Lament for a Warm May Spokane Night

In the tradition of Throwback Thursday, here's a poem I wrote in May 1993 while living in Spokane. It's not good, it's pretty terrible in fact, but I was 19 and messed up and it brings back those evenings. So close I can almost touch them. I can remember writing this one; amazing as there is much I cannot remember of those days. What I most remember is how, regardless of my personal misery, playing with language and images was such a pure joy.

shot through bloodshot red marijuana eyes
viewing from a pebble soup Spokane sidewalk
coming home from a tiring day
a mild headache, 
     a memory of a night spent entwined with my lover weeks ago
weathered old businessmen in shriner hats stare at me strangely
asking who am i to be walking down this ghost street
the architecture full of stone dust
all gargoyles frown mysteriously
catholic cathedral proudly displaying its ugly evil
     across the street
cut in half by black meat cars
trees that have grown up breathing polluted air
     looking like cigarette-scarred lungs
oh child innocent spring night memory
a full moon extra cop cars (tainted)
     flashing! blowing! wigging out, the 
          unsuspecting children of the hallowed Spokane night
jungle rhythms cut headache into strips of hazy consciousness
a tribute to Ginsberg, yeah, this betrays his influence
but the death skull platitudes are all mine
down the street two beasts w/only one bright eye--Cyclops!--
     creep towards me
          spooky
i laugh as a soft mad child
safe in my headache nirvana.

Ten Songs From Another World

I wrote these ten pieces in 2009. I always imagined each accompanied by a painting, but I have zero artistic talent and no one has offered to partner with me. (I'm intrigued by the idea of collaboration, having always worked exclusively by myself.) Perhaps they are destined to be only words, after all. I like all of them but the tenth one is my favorite. Enjoy. And apologies for the uneven formatting; Blogger is a pain in the ass and I'm done fighting it for the day. I wish you could see my original document.


Clean Kills

My father told me: it must always be a clean kill. Sloppy work is not accepted under any circumstances. And when you are finished, you clean all your tools and put them back in the proper place. The cooks call it mise en place. Everything properly set up, each component occupies the space necessary, and there is enough space left over to perform the work in a quick, thorough and decisive manner. The final result must be of the highest quality. Always use your own knife. To use another's would be an ethical violation of the most degrading sort, put on display for all to see. These are the things my father taught me, and I learned the lessons well. He did not let go of life until I demonstrated I’d learned. When I was finished, I kept the eyes, because I needed someone to watch over me.

Step 2

Have you ever conjured a three-headed dog? It happens only by complete accident. Most likely you were distracted, talking to your brother over beer gone warm in the afternoon sun. Though it made annoying little yips, you probably wouldn’t have noticed the creature had you not tripped over it. Unlike you, there was nothing befuddled in its eyes--six of them: one pair green, another black, and the third a pus-like shade of yellow. It sat on the grass that you mowed yesterday and stared at you as if it had every right to be there. 

The only thing you could think to say was “Get off my lawn” but that sounded all wrong when it came out, it wasn’t what you meant, wasn’t even the best you could do. Your brain was hazy with the beer. Oh, old man. Your brother, who you’d forgotten about, informed you that the dog wasn’t listening. On this point, you had to agree, and so you let him stay.

I Will Go There, Take Me Home

Fourteen prayers: sun, dust, acorn, spider and ten more not named. History buried deep in the cool earth, covered by penance. Rotting wood, discarded magazines, you are as dust, as the things left unsaid. Fourteen prayers, each separate but said in order they form a greater whole. A cosmic weave, a tapestry of dark filaments shrouding you like a cloak of black stars. A chainlike series of cells.  

Metal corrodes but dirt is always soft. Soft, wet and cool.

the boys of summer

The kind of night when you listen The Boys of Summer over and over. And I fucking hate Don Henley. But that song. Brilliant. To those of a certain age, the most brilliant. The sound of the 80s, beneath all the coked-out fever dreams and anger. A long line of melancholy and regret. Realization of all that is gone and all that barely was. When he pleads that he'll love you even after the boys of summer are gone, there's a desperation that is so real, you know that if that love was real it only was for a moment and now it's just a ghost, another memory that won't leave him alone. And that echoing guitar in the break, crying like a seagull fading into memory. Another reminder of all that is gone. Echoes, echoes.

