[repost - people were reblogging a dead link]
the annoying clicks turned off, dial
her number, no sound. the phone
rings a few times, play games guessing
if you’ll pick up,
then pop n’ click, satisfying. “Hey.”
she says. Theres music in the background
for a second but it goes quick,
she’s either driving or lying sprawled
on the floor, loft bed. Wanted to say,
just called to hear your voice,
a reasonable facsimile therof.
Just called in case you’re hiding in the
backseat or standing in eyeball range
on pale sidewalk.
“Hey there,
just wanted to make sure
you’re still alive.” Light changes to green.
“I just got your message” she says, now
probably sitting up, or further reclined,
resigned to quiet conversation.
Hearing this is just enough to see
it, hold the room in the mind’s eye,
the silver car. Just wanted to say,
Just called to make sure everything’s ok.
Just called to make sure
wherever you come from
doesn’t want
you back.
I would
i don’t feel like
getting up to get my journal
so instead i’m just going to
write a new poem. This is the mood
where its dissapointing that sunlight
only lasts till 8pm and the
creeping hours set in,
the blackout that is ninety percent
blithering, raving darkness bursting
over dams of rolled down
driver’s side windows, furiously speeding
past, over and through and police speedtraps
unusual in that
cops with radar wear neon yellow
during the day but not
in the ass end of the night,
so i guess they want you to hit them.
nothing is clean,
the crumbs penetrate the cracks
the CDs stick disgustingly to the table
and bats circle the streetlights
in the dead of night. see me if
anything changes.
see me if
there’s something bad on the news
or you change your cigarette brand,
if the new IHOP opens this week or if
they finally nuke suburbia. one of the
many perks of living in this particular
blast radius is that
if there is ever a nuclear war you
will never know
floors call the curtains
pet rocks do nothing
& your dreams are asleep
on the forest floor.
charles m., the grandpa, is dead
while 525,000 ticks are alive, well
and breeding spotted rocky mountain fever
which is not a flavor of ice cream but
you can still get a free sample.
a little bit of rain and minus ten from
room temperature has driven all
of the nation indoors, leaving their
yappy dogs on myriad front porches while
some sort of continued tranquil record
was being set before you opened the car door
and sometimes, by the third word in the
sentence you know it’s bad but inertia
carries you to the end anyway.
community branches of the library are closed on sundays
but so is the dojo. nothing productive
many children died in sweatshops for my secondhand nikes
but they suck anyway; souls must be low
currency. having missed out on dreams
for months means i’m going to be naked
in all of them now. Korea is still the nigger
of oriental countries because of stupid
shit like kimchi; I’m chinese but i got over
the rape of nanking because sushi is
incredible & it doesn’t smell like evil.
smoke from cloves and mist off the road
in headlights after dark are either long
lost brothers or distant relatives.
two 5x10inch books are enough to trip over
in a 1,000 square foot bathroom.
stay in school, or join the army. whatever
afghanistan is nice this time of the year.
& bad things happen
hand in hair, rap at the scalp
meditation “ohhhhmmms” of rivers, wafting up
through sewer grating, manholes
concealed under the soft tread of feet &
ritual savagery of automobiles, hi-beams
our constant companions in the night,
personal streetlights, spotlights for two
method actors that,
far after credits roll, cease denoument,
insist closure,
still find the words swimming in the head
“and just remember,
if you’ve enjoyed watching half as much as we’ve enjoyed
making it, then we’ve enjoyed it
twice as much as you”
hair brown the way kansas is flat
makes asteroid craters on the moon’s surface
childish imitations of your dots of complexion
compelled to write,
rack the language areas of the brain at hours late
& find less and less, giving up the search for wisdom
in anything but eyebrows and irises
miss you badly
car rolls to a halt;
train brakes a hundred
feet out of the station.
Father gets off work
early. someone jumped
on the tracks
and the whole
line is shut down.
Waiting for him to get back
the time slips away slowly
in the bed, no option
but to hold the pillow tight
and feel the freshness
of the shower
writhe in the skin,
cherish the loading screens
and in between moments
as they float by
Power lines ride raindrops like
roadkill rides paved road &
the undersides of pastel-ed
stationwagons.
Glass is a liquid
according to the man at
the self service. It oozes out of
window casings and nips
down to corresponding bars. A wounded
soldier returns to our seas of green
land of opportunity, blows forty thousand
on video games and a bed with a slide
for his kid, so she can’t complain about
not getting to go to the park. The blood
flows through the streets like Venice
and those without gondolas
are forced to wade. This composes
the majority of the population.
Anyone who doesn’t put the windows down
and turn up the stereo on a nice day
has no soul. People like to talk about
discipline but there is not yet a
punishment for leading a boring life.
Erasable pens are still a few steps behind
pencils. Bon Jovi established a precedent:
things may be slippery when wet.
Business suits remain classy despite
inordinate amounts of mischief made
in them. Maybe because.
Dull things don’t get put in novels;
The butterfly effect doesn’t work
in reverse. Hundreds of thousands can
die in a typhoon and my bedsheets will
still be purple.
Some things are too painful to talk about.
“But what could be too painful? like what?”
well, i can’t talk about it. i thought that would be obvious.
i can’t even begin, anywhere. “you can leave out the gory bits.”
well is it much of a story then? if i leave them
out, the story may have a point, may have a reason. what
makes the tale so harrowing as to pull shivers down your spine
is that nobody takes anything from the
retelling, nobody goes home knowing anything more about life
in the parts of the world that make bad dinner conversation.
if you omit the details then all you have is
half an anecdote
no strong currency.
If i have to tell anyone anything,
they get the tractor story.
