—Sometimes You Sulk—

Tonight we watched you press your face
to a beat-up broken black table
in the middle of a wide-open room
in the middle
of whatever that was
you were singing

You and your sulking
remembered a song to me,
it’s British and sad but
it sounds just like fire
with its crackle and spark

You and your face pressed
to a table
looked broken and sad,
but the singing—
it burned like fire, or ice,
and it was neither British nor sad

Obviously I can’t make any sense of it at all.

But I’m out of practice with sense-making—
I forgot how to pause a long time ago

You see,
Dysfunction is a quiet little fucker.
But then,
So is rising.


It occurs to me now that
I remembered in the moment
to hope that you
would just keep singing.
Any song you like,
whatever beast of a worry-filled tune
your little bent-up heart desired,
as long as you sang it with that head
on my table
and the ache in your throat

as long as you agreed
not to watch me unravel
at the sight
of you singing.

Scoot and the Labels

One of the sample labels provided by this website when writing a post—you know, those little "labels for this post" things that are intended to signify what a given post is about—is scooters. Which, really, I mean, how is that not supposed to influence what people write about? I can only imagine that there is some ungodly high percentage of posts on this site that include discussion of scooters in some form or another. Way higher than the actual per capita percentage of people who either (1) legitimately have scooters as a part of their daily lives or (2) legitimately have such a connection to non-part-of-their-daily-lives scooters that they are willing to write about them. A collection of scooter-label-suggested sheep, if you will, just following whichever next sample label that comes along.

It's just a theory. I don't actually know of any scientific way to test it, other than visiting a significantly high percentage of these blogs, of course, looking for scooter talk. But let's get real: that would be far less interesting than just blindly throwing out a theory and watching it take great flight.

Maybe I'm wrong about all this. Maybe most people aren't actually impacted by such suggestive wording. Maybe people hit the "new post" button and then merely commence writing a new post, rather than stare at the bottom of the screen and read the sample labels over and over and over.

Which, while we're on the subject, in case there's any doubt, I obviously have nothing to write about. And I am, I suppose, nothing but one more in a worldwide herd of scooter-led sheep.

Save It For Later

It's an all-night diner
on the side of an all-night highway
and a waitress who calls me baby,
who tells me about the worst of worst that
I haven't seen yet, don't want to see
even for the iron balls or the stories,
she says,
knowing I tell stories when I need to stand straight up



Hey, she says, snapping her fingers,
looking at me with ice-cold water between us,
Don't be such a sad motherfucker, ok?
I laughed, we laughed,
I said, Shit, and it took about three
seconds to say it all, those four letters,
because I've learned to extend words
in southern diners
She said it right back and took about twice as long
I said You can't make me blush just
by calling me baby
so she leaned forward
and said Then come to momma's house
and make her feel loved, on the inside,
again,
and I blushed,
and we laughed

Fuckin' storytellers, she said.

Drink More Water

What are you writing, I asked

It's a parody of all the bad blood I carry
inside of me, he said



As in hemophilia or as in sharpened old stories,
I asked, about the blood

Hemophilia, he said, and chuckled,
listen to this goddamn jokester

Parodies can be about blood disorders
and broken hearts
and mineral deficiencies,
I said,
and they can
but I don't know enough about hemophilia to
venture a guess

I told him to forgive his family
and drink more water
It was good advice, I figured,
regardless of the specifics

Everyone needs more water,
and forgiveness
is anything but aging.

What Worries

Awakened in a cold sweat, I was,
with a nightmare about my old nightmares,
with a bone-bending fear of falling
in reverse:
A fear of rising at the expense of myself—
in spite of myself, even—
and a lock upon my lips, my teeth,
opened only by silence or acceptance
by either or both

Today is like the evening following a hurricane and
the morning after climbing a big snowy mountain
all wrapped up together;



Today is like holding onto the side of a hot-air balloon over
miles of jagged rock
after shadow-boxing a strobe light all night the day before
Today is strange and tired and tiring

but here’s the thing:

I’m worried about tomorrow.

Stillness scares me a lot more
than hot-air balloons and hurricanes

I was nothing innocent when I got here
but I wasn’t guilty either
Perhaps I was a witness

I’ve gotten dirty in the process
I’ve seen breaking and blood and more than I wanted to know.

Though I have to admit—it came with caution tape,
I had my crossroads and all

Yet, still, I thought poverty would have been
uglier than this
I thought maladjusted children would break me
quicker than
the concern of
too many keys in hand and
the drunkenness of knowing it

because
at least poor people laugh freely.



Yet, still, a stubborn light maintains,
flashes in and out, on and off,
remembers itself and I follow it,
I remember it
and
against every better sense
I believe it.

Let/Go

In the West we take shapes for granted—
probably the mountains explain it.

I take words for granted
and only remember in the absence of
sermons or sunshine or
time to smoke between
trials and time-clocks

But I steal rhythm every day from songs
from words
from phrases and questions
and train-tracks and the past—
the past that we all want to believe

But it wasn’t and we know it

. . .

The problem is no one cares
anymore about words.

Now that's a ridiculous thing to say

Feels like it, though, and
sometimes can't imagine
anyone but 87 elderly
gathering to spit smoke
on poetry

But why should they, anyway?
Every day,
in the middle of every afternoon,

there is
no getting around the fact
that we've lost it
and have no reliable guarantee
that we'll find it

I've mine and you've yours
and an occasional
stranger with a wink reminds a man
what he promised to do

Every day, twenty minutes
before sundown, my eyes
fix upon western peaks
to make sure
I am who I say
I was going to be

But it shouldn't surprise you
that I'm not as certain
as the stone is to sink
as I to ascend, to rise
for the sake of
tasting smoother air—
if that's what it is


Have you ever seen
pastry crumbs sink down
into coffee?
Me neither.
But I know they're down there.
That's change:
I see nothing of it,
but it doesn't taste
like it did before.

All In the Wrist

There are plastic bins filled with

chemical waters

It pinches me inside my nose, the air does,

but you seem accustomed to it
so I smile and watch you pour

I'm willing to wait for your finger-clicks to swim

in these chemical waters, in

whatever correct order they should

go, to see how your eye

caught light or lightning that day

I often remember the the marbles-ready thumb

in black and white

on your wall

And I want to write a book

just to have that on the cover,

I want to hardline some future publisher to

give you many thousands of dollars

for the right to

marble-thumb my book,

my quiet little book

that tries to stay out of the way

of its loud little cover

Confetti and a Coffin

Koll Strand sat inside a small gymnasium on a picnic table bench, sorting indiscriminately through a small pile of confetti in his left palm, breathing shallow breaths and smiling, halfway, to himself and to his hand.

Around him, on her feet, moved a woman from Colombia with a vacuum, a woman named Eva who had no idea that the man whose feet raised up to avoid her cleaning would die, one way or another, sometime within the next twelve weeks. She didn't know but he did.

The party—that's how he referred to it, regardless of the rather morbid alternatives that his friends had assigned to it or to themselves, such as "The Death Bash" or "The Coffin Cast"—would take place the following day, the afternoon and the evening and all the night until light appeared in the sky, probably around 5 a.m. Those were the rules, so to speak. There weren't many. People could bring anything they wanted, and with regard to their goodbyes, they could speak out loud in a toast or quietly to Koll himself. Koll preferred more laughter than crying, and he told his invitees the same, but that wasn't a rule, just a preference. He would be gentle.

...