The sadness is always there, lurking. Some nights you can't put it down with beer or words or hugging your daughters. It sits on your shoulder and sends songs into your head. Scrambling  up these words and crawling off to bed, hoping sleep drowns it out. In a house of bodies, ghosts.

You can't look back, you can never look back. But you will.

sidewalk

the man was yelling and waving at me.
throwing his arms up in the air, disgust and anger animating his face.
my car was blocking the sidewalk.
the large sign on the sidewalk advertising vacant apartments obscured my view of oncoming traffic and the only way to see was to pull out over the sidewalk and nose out into the street.
if you didn't do that, you were likely to get smacked by a car or truck or bus.
i didn't see this guy emerge from the apartments.
i was too busy watching the traffic. we'd been sitting there for at least a minute. it is a busy intersection.
but this guy. he was obviously very angry at me.
for a moment i became fearful.
what if he started pounding my windows? i had my daughters in the car with me.
what if he had a gun?
i'd either get hit by a car or shot. my girls too.
i was fearful. then i was mad. and then he apparently decided his point was made and walked behind the car (where there was plenty of room.)
and i was just sad.
sad to have been that fearful. sad that anyone could snap. sad that it wasn't even a paranoid reaction.
finally there was a break in the traffic and i pulled out.
i glanced over and saw the man walking on the sidewalk.
i thought of how lousy a day it had been.
contract arguments at work. stepping in cat shit in my bare feet. the horrible violent misogyny of the isla vista killer and the aftermath.
(i have two daughters. sometimes i'm really scared for them. there is no feeling as hopeless as that fear.)
the big and the small and the inability to be sure which was which.
that man walking down the sidewalk had just yelled at me.
he'd probably had a bad day too.
neither of us, in all honesty,
knew what to do.

--5/28/14, first draft, only draft.

turkey soup

I wrote this about two years ago. I've always really liked it but never been quite sure what to do with it--I don't think it's finished. But given that two years have gone by and I've not gone back to it, it's hard to say what may happen. Isn't that always the case?

Your voice is a mockingbird, calling me when the day is done.

"How is it you are always here, when I least need you?"

"There doesn't need to be an explanation."

How true this feels to you is the only truth that matters. The weird echo in your voice is a sound only my ears hear. The day that you couldn't get out of bed because of the migraine, the same day you turned your phone off completely for the first time since you bought it, that's the day that cemented it for me. I wouldn’t let you cook that day, making turkey soup with the stock you made out of the Thanksgiving bones. I didn’t know how to make it but I found a recipe online. You ate two bowls and I felt strangely proud. Later that night we watched June Carter yodel and Johnny Cash try to stifle a laugh.

But the phone bothered me, far more than your migraine. The migraine could mean an aneurysm was around the corner but that would be completely out of my hands and I saw no point in dwelling on it. The phone, though—you were always on that thing, even shouting into it while driving (that did bother me, I can say this now.) When you charged it, you left it turned on. At home you moved the charging cable and the phone itself from room to room if you planned on being in that room for more than a few minutes. You never received many texts—maybe half a dozen per week. And calls were rare. I never pretended to understand it but I accepted it. And then to suddenly turn it off—honestly, I wasn’t sure you even knew how. (I’m not being fair, but it’s true.) What if you received a text? What about your calendar reminders? What if you got the urge for a game of Angry Birds? But you shrugged all of this off and pulled the pillow over your head. Then you asked me to take the phone from the room. I did so, cradling it as you would a wounded sparrow.

I froze the remains of the turkey soup. It was a huge batch. I knew you’d never eat it unless I warmed it up but I couldn’t just throw it out. I don’t think you ever pay attention to what is in your freezer. It’s a remote object, more like a desolate Antarctic plain on one of those nature specials you’re so fond of than a repository for food. Putting the soup in there was like condemning it to a long, slow death. Making it irrelevant. Unless I heat it up for you sometime. It’s funny, having that small sense of power. I accept the responsibility. There should be a better explanation but that’s as good of one as there will ever be. Again, I accept the responsibility. I’ve condemned the soup to a frozen death, but if I choose I can bring it back to life.

