Plausibility

The husk of you

lies somewhere

under water or

cracking on the dry

sand, a relic, amphibian,

a fossil.  Warm for 

the museum, under glass,

seen though water,

locked in ice.  Honest 

curiosity fills the emptiness;

your dead eyes

see like chromium spheres

all of this.  You know.  You

have all the answers.

While here, you have left

only questions and slime

and the awful 

gift of

plausibility.

Noun and Verb

For a time, the idea of him--for what is memory but idea enhanced by prejudice--persisted, haunting those left behind.  He was the topic of gossip, of rumor, of speculation.  In the gesture of his death, he became the Everyman, the Anti-hero; like a fairy tale monster or the vague outline of the title character in some moody French film, our imaginations coalesced around him, turning our fears, our loss, our fascination, into twisted projections that did neither justice to the complexities contained in him nor to the complexities contained in ourselves...

Suicide.  It was that word.  Always half whispered, delivered into the conversation in a puff of smoke that woke the nostrils, shook the senses; it made the whole body alive while simultaneously permeating one's' being with a slow soaking novocaine.  The numbness is something like death.  Creeping.  And that is just the word...

The act is something different.  It is first a solution; it is somebody's idea of a resolution to a minor--but not trivial--chord.  And after, when the sustain has drained the last color from the notes, there is nothing, just silence.  Silence cowers.  Silence doubts.  Silence aches for the sound that could fill it, the percussion and honey, the music undone.  

They say, "Absence is invisible."  It reassures us of the imperfection of the eye, reminds us of the risks that arise when we believe our senses.  But, in this one case, in the case of the dead, absence is obvious and brooding.  Absence is phosphorescent and loud.  Ghost, be proud of the hole you have ripped in the story...

Once, on a cool day in late April, nineteen seventy something, a quarum of Colorado teens were standing in various postures on the grassy bank of a stream glutted with the Spring run off.  Here, there was a bend in the river, and the water enlarged into a lazy, wide-mouthed, muddy miracle.  The kids marveled, laughed.  "Dive in!" someone instructed.  "I bet its fucking cold!"  There was that momentary silence, then the pulse pulse pulse before the (im)patience was answered with an act:  somebody pushed you, quick and hard, their splayed fingers and flattened palms knocked the wind out of your down jacket.  Your hands scrambled, and each found a body to cling to, briefly, before pulling these others in behind you.  The flailing limbs, the muffled screams, then the bodies--falling like angels, one-two-three--into the murky aftermath of this latter-day deluge...

Shaking You

You are bruised by the world, a little broken.  And you come to me, tired; you bring your burdens in the form of stories, torturous tales of loss, regret, fear.  You bring to me words, words, and more words.  You bring a vocabulary you have rehearsed in the deep hours of your dark night, rewriting your childhood, your father's death, your lover's betrayal.  As if you are stringing the beads of a new kind of a rosary, aligning the words to blurt out or blather, you have chosen these words carefully.  The curling letters, the cursive smoke--cancerous, burning, a dragon's urgency in your breath--comes out of you, the fire of your own certainty that you have been wronged, or wounded, or worked to your last raw nerve.