When I Drink
When I drink,
the ever-present pain
in my back dulls
just enough to help me forget
what it is to be human.
When I drink,
you become both
exceedingly attractive
and evermore attainable
within the same passed hour.
When I drink,
the shitty music playing
at this bar, club, hole-in-the-wall pub
takes a turn for the tolerable.
My memories of every song
I’ve ever heard become more fluid,
filling in the gaps where this track is lacking.
When I drink,
my dancing improves drastically,
both in my head and the space I fill.
The muscle spasms are likely exactly the same,
but when swung with far less reservation,
appear better, sexier, bolder.
When I drink,
my teeth tend toward numb
and my tongue unfurls to flap out
every word that’ll fly on the wind.
They propel me forward into what would
have otherwise been a night of dead seamen.
When I drink,
I become more confident, more direct,
more the person I feel I ought to be.
I’ve always been an enabler,
but only liquor lets me put the springboard
under my own feet – vaulting me forward
toward a flight that only gets more exciting
with the prospect of a bigger crash.
When I drink,
I always overlook the warning label
hidden on the bottle’s back corner.
It screams, in its loudest, tiny-print voice:
May cause delusions of grandeur.
These will be fierce, fun, and loyal,
but they will be short-lived.
The body will only turn a blind eye
to the mind’s tricks long enough to bed her.
Then he will slug himself in the gut and purge
everything that temporarily made him think
he could ever be greater
than mortal.
An Exquisite Corpse 30 Days in the Hole
I
She rouses from a road bump,
spots me reading a book of poems,
and assumes me to be educated.
Her sweatshirt is rolled up like a bikini top,
unveiling her large stomach
with the pomp of a premiering vaudeville show.
She’s been unselfish since birth,
salt of the earth worth her weight in gold.
Sold down the river at her own demand,
she walked straight into our house of mourning,
wrapped her wise arms around my 11-year old frame,
and kissed my tortured mind.
She reminds me that spring is coming back for us;
we just have to spin the world a little more first.
But she’s been forgotten and forlorn,
become a run-down ghost town
whose people left her long ago in heart
before she lost them to industry.
And I write to her, to you because I loved, love, will love you
and I want to understand who you are,
who you were, and who you’re still yet to become.
Watch now how slowly a tear can form,
and then fall, when you’re crying
and think you have nothing
worth being sad about.
II
The sexiest thing you’ve ever said to me was
I want you inside me
and all my blood rushed center and down.
But you were supposed to be my sandbox, not my stone tablet;
there to make me realize how quickly I would die.
Our void grows contemptuous,
widens with each jealousy,
sprouts a new offshoot so green,
so doomed to be forgotten.
I hope your children grow up to be poets
so you’re never able to understand them.
I reread the printed letters from my lawyer,
make constellations of his patterned excuses.
I catch every person’s phone conversation
and reply to both ends, snatch their vested secrets,
could expose the truths of their youths.
But you haven’t read about me in your guidebooks,
and you’re not sure who to believe anymore.
III
Born of the same soured soil and tainted rain,
we did the only thing we knew how,
grew inward – tighter and tighter into each other,
hoping that our togetherness could save us
from the harshness of our surroundings.
But the darknesses we hold inside us –
deep and consuming enough to digest galaxies –
have somehow found homes in our foreign bodies.
We are eroding within, like our lost coast,
ever crumbling into the insatiable gulf
as grown men seek a fantastical world
where their monsters obey them
and not the other way around.
She had to have heard the morning moanings
of VHS vixens through thin walls.
Shut up, shut up, sit down, and get lost
in this sitcom rerun with him for the third time today.
His self-slapped golden handcuffs keep him
tight where his boss wants him,
marionetting stability and rigidity
as our former selves fight inside to stay alive,
waiting for the worst moments
to resurrect themselves in their familiar haunts.
He couldn’t domesticate the beast with obedience;
his training just taught him to gnaw the wrong things.
We want to be brackish,
but fear what we may kill in the process –
some just can’t comprehend the water’s ways:
filled only with soft breathing and flushed skin –
the work of an inexperienced child
who’d only before fucked women
to submission in his mind.
And your elegance and innocence couldn’t save you,
not this time.