Your migraine eventually went away as I knew it would. But you still didn’t ask for your phone back. I wasn’t sure what to make of this. I spent far too many hours searching online, to see if this behavior had manifested itself elsewhere, but got nowhere. That’s the trouble with online stories—it’s so easy to lie. How do you know what to trust? Even the turkey soup recipe could have been some kind of poison, but at least I had the chance to study it as it cooked, to watch for signs. But behavioral advice, well, it could be anyone saying anything. Yet I needn’t have worried, because I couldn’t find anything. All those hours and nothing at all. Maybe I’m just not good at online searching, but it’s not the kind of thing I feel comfortable asking for assistance on. Sometimes you really must try and figure out things yourself.

two-sentence stories

Sometimes, by the time I get home from a long day at work and deal with the evening routine, I have very little energy left and just can't find my way into whatever story I'm currently working on. Some of these evenings end up as lost causes. I give in and read a book or spin a record or even turn on the TV (though I'm not much of a TV watcher.) Other evenings, though, I write two-sentence stories. Not all of them are complete stories. Yet, rather sneakily, they sometimes capture a tale better than I could do with thousands of words. And sometimes they are just junk.

Here are some of my favorites:

At first he thought it was a human leg sticking out from under the log. He was wrong, though it was still the last thought he ever had.

He reached down and turned on the radio. Johnny Cash was singing.

The first time they had sex, it was awkward and not really very good. The second time wasn't any better.

There is an object with indistinct features in the corner. It might be a rag doll, but probably not.

She swore when the flashing lights started behind her as she knew she had been speeding. She obediently rolled down her window when the cop approached the car, but then the cop was no longer there.

He works really hard at his job as a sales manager for the software giant, and he knows he's damn good at what he does. The first thing he does when he gets home is look at pornography and masturbate.

The intention was to read the books that had things to teach him. But they only made him feel dumber.

I stopped because of the ghost. I continued on because of the oil leak.

He was the one who suggested the picnic. She told him no one actually went to picnics anymore.

That would ruin everything, if you were to move. The plates rattle when you put them away.

Applebees is porn without the entertainment aspect. They don't offer freshly ground pepper.

The dentist came home depressed. If his wife had been home, she would have alerted him to the camel spider on the banana.

It was the second time she dropped her keys in the last hour. He could not have seen her, even if he'd left the bar two hours and three drinks earlier.

delete

I think I might
Delete every post I've ever made.
I think I might
But I probably won't.
I'm pretty sure I've argued about whether anything can ever be deleted;
You can't burn the internet.
My paranoid moments merely excuses for self-pity.
I don't like anonymity except when I do.
I don't write.
That's a lie--I do write, I just save it on an external drive and
Forget about it.
That's also a lie; I forget none of those word collections,
Even the bad ones.
Especially the bad ones.

I'm writing a poem.
It's the second poem I've written in two months.
Before this, I had not composed a poem
Since 1999 or so. Maybe earlier.
I didn't burn the old poems, even though they were not on the internet.
I have all the notebooks here in my office.
There was no such thing as an internet when most of them were composed.
I didn't use the internet until 1997.
Maybe earlier, probably earlier, it's not one of those details I deemed worthy of recording.
Initially I used the Internet for porn, like everyone else.
Probably a few other things too, but definitely not for poetry
Or any other of my writings.
Truthfully, I didn't even think of it.
There was too much going on.
That's how I know I'm not a real writer:
I always think there is too much going on to write.
I stopped writing for a number of years.
Real writers don't do that.
I think it was close to seven years, but I'm not sure.
I had excuses, of course.
Every writer has excuses.
But real writers don't actually stop writing.
I did.

Eventually I started again. And I was better.
I wrote a lot more and sometimes I posted those writings on the internet.
Not poetry. Stories, a couple of novels, journal crap dumped from my brain.
(Guess which of those three formats I posted on the internet.)
I've worked steadily ever since--there are periodic lulls, of course,
But it never feels like it is over.
I'm still surprised to find myself writing this poem, though.
Maybe it's because I'm hungry and don't want to fix dinner.
It might be the rain.
Unlike the poem I wrote two months ago, this one was composed longhand.

Fact: I don't think it is a poem.
But that's not for me to judge.

I'm still undecided on deleting every post I ever wrote.
I guess it's too much effort.
I'd rather have another beer
And wish I still smoked.
Like a real writer.



-- 5/4/2014