“tractor story? that sounds interesting.”
yeah, well angelo, our guide, was leading the group through the market. this is
just after we step off the plane; we’re all holding our baggage
and casting apprehensive glances at all the natives glaring,
well in their right to be angry at people who (at that point) still thought
hunger was for hobos living in tents in new york city.
the gunmen in APCs were parading down the street, really just trying
to force everyone out of the way so they could clear the bazaar
and get back before sundown, before things got dangerous for them
and angelo turns back to say something unimportant, you know,
introduce the new guys, look world-weary, alive in useful knowledge
and his coat got caught on a tractor, dragged him around a little.
we laughed and pointed, it was a release of tensions, we
loved the little moment.
“well thats nothing. you got my hopes up.”
and then we didn’t laugh when the tractor driver, unable to hear or
see angelo, suddenly cut into a different lane of traffic, off beat,
jarringly out of the program. we assumed the joke was supposed to
hold him on the same path by sheer force of comedic value.
well
the tractor swerved into the lane next to the oncoming tanks
and angelo, flailing, trying to get his jacket off, swung his legs out
over into the open lane
and was cleaved straight in half by the treads of the tank.
the driver didn’t stop, but the tractor did,
and while we tried to carve open the mass of people and
reach angelo through the tumult
the tractor driver looked on the upper half of our guide
and said nothing, until another man came and covered the
body with a coat so he could leave. this took seconds and
even that was enough to engender a
rising cavalcade of honking & yelling,
foreign threats that would be our first introduction to
violence translated into the native language.
but i don’t tell that part of the story,
I only tell the first half of the tractor story
so that people don’t ask me again.
it is 8 past 8. this is more than the lack
of hands on a digital clock. to tell this
time you have to leave your room, walk
into the calm rain that threatens to wash away
absolutely nothing. stand, on the new patio walkway,
clutching a book of mark craver poetry and shivering
in the ill fitting army jacket. the front door
is locked and to get to the steps at
the porch you must circle around the deck
past the fence. it is natural to forget the
plum you’ve just eaten; the pit can no longer be
noticed in the frankenstein patchwork grass that
composes the front lawn. Staring at neighboring
houses produces only so many answers, and without
a phone, or better, a watch, there are no nicely
sectioned intervals at which to roam. So mosey
into the back yard. at the side of the house,
the wooden fence between the next yard over
and yours is falling in one big section. their
briar infestation threatens to overrun the perimeter
defenses, and skirmishers of green peek
in already. It’s still winter; you don’t know how
they survive. But a lone mosquito is back,
and you suppose its time for life’s larva
roasting in pools near the back patio to
rise into the air and terrorize Virginia.
walking walking walking
the imitation vans slipons kick downed branches
of their own volition and apply wet dark
makeup. the lines are blurred. a shovel and
a rake are pressed standing up on the oddly
placed tree. they stand at attention and resist any
command to put themselves “at ease, gentlemen.”
the moss refuses to let you call it grass.
there remains a distinction, and it will have
you know as you sift it for dry patches.
there are none, and it told you so. people are
busy silhouettes inside the house, peeking
out the windows, making coffee or tea.
you decide to pick up trash from the yard
and throw it in the woodpile shared
with the house next door, but you only make it
halfway over before inertia is too great a burden
and the detritus gets flung to the edge of the stack.
the universe suddenly has much less to offer. an
ambulance blathers all the way down the
football-field stretch from the volunteer
fire department to the nursing home. go inside.
the clock insists it knows
the time. there are scrambled eggs and bacon
in the frying pan.
taped up, starring ‘punchy’ and his
hilarious, zany madcap adventuring in:
Thursday Night is Fight Night
dead skin flaking off, red in martian
mountains, summit half covered,
calcified, jeweled & encrusted
three quarters garnished with
sore in parts of the body that
haven’t seen a single nerve
ending get off since
the president was white
& take the 55 minutes and
wear it around your wrist
like the time of day
check the watch when you need
to get all action hero on a fool
“oh was that your car? well
it looks like it’s kung fu o’clock”
& cue the dance music
I kept the lights out the
last two hours you scented up the
room like the yankee candle
you will always appear to be
in the mind of your dog -
Partly to romance, but mostly
to watch Jarhead,
a Jake Gyllenhaal movie
forever in our eyes,
despite the director’s inclusion
of Jamie Foxx, John Krasinski, and
the Gulf War.
The bed is actually cold now, even under
a quilt that could comfortably insulate, say,
an international space station or two
which is horribly depressing, almost as much
as the movie, the difference being,
the movie makes a point and the bed doesn’t.
they told me to look both ways when crossing the street
to treat others how you want to be treated
and to prostrate the finger flat over the trigger guard
when not in use.
i learned to drive a car, observe the pedestrian right of way
as well as some good breathing exercises, for helpful hysteria
and to let the sights come back down to the weaver stance
in time for the second round.
some girls taught me how to love a woman,
or at least like her a lot, and others still do
but i remember better the sequence of tap and rack
and to put one in the chamber then get a fresh mag up.
my teachers wanted me to learn the boundaries of good taste
and how to keep my writer’s voice in check, to funnel the feelings
into hard text, not your pulp literature and i studied
accompanied by the sound of the groaning spring
inside the hicap, a spent shell on the dot.
drop the trigger with constant velocity
marking wind, shots between breaths
peering over the top of Trijicons
green glow like tokyo neon
washing the invisible powdered-donut specks of lead
out of west german garrison jackets
letting the range membership take up more
wallet-space, perforating papers and the whole time
staring at the target
NRA official pattern, 10 points center mass
trying not to see a person there.