One day, they’ll understand
the power of a peaceful moment,
the courage of calming the raging storms of their souls,
the wisdom of harnessing their ferocity for greater ends.
Saying the Same Things Over Again (5 Years Later, a found poem)
I
Have you ever watched a fish
writhe upon a boat deck, flip-flapping
and gasping for its last breath?
We are the fish.
And it's like a little piece of myself
keeps on dying every day.
II
This is Paradise Lost –
where I used to see an oil rig,
now I see a threat.
Listen, carefully: our waters are still
mysterious to even us –
the people born extracting
our dinners from them.
But when you swim in this
long enough, you learn
to trust the bayou, believe
that it’ll always be there for you,
for your pilfering.
Like oil, you can’t see shrimp –
you have to tide and predict,
gamble what the minds of sea critters
would find most comfortable.
But now there’s a sea covered in tar mats,
and we was just playing in the water,
standing in showers of oil,
forced to leave our masks onshore –
as chemical assaults bombed our backyards.
III
Our bodies only know
so many ways to tell us
we’re sick, broken.
The crude doctors know this.
The average lifespan
of people who polished Alaska
after the Exxon Valdez spill
is five years.
All of these people are now dead.
Cover-up had to be refined
to mean clean-up once again.
IV
We did not do this to ourselves,
this was done to fuel the nation,
to break us and barren beaches.
And now we see a culture of ethical failure:
black-slathered dog-and-pony show, control
the images, the evidence of harm.
Public perception is all we have left,
but you've long since learned to deal
in misinformation, bait with plausible deniability,
cast reasonable doubt upon our shores.
It’s just the flexing
of a practiced muscle for you:
divide and conquer our communities,
pit them against one another,
let them kill themselves from within.
This is the strategy of claims war –
see how destructive money can be.
V
They say fishing
is the second oldest profession,
and it has survived so much, but this,
this smothers everything.
And I do not want
to end up
in a museum.
We never wanted your help,
or your annihilation,
but we bore the load upon our backs,
with both boom and bust.
So you must dig deep
to make us whole, Exxon.
Make us whole, BP.
Make us whole, America.
Do not forget
who the “w” is
intended for this time.
[NOTE 1: This is a found poem. The vast majority of the lines above are taken verbatim from the "Dirty Energy" documentary, which focuses on the fisher folk affected by the 2010 BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Some of the featured personas' words were massaged to make it into this current form.]
[NOTE 2: In general, my poems tend to run far under 500 words. But this is one of my longer ones, and because I still wanted to submit this piece to this particular challenge, I've included this note at the bottom to hit the 500 word minimum. Yay.]
Our Psychiatric Casualties
I
Doctor,
how much fear and tedium should a soldier swallow?
Doctor,
is this enough psychic salve to keep him fighting?
Doctor,
are you feeling alright this morning?
You must keep from cracking, for their sake.
Doctor,
I am no expert like you,
but this is mental medicine at war with itself,
the fury no one sees coming.
II
This is nothing new.
Achilles would have cried
over the body of Patroclus
on the shores of Troy
or beside the Bay of Pigs.
He would have bathed himself
in his battle-brother’s blood
with or without a priest or alchemist
showering him in magical liniments
for invisible wounds.
III
During the Civil War, the field surgeons
named it an irritable heart,
tried to quell the beaten
butterflies with bottles of young bourbon.
In World War I, we called it shell shock,
and our boys were shot for cowardice,
electroshocked for their tenaciousness.
In the Second Great War, the nightmares
were known as battle fatigue,
war neuroses, and Freud asked
if they’d shot their mothers
and if so, in which theaters,
and where the hole had borne
its way through their bodies.
The great psychs once defined PTSD
as the post-Vietnam syndrome,
and in every acid-smacked flashback,
some men return to the jungle,
some have never left.
IV
If a soldier should break down during combat,
he should be treated close to the front
because, if he is sent home,
he would do poorly
and seldom return to battle.
V
Experts are remembering and forgetting
remembering and forgetting,
never listening, never creating a lasting narrative –
no boot print to follow
out of this man-made muck.
The subtle pressures of killing
and more killing,
the tours in foreign countries,
the time spent stacking filler
for the catacombs they’re sightseeing –
overlooking that war travels home as well.
