soldier

If it were smoke, and not a sound, again the remembering would be a choke. A cold cough from camp stoves and coalfire. A coat length away from blasting caps with no wires. Blasted captains wiring home to no wives. Seated soldiers bleeding alone to no lives, If it were smoke and not a sight, again, The remembering would be a blinking, hot knives undoing steady hands, wrinkled fever-dreaming youths in foreign lands.

Over-there was never here, a location changing as the news, prepared for smeared, re-arranging faces in the few, the proud, the blind, the waging war, the staging for a larger house, the moving up, the ranks, the banks of rivers bulging, planting bombs and bulbs in virgin earth. If only I could be interred. 

If it were smoke and not a word, again, the remembering would be a blessing, blurred, a ghost, a spirit, at most, I’d hear it in the night, not dream it, right? But no, I dream it, a dream, it blots out the night sky, inside, the world behind my right eye, the left sees out. What’s left eases doubt, down my neck like hearing my own name. 

What is it? I know I would recognize it. Say it once, I will write it down in the dirt. And when the wind removes me, the name will go as it proves weak to the touch, a wreck of sighs, it stands above me, a standard, above me, in the wind, away it flies, my name, what is it? I watched it go. I remember that alone. At a moment, I was strong and held a flame, in the next, I stepped in the dark and lost a name.

 *****         

Men walking, again. Standing and walking. Could they be talking towards coming for me, Would they be talking, even be trying, Through the fields of the dying, to discover me. To recover things left, lost to the battle, amongst the death rattle-ing chorus of saints, if heroes could gather me, send a boat after me, down the river, I’d row without water, a foe with out father, out feeling, out fear, Men seen walking, stepping and walking, could they be enemies, coming for me? 

Am I the last, beyond the edge of a boom? A blast, beyond the doors of a room? could my ears ringing be men, calling for me? Calling “amen!” Calling “we’ve killed them, again, each one, done is our work, except for the last, beyond the edge of the blast, the one we can’t see, or care to, he’s free by omission, if he dares to reveal his position, we end him!” Am I safer here? Will I come to savor ‘here?’ My savior here, but they come to sever ‘here’ from ‘here?’ Obsessed, again, Several ‘heres’ for a man, a plant that no one hears, affixed without a plan. 

 *****         

A new kind of anger. From a new place, in the past. The last time I saw my pa, my ma, my rifle, my letters. The first mirror, the nearer I look at him, I fear it. did I know him? If I had legs, they would look like his legs. My feet, his feet. Socks, wraps, boots, and the legs. Did I know him before, again, a friend, the end of memory, before, again, as ends go, it was the worst kind. Refusing superlative, the first time, commemorative photograph, releasing control of a legacy, looking down to my leg and see the terminus, the germ is dust, the endless sand of understanding, 

la arena sin fin, me llamó desde lejos, 
lejos de casa, cualquier casa, 
donde mis padres, esperando, respirando, 
miran hacia el este, antes de que termine el sol, 
cualquier sol, alcanzando sin brazos, 
susurrando,“nuestro hijo perdido.” 

But again, not a son, a picture belonging not to anyone. If I had his luck, unstuck from the ground, Able and free, in the air, til I’m drowned in time and soil, the sands of my toil, if I knew him should I shudder, should I gasp, vomit on myself and sob till I can’t? Before, perhaps, I would have known how to act. 

 ***** 

And so it comes, to me, to this. And if there were a chance, if bliss were not romance, but fact, and fact were not romance, but truth. And truth, if my body were a house, a skin of bricks, thick and growing out. Only the sick of head would approach and beat the knock with mouths instead. Fools standing and greeting stones. Alone but not exposed, autonomous, composed of life, liberty, and the holy ghost, and wholly chosen by my birth, from earth I grow to my end, no friends to witness my slow descent. Begin, my bones, as before, defend me from one last lost war. 



 * 



I remember at times, a time before. Reading or seeing, looking more into books. Or magazines, if those are things, The words come back, obscured, but back, and not my heart, but my skin, a part of me is hurting, and the stars shine the brighter for it. Reaching down for it. I opened, a flower to the sun, but cannot help but feel the turning, done for now, but opening again, as before. 

O before. Where was it? I was looking out, with eyes, with everything. There was a light, and a brighter light, And dark before, and after there was more, and night had fallen, or I had fell, to here, or to here, was I surrounded, or who is to tell? I could have felt their hands that caught me, caught and kept me, was I stuck, or stuck before? I had a smile, and I felt the smile end. But they said to fix it “smile, yet, smile again.”

world wool shrunk 6/12/11

A little bit of warm water keeps the memories turning. They all slink into my head after a long song day. It gets crowded. No one wants this in their way, in their back fenced forest, when sleep is a simple sigh and a tickle of relaxing muscles away. Days are like books. Weeks are like volumes. Months and years, anthologies and libraries. So each moment, movement, memory from the minute before is a word sweating out of your lips. Whether it's breath or melody, we never cease the telling. Since we have reason sunk in our helpless heads, humans think out of instinct. We dissect, organize, and decide the value of the dust on our tables.

"I think that I will be alive,

purse-lipped and starving,

every day I am given, each

a treasure, until I cannot,

or will not, reach into my 

head and pull out a gift.

