Summer, Oregon, Whenever.
Splayed out on the tired porch couch.
The sun peeking out from behind
schizophrenic clouds, for
the first time in months.
We stare up at the trees,
those clouds,
lose ourselves in
gentle rustling, the
the scent of dust.
The music of Liszt
now Debussy
now Schubert
(now some Name
I could not hear clearly...)
drifts out the screen door.
A joint curls
in our fingers,
spicing our lungs,
its smoke rising,
dissipating,
conversing with
our laughter and
faint melodies
(Was it Ravel?)
lost in happenstance glare
and warm breeze.
Breeze which now
beckons the looming trees
to dance.
Soon they will be quiet giants
swaying with Ravel,
unsure of the time.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Tuesday, January 5, 2010
The Gift of Language
All this talk--
"The pen is mightier than the sword"
"Words cut deep"
is bullshit.
The implication being
language is sleek,
silent, razored, arced.
In other words:
Elegant.
That language is the
sheen of blood seeping out
in the shocked afterglow
of a knifing.
But in my experience
Language is blunt force trauma.
The bloody bludgeoning of hammers,
the splintering, wincing crack
of axes on the skull.
Language is clumsy.
Messy. Confusing.
intents and understandings
stand waving at each other awkwardly
across the street.
And when they do cross paths,
the results are so often
destructive.
Not lilting, dancing, whimsical.
Just devastating:
"We regret to inform"
"Sorry to say"
"I don't love you anymore"
Words leave marks.
Words leave scars.
Words leave wounds.
Language is violence.
"The pen is mightier than the sword"
"Words cut deep"
is bullshit.
The implication being
language is sleek,
silent, razored, arced.
In other words:
Elegant.
That language is the
sheen of blood seeping out
in the shocked afterglow
of a knifing.
But in my experience
Language is blunt force trauma.
The bloody bludgeoning of hammers,
the splintering, wincing crack
of axes on the skull.
Language is clumsy.
Messy. Confusing.
intents and understandings
stand waving at each other awkwardly
across the street.
And when they do cross paths,
the results are so often
destructive.
Not lilting, dancing, whimsical.
Just devastating:
"We regret to inform"
"Sorry to say"
"I don't love you anymore"
Words leave marks.
Words leave scars.
Words leave wounds.
Language is violence.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
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.
the number of love affairs I've lost,
the way a woman's eyes stop sparkling,
When I said I loved
Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Monday, November 9, 2009
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.
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.
Sunday, November 8, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
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.
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.
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