I Have Loved (Long waiting graves).
I have loved with all of the colors I have ever known, I have loved with each of the four Winds that blow within a man’s soul. I have loved as ancient tombs, As broken mournful stones Hold ancient bodies Silent in their vigil And ever waiting To feel the breath Of departed passion Singing through cracked teeth. I have loved as storms Flooding over mountains Dark and brooding And soon exploding Full of fury rampant rage. I have loved and been loved In many, many ways. Yet for them all, added And and refracted with Nostalgic eyes - Alone or Totaled could make me stray. I love you in a way which Makes my hands wrinkle, My legs weak and beg In infirmity and age for The aide of a cane. In A way which makes my Soul shrivel, in a way Which makes me revel In the thought of growing Weak and watching your Neck grow thin, your eyes wreathed By the feet of fleeting crows, Your soft hair brittle, gray. I love you with the fertility Of the cool damp earth, The strength of an old Rock carved with a pair of names. I love you like a man Loves a woman When both are lowered Side by side, into Long waiting graves. (Yep, you still double space everything and break all of my stanzas unless I write in tumblr; which is why I’ll always kind of hate you).
They’re Not You (Can you hear?)
They’re not you,
This fact is undeniable,
This fact is true.
And their hands
Are not your hands,
Stirring cocktails and eye contact,
All little smiles -
Come hither breaths
Leaking from heaving breasts,
While I sip whiskey,
Keep their attention politely
With all my war stories;
My thin smile,
Choking back bile,
At their sympathetic lips,
The corners of their eyes,
When knees touch,
Her bed hanging
Diaphanous between us.
Will she taste like heaven,
Her sweat bleed freedom?
If I whisper your name
Into her ear, will she care,
Will she pretend in the afterglow
That I’m still there?
Not lost in memories,
Deep indents of velvet sofas,
Beneath thick blankets in cold cabins,
Sacred hugs in random hallways.
Should I sleep alone,
My arms empty while you’re
Spread out silently in western beds
Of Los Angelical men?
They are not you,
No matter what we say
To ourselves as we force
Through this to the next day,
I’m not in their eyes,
So don’t look for me there,
Alone or with company,
My bed silent or shared,
I’m drowning in drinks,
My empty smiles, my wolf whispers
In alabaster necks, absent ears
All the words I hold for you,
And I wonder in their nape,
Can you hear?
All The Broken People (Let me be weak)
All the broken people say: I’ll fix myself tomorrow, I’m just to broken today. Yeah, all the broken girls sing Shitty break up songs, Out of key. Find salvation From depresssion in the Daisy chain of new arms. And the broken men scream, Their ragged voices in the night: I fought the war, loved her more Than anyone ever has before! All the broken people sing Withered hearts with weak words. All the broken people scream In defeat at the cycle they repeat, They justify, they sought -they seek. All the broken people sing out Just let this guilt die, let the truth Sleep, let me forever just be weak.
Object Desire (the commodity of breasts)
Object desire
Fools, playing with wrapping paper
Their fucking hands
Always reaching, groping
At any gift left unattended
Minutes or moments
So eager to put their dick in something.
Object desire
The commodity of breasts
Given scarcity
Gives birth to desperate men
Pants and small throbbing cocks
All riot and unrest.
Object desire
All the plastic people
Prophylactic discourse and desperately
Talking each other out of their clothes
All the pretty girls
Sitting behind window sills
Wondering if they’re people too.
Object desire
The innocence afforded
By being half aware and cheap
My conscience is low
But confidence is high
So baby, let me take you home tonight.
I hate that Tumblr randomly decides to double space my poems, and despite anything I do other than spending hours fucking with HTML, it can’t be fixed. What site even still operates under HTML anyways? Seriously Tumblr, you’re starting to make blogspot look more appealing.
