,
who's cells have been replaced
now two-fold times.
But the memories never go away,
there are some cells that will never be replaced.
They remember, grieve, regret,
but never go away.

October 18, 2005