FDR

I cannot tell you
the number of love affairs I've lost,
the way a woman's eyes stop sparkling,
When I said I loved
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Revelry

What a joy would it be
to have a funeral
brimming with laugher,
full of celebration and revelry.

And yet the only people
with delighted deaths
seem to live their lives
as horrors.

Our friend Scott didn't wake up this morning.

Scott was the lead singer in a band we became friends with while we lived in St. Johns. We drank and smoked pot with him and his bandmates countless times over the course of the year I knew him, our involvement being of the fuzzy sort which seems to develop at bars, friendships which accept the peculiarities of one's life and asks no deeper questions than to find something to laugh over. In all this time, I never knew Scott's last name. Uncomfortable with this, over a drink one night I asked him. The question seemed to puzzle him, but he answered. It's funny now to realize I was too intoxicated to remember what he said.

I thanked him but wasn't in the right frame of mind to explain my reasoning. Had I been sober enough to do so, I would have told him how strange it feels to know someone, and yet remain unaware of their surname, as if their name itself feels alien inside your mouth. Growing up, we encounter entire family trees. I can explain precisely how a high school acquaintance's whole extended family is connected, down to random ex-wives. And yet, with an unknown last name, all of this is circumspect, people become ghosts, uncertain spirits only half-connected to the world you know, names tenuously tied to faces that can change without warning. A surname gives grounding, presence. Reality. A surname can be traced down the pages of a phonebook, the ink of a birth certificate or at the very least known to the almighty Google. A surname forces you into being. In going back to school, again I know everyone's last name, I know their collective histories. In St. Johns this was never the case.

In the time we knew each other, Scott repeatedly told the story of a poem he penned for a class, a sonnet, how much he thought I'd like it. Finally, after weeks of back-and-forth badgering, him promising he'd show me, me demanding he just recite the stupid thing, he shoved the original copy in my hand and said "Read it." It was on a tattered piece of college-lined paper, smudged and probably home to the residue of countless coke lines. I scanned the poem more than a few times. It was far from perfect. Words were misspelled, the rhyme scheme completely fell apart in the last few lines. He pointed out a bit of wordplay that was only somewhat witty. But still, I couldn't tear my eyes from it. It was an elegy, to longing, to hearteache, to misplaced desire, to the bitter regret we feel for mistakes we know we make. The kinds of mistakes for which Scott's fingers and nose and lungs and finally his heart were routinely picking up the tab.

His life was in shambles. He barely managed to hold a steady job at Subway. Once, when his student loan check came in, he bought drinks for the entire bar, keeping a bottle for himself, which reliably dwindled down to nothing by the end of the night. The stories of his evenings after the bar were of the obscene amount of drugs he consumed, from the occasional eight-ball of heroin to a day spent huffing paint cans. Of his real life, I heard rumors of rich parents, a psychotic ex-wife, years spent huddled in a clunking van. Nothing I ever felt comfortable verifying. And every night I knew him, it seemed his body was a canvas, a startling panegyric to suffering and self-hatred, pity and fear, dutifully accepting everything he threw on it. We always joked that he'd die before he made it to thirty-six. If you looked at the stretched exhausted skin, you could have sworn he was nearing fifty. He was twenty-nine. I joked once that Scott was the epitome of today's youth. That if we were to have our Don Quixote or Jack Kerouac, it would be him, that he was who we'd need to write about, and his death would be the only way to end it.

But this poem humanized Scott for me. Until that point, he had been at most a caricature, a character. It was in reading this poem I felt his unsteady heartbeat, saw him crystallize as a real person, no mere ghost at the bar. The poem was marker, just as a grave, that said "I was here. I existed."

After I finished reading, he told me to keep it, for posterity. My roommates and I pondered giving it back to him, that he should keep it to build it into a song, make it into something more, or perhaps just for himself. But we knew he would refuse. And partly, we admitted that maybe it was good for one of us would have it. In case he really did die. We laughed off the possibility, but the laughter felt shallow. Why is death always a laughing specter?

All I have left of Scott is his poem. My heart isn't broken for the loss of a friend, and yet it feels sorrow for the loss of someone who could have been a much closer friend. Someone whose last name wouldn't escape me, whose mother I could call and offer apologies, someone whose obituary I knew existed and could see, to learn what kin he left behind, where he came from. An official history. But that perhaps will never happen. Scott will forever be only half-known to me. One may argue that I knew him just as well as I may know anyone else, that merely knowing someone's last name is at most a formality. And that may be true, we are more than words on a page, or the ink of our birth certificates. But those words do mean something, as do the physical objects they inhabit. Just like Scott's poem, They help to make us more. More than just ghosts of memory and uncertainty.