Our soldiers are holding
their machine gun minds
with flintlock hearts.
They are holding in
the stress for all of us.
[Note: Found Poem drawn from “When Soldiers Snap,” a New York Times article by Erica Goode, published 11-7-2009.]
The Couriers
We were delivery boys
made men
gripping permission
with privilege to hover.
We biked between
the lines of the living
and the legal.
With every pedal,
we’d bend mortal men’s physics.
Traffic’s laws never applied to us –
the road paint only confined
in white and yellow,
but we thrived in grey.
We were boundless, weightless,
limitless,
until one of us was hit,
when gravity smashed back
and we returned to being
breathless.
***
I can see you now
amidst the flashing lights
grinding gears uphill
through the snow,
the storms, the sweat.
You are splattered in city.
Break grease tattoos
on the back of your palms.
Crank and chain frayed jeans
drag inches behind you,
hold on so desperately
to their thinning threads of life.
***
Long after I’ve quit your post,
I still street-spot the others of us,
the matching, bleeding cracks
of our dried knuckles.
Still hear the manager’s
match-tip anger ignite
with only a second’s strike.
We were just ones of hundreds –
carrier pigeons on wheels –
and if we couldn’t fly fast enough,
he would hail another
to fool-flutter in,
always happy to take
someone’s crumbs
for the simple sweet
of feigned freedom.
The Darknesses Within
We humans are such fragile things.
The darknesses we hold inside us –
deep and consuming enough to digest galaxies –
have somehow found homes
in our foreign bodies.
We try to contain them with our weak minds,
pretending to comprehend their depths.
We camouflage them beneath our thinning flesh,
hoping the emptiness doesn’t leak out
or our false colors seep in.
But their escapes are inevitable.
Whether as a flashflood or an erected mountain,
our darknesses will make themselves known,
will have their ways with us,
will break us up to tear us down.
They’ll hold our hands as we climb higher
just to watch us fall for longer,
always waiting until we falter
near an edge to shove us over.
Then our black holes will eat us –
chew bite stab slice and swallow
until our insides are fecal and fallow –
and they will walk around
in our leftover skins,
smug shit-bags who thought we were
too good to be seized by what we hide inside.
They’ll go on pretending they’re us
until they can get close enough with someone else.
And once our decaying corpses
become too troublesome,
they’ll jump ship to their next hosts,
leaving us to rot and fester –
flailing as we fall to the ground –
slumped in a heap of ourselves:
the wasted snack of something
incomprehensibly stronger than all
our mental wrestling could ever grapple
or years of denial could ever outpace.
Alternate Heats (for Christina)
And so I’m left alone
wondering: what if
I’d tried to love you
rather than the warmth
of your best friend?
Would we have fireworked
just as vaingloriously,
pan-flash spark spewing
color just as quickly
as we could shed our clothes?
Or would we have bubbled
like sugar microwaved and molten,
forced into a form
we were never meant to be
shaped of or by –
the crust of our former love
crumbling everywhere in its hardness?
Or would we have brewed
like tea leaves steeped in the boil,
finally unfurling our dried tongues
preserved months ago
for someone else’s tastes,
releasing the flowers
we’d kept clenching
for no other reason
than constant reservation?
Perhaps the kettle is still,
waiting to whistle.
The Ash of You (for Philip Levine)
When you spoke of melting
pig iron into steel,
pneumatic pressed sheets
into car quarter panels,
you mouthed the words
with your thirsty hands.
Other poets only ever imagined
what you’d lived –
the poverty, the desertion,
the bitter, biting winters
you’d worked through –
the lines you penned
to honor those
who could never lift one,
despite the heft of shoulders,
the hungry bones of backs.
You were never born of ash –
it was always too clean,
too burned of its impurities
in the foundry blaze.
No, you learned to write in the muck,
to make stick make pen make word
make world make life make belief
make escape.
And when the immaculate poets
bleach their shirts for the honor
of returning you to your dust,
force them to burn
you in your first furnace,
to push you through
your factory smokestack,
and puff you out
upon the men you’d tried
to uplift, to preserve, to embalm.
Should the workers breathe in enough,
maybe the ash of you
will console
their cancers,
will convince
whatever’s eating them
from within
to work itself out.