Two Poems (December 20, 2010. Issue 23.)
Letters to New England
I
In a morning lit room east of where you’re from, you
will wake up. Glaring beams aching their way
through tilted blinds, half-empty bodies and coffee
mugs, sprawled around living room furniture
like Greek hedonists post-symposium.
while somewhere
in mighty cold New England
A scarf-drawing young man in a stolen winter jacket
will be snuffing out candles, chasing smoke ghosts,
listening to realists
complain
about shades of gray
staining the high streets and burning youth,
who claimed our empty generation by counting 10
frostbitten fingers and 1 burned tongue,
front lined it to a paranoid shaking firefight, hopping
the train to bigger places then where
they were-
frenzied paradise
where the railroads
are starting to fall down.
They’ve been drinking really cheap wine
all night,
and are trying to tell you how poetry is a really great
way of admitting you’ve developed a drinking
problem.
My first time with a girl, I was
too hopped up on god-knows-what pills to
notice
glass shards scattered on the bathroom
carpet our backs and thighs slapped against.
It was 4 in the morning, at a house I don't
really remember, and at one point it sounded like
something
living
was tacked face-first against
the linoleum.
But that’s not what this is about.
This
is about drifting, gentle,
to the island of sweat and lace.
Thrifting away fishnet for cuffs,
neon halos, cold winds,
a torn-up deck of playing cards,
scattered from broken beds to
cobblestone
personified as the wild ones you left in a more
frenzied wake then they could swim.
II
There is a faded windowpane somewhere in NH that
I have a few questions for:
Do you remember pressing our backs to spray-
magicked walls, sky spotting fireflies that
disappointed when they just turned out
to be angels?
Do you remember the time the town falls
dried up?
or
the night you got home late enough
for the moon to
back down?
I daydream that answers are lost somewhere in
letters,
lost in boxes, that were
lost in the beautiful places people go to
be forgotten.
III
She’ll come back here someday, and ask where
her boy in the second-hand wings went. I’ll tell her,
”He’s right here. Shining
through a broken jaw.”
But there are mosaics painted behind every silence.
Every wordless lip speaking street corner at dawn,
every working-class seraph
tracing celestial scar lines,
at one point or another
sees the movement of shifting boxcars,
steady rise and fall of a lovers wheels,
and rhythmic pattern of sighing trains
that will remind him
of
kissing something that tastes
like damage.
And lessons he received in practice
on loving beautiful things from a
distance.
City of Machines (A pantoum)
Sheltered by unseen walls,
a circle of machines dance
in the streetlight’s bonfire,
tenement flats playing hide-and-seek.
A circle of machines dance.
Their sparks, more atom bomb then iris.
Tenement flats playing hide-and-seek
to the rhythm of grinding pavement.
Their sparks, more atom bomb then iris
weave the story of how we should be,
to the rhythm of grinding pavement.
Fitting together like gear work.
Weave the story of how we should be.
Metallic ligaments clutching bent forms
fitting together like gear work,
or staples in broken bone.
Metallic ligaments clutching bent forms
in the alleys of cracked concrete
or staples in broken bone
paint hurricane mishaps on storm drain faces.
In the alleys of cracked concrete,
streetlight bonfires never reach us.
Paint hurricane mishaps on storm drain faces.
They won’t see us here.
Streetlight bonfires never reach us.
Come to terms with the evening’s husk.
They won’t see us here,
chasing the skyline.
Come to terms with the evening’s husk.
These privacies don’t belong to us anymore.
Chasing the skyline-
we dancing constructs tremble.
These privacies don’t belong to us anymore.
In the streetlight’s bonfire,
we dancing constructs tremble,
sheltered by unseen walls. |