The reaching is the crisis."

After a long day of rain, the sun shrinks the earth down to a colorful dirtcake. On these days, one can walk the entire breadth of grass waves and wind caves in an afternoon. The earth will be painted differently this day, when the ground feels less like distance, and a whole lot more like a magazine. It's all the colors we choose. 

**

On days of whimsy, the world is dancing light and deserts of restless dragon backs. On these days, noses snort and wiggle and you catch people making grand gestures and it's all, in the faraway clouds of radio jeering and lines at the DMV, set to music. You feel a dancing rhythm in your ankles, and the chattering, corduroy fleets of vibrating delivery trucks massage your temples to a languid, after-meal stare. A mysterious smile warms through your lips at unexpected moments, leaves an earth-acknowledging air to your conversations, and lands you safely back in your chair to pay your check.

When angry, even the slowly listing, silent moonlight leaves chasms in the sky. Gentle, distant dripping from the faucet is a japanese drum played by german industrialists. Scratching with rusty farm equipment at the chalkboard gates to your eyedrums, the day stretches on like the sweating, stammering traitor on the rack. I WANTED A NAP!! Bunny love is met with hatred: nazi-youth with strangled, rag-doll puppies. Every pedestrian a mine victim, limping, useless and taking up space. Every driver a lunatic, geeking out and drooling, humping the steering wheel as they bury the gas and brake simultaneously. I would end myself for a popsicle and a room with a view.

it's not like it's all that serious

is time truly short like they write about it?
hormones suggest otherwise.

I tend to tend rather than choose
these days

and I definitely choose
over acting
and especially
over-acting

I love
but I don't know why

I am addicted to reading articles about how my myers-briggs
personality type will effect my life.

[you] Just bite my lip.
I will know whether or not I will like it.

can I get my feelings back for christmas?

I'm not proud

I mostly fear reading the next chapter.

Of myself.

If I were a book, and not a boy,
I would make sure I was hid
at the unreachable corner,
under the dusty, over-thumbed tabloids,
in a cumbersome looking shelf.

Not worth the effort of rummaging
and squinting to rediscover where I left off.

••

Let's leave it at the pronouncement.
too formal.
Let's leave it at the sound of
the song we both know.
We love the words we constantly
forget.
We smile, even though we
never really understood their significance.
Maybe I reach out my ashy wrist to
call attention to our surprising, inevitable
silence.
"ooh, would you listen to that!"

I'm never surprised by you.
I hold my breath re-reading
the heaviest paragraphs for mistakes.
trans-emotional typos
that inspire you for a day or two.

A wheezing, moth-et bellows
roars at a lace jib, waiting for a punchline.

waiting for the image to stick.

yep

when juliet stabs

her tender, white belly

loses her breath

and hot cranberry jelly

it's the snuffing

of ash

in a puddle of

dew -

not the gush

of a vein

or hollywood

spew

the magic in death,

is knowing the story,

though the end can be grim,

the scenario gory

blah, blah, blah

I like shakespeare.

angk-shuz

You better stay away

you got me angk-shuz

knuckles like battleships

at the ends of my armadas

firing squad fingus

blazin badabadabada!

laying you flat like

newsprint for tilapia

leave you out for days,

you both smell like shit

I smell you from here

"REALLY DOWN TO EARTH"

game, you know I know your game.

game.

'I like you, too! But yeah, gotta go, don't follow!"

shit's like high school locker room dramatics,

but your life is fluid, tugs from all directions.

gotta jet, gotta meet, gotta eat my collection

dainty daisies ripe, ripe, so you pluck,

'cept the swift lily white of my good luck

PLEASE don't think this is about you.

that would make me so HAPPY punk.

SMILES with less teeth look unimpressive.

Like an GLEEFUL apology from a drunk.

shut up.

Honestly

It's not about your eyes.

It's not about your beauty. Your kiss. Your anything beyond your heart. I know those parts very well. They are the book that I have read alone, to study it deep. Deep like low notes. To study it within the slow tones. The rumbling dischordancers of a slow techno. You are too alike to my kind of safety keeping. To hold them at a certain wonderful, terrible distance. Far enough for whispers to fall silent. Whispers of illumination. Whispers of lovelihood. Close enough for kisses to fly clear across my cross-eyes forehead and touch down like a moon lander out of focus. Who is this? Who are this? How lucky and wrong am I?

BUT BELIEVE ME! I understand. My heart is one of those tinier ships, with the captain at roost with a lazy ankle guiding the tiller with one hand holding a book of verse and a hand on my thin-as-shit neck hoping that one of the pages makes the pulse quicken and causes me to move. make we want. makes he stand and run. and not be done. to shade the sun from everyone. My heart, too, moves like dust on fancy shoes. Riding the invisible tide of secrets to hide.

And obviously, that's not a happy place to be. No. But it is A place to be, and I will never complain from a lack of location. Because being in pursuit of a larger love is always considered "A" place to be.

So sink your teeth into my DANGEROUS inequality. I am largely unwritten. Largely unbitten. Still eyeing the yarn, like a ferocious knitting club. caste. Still eyeing the yarn, still imagining the slightly larger than life perspective of things.

Keeping me softly.

So that's what I have for now.