When The Wolf Calls (twenty-seven)
I never thought about my youth until it had passed me by. Much in the same way you never think about air until your choking. Watching some anonymous fashion design reality show with my mother, I noticed most of the contestants were younger than me. As a child I always measured the distance in my age and others by how much older they were than I, now it seems I’m counting backwards. These eighteen and twenty year olds on television, not betraying a shred of the ignorance or ponderousness I felt at that age; they were entirely alien to me. They’ve done things too, seen things. I’d always think, well of course, they’re older than me of course they have. But now they’re not, and I see what an empty thought that really was. I’ve seen plenty, been through more and had life experiences far beyond what most people are luck enough to have; but it still rings hollow. I want more. I’m thirsty or hungry or not empty but nowhere near full and I need substance before I wear thin. It’s not enough, never enough. I want eighteen back, twenty-three and thirteen yet I seem to waste most days. I want my youth back, to squeeze in more walks, more travel, more nights spent drinking sangria and listening to old mexican men play spanish versions of Dylan songs. The tragedy of age is that most of us do not possess the grace of wisdom and youth side by side. And what of death? I see it in my mothers veiny legs. The scar running scalpel straight down my fathers chest. I see it in the puppy largeness of my son’s feet and the years of remembrance anchored and fully docked in his eyes. I see it in the blur of years, the way they pass more like months should. Where once the half an hour wait until cartoons came on after school was a small eternity, dinner plans for next week feels rushed, and plans for next year perfectly reasonable. I slow down, yet time moves faster around me. I am a weighty rock slowly tumbling in a swift stream. Eroding, chipped and polished by the loss of my rough and uneven youth. Perhaps wisdom is not something gained, but rather what remains when the unexperienced spurs and ignorant crags of youth are worn away. And so we are lessened, smoothed and polished until all that remains are the dissipate pieces of what we were; memories, possessions, ashes to be sorted and divided by those stones still tumbling in the stream, still living. Death is a simple thing, and I do not fear it, but it is like a wolf in the woods, on your trail the moment you entered but unknown until it’s howl is heard. Twenty-seven is not the year I heard the wolf call in the night, it was when I realized it was calling for me.
Beautiful.getbornkeepwarm
Thanks Meg, it has the benefit of being true as well. I’ll read your poems when I get some time -I’m in Iraq right now, getting ready to take a blackhawk into an outpost in the middle of Baghdad for a few weeks to man a withdrawal. Maybe I’ll post some pictures.
Hit A Woman (And she’ll love you forever)
It seems it’s sad and true,
Hit a woman
And she’ll love you forever.
Heard them say, in a song once:
“If she knows your paper
You know she’ll have to burn you”.
So I’ll take my heart cast in iron
Jeweled with bits of jade,
Because their hands are vandals
Obsessed with pulling things apart.
Let them dig their nails in
Oh, well, go and let them try
Because it’s all one piece, fused
In shape in peace in part.
I keep a heavy heart
To keep my eyes and hand light
As to find the body’s curve of
Whomever lies with me tonight.
“Don’t be honest, never tell the truth”
Allow your wild hands to roam to
Whatever is offered to you.
Poverty Is A Hereditary Disease (A Song)
South Carolina
Sing me to sleep
The day’s been long
And I’m a restless thing
Oh, South Carolina
My sweet
Sing me to sleep
They say if you dig deep
You’ll find hell beneath
And I’m one to think
It’s always waiting
Right beneath our feet
Down in that hole
Before the sun thinks to shine
Crawl our way out
When the daylight is dying
My father dug before me
And his Pa before im’
The blacklung took em both
Take me too I presume
But there’s men in New York
Detroit and Washington DC
Who make all the money
And they need electricity
When I sit down at night
Coal dust staining my skin
To eat an honest meal with my kin
I thank god for that mine
Because poverty, it’s hereditary
And my chldren gotta eat
So at night, when I can barely breathe
I make myself sing:
South Carolina,
Sing me to sleep,
The day’s been long
And I’m a restless thing.
Oh, South Carolina,
My sweet,
Sing me to sleep.
In My Father’s Car (I see him as old)
In my father’s car
Driving somewhere,
Where I forget;
I see him as old.
The mortality spreading
Like spiderwebs
Out from heavy eyes
And running to his cheek.
I know he thinks of death.
Not in any discrenable way,
But in his knotty hands
Which his eyes linger upon
Too often as he drives.
I think of him, cold
And lifeless laid out in a
Casket wrought by my hands
In mourning; it’s a promise
He mentions more than
A younger man would.
I see death, and I am afraid.
It’s slender hand upon my shoulder
And my heart curls around
Thoughts of my father. That
Day which will come, that day
Which grows closer every time
I see his hands upon that wheel,
Knottier than the last. I think,
“will I be able to count back to
this visit, the number of times
I spent with him”.
I do not want my father to die.
When The City Sleeps
Empty eyes drifting out from a dark alley’ stretch,
I wander on the pavement, taking solace in my steps.
And one for one, each for each, I’m further left alone,
With more dark thoughts of departed lovers to roam.
I find cold comfort in familiar peaks, each belonging to
Half empty buildings, my city belonging to each.
Down past Penobscot, Cadillac Center, Renaissance
And past the plaza too, is my old haunt, my mayhew.
In the drifts and gales of swirling December snow,
I lean against the rail, over the river and into the glow;
Of another city, who is loved dearly by another man,
Windsor loitering listlessly, the same as I am.
I know a thousand people, their faces, their names
And for each of them, I feel little but a distant disdain.
I’ve lost more people than most have ever known,
And for it I feel quite cold, and all the more alone.
Random Daze theme by Polaraul