Imagination

Our imaginations die.
Time becomes a spool of string rewinding itself.
Clocks stop ticking and each second
the giant fingers refuse to move
becomes unbearable eternity.
Sparrows refurl their wings
and collapse back into their bodies.
Sunken ships rise from their graves,
shedding layers of mud and kelp,
and emerge from the water,
returning to ports long forgotten.
Pages of books unravel from spines
and fly out in a storm,
leaving libraries barren.
Newly built houses burn themselves down.
Piano strings snap, wood, metal,
ivory and ebony uncarve themselves,
sheet music, ink, lacquer,
it all reconstitutes itself in some previous state.
Melodies drift out our ears, never to be heard again.
Don Quixote buries his lance
where it sprouts once more as a tree.
Ancient warriors unswing their weapons,
arrows unpluck from their targets and
float in reverse, nuzzling archers' cheeks.
whole armies walk backward over the sand.
Femme Fatales are left waiting helpless,
ballads remain unsung.
Romans a clef perilously teeter
with nothing to stand for.
Paint unsplatters,
canvasses sit pristine and white
in buildings slowly pulling themselves apart.
Rhythms becomes memories.
The last jokes in the world
crawl inside our minds and barricade the door.
We forget how to laugh.
A thousand stories flow back to our tongues
and disappear untold between our lips.
Would that we could
bellow to each other
the closest-held truths of our hearts.
If only we knew what to say.

considering art

An art gallery:
the sunset caressing the hills,
and flowing through a wall of mirrors
onto canvases almost
bleeding paint.

You, me.

And I know should care
about the art we're viewing,
analyze or contextualize
or deconstruct its
thematic structure.
Maybe theorize how the direction
of a stroke of a brush
belies whatever and
what have you.

But you look gorgeous
in your evening gown,
admid all these
mummified women
reeking of perfume and mold.

And the nape of your neck,
drawing devastating lines,
is calling me to a heaven
unknown by fleshless creatures.
And the curve of your calves
sneaking out
the hem of your skirt
is driving me to
half-rendered Shangri-Las
Such that art or metaphors
or silent brush strokes
gliding this way or that
are proven
completely insufficient.

2:38 AM

And I have seen the blue
shades of the morning.
And I know that
hope is a curse
more than a blessing.

preparing for winter

i.
On the cracked and ravaged sidewalk,
the concrete knolls barely clinging
to the tops of angry tree roots
An army of ants scurries about,
preparing for winter
among ocher autumn leaves.
Hopping over this pebble,
that chunk of moss
creeping through up
through the crevice.
One ant stares up at the trees,
those shining beacons of
a rarely pondered heaven
by relativity.
They're alive now
with the screaming of noises
The ant can't begin to comprehend.

ii.
In the trees, the warfare of the cicadas
is in full bore.
The symphony of their machine gunning timbals
and the timpani of tossed acorns.
Leaves caught in the crossfire
drift gently down.
Three cicadas in a burl foxhole,
the first firing rounds of ammunition
and expletives.
the second screaming commands to
unseen cicadas hidden thin-veiled
behind the dying leaves.
The third holding his head down,
sobbing for his mother
as bullets chip away at bark, leaf and nut.
The second screams at him to fire his weapon.
He jumps up just in time to catch
an enemy bullet in the exoskeleton
and fall.
He does not drift gently down.

iii.
Below, the ant sees something
falling fast between the leaves.
He only just avoids being crushed.
Hiding behind a nearby hunk of rock,
he notices the rush of green muck spilling
out of the creature onto the concrete,
the gossamer wings flapping
with quickly-sapping strength.
The blinking, fading black eyes
filled with fear.
The ant cannot move.
He remains at rest, staring
like an unsure David
at this unknown Goliath
and his strange portent
from the heavens.

iv.
The third cicada, falling fast
but fading slowly. Memories flicker
between shafts of light,
cutting this way and that, through the
palisade cells of the fluttering leaves
illuminating maps to
unwandered territories.
A vision of his mother now,
his countless brothers and sisters.
Another blade of light.
His mother's eyes obscured,
the brightness is almost too much to bear.
A thousand eggs burrowed in bark,
a beam caresses him.
Another taunting map.
He knows what should be coming now,
and yet he is forever waiting
for this pain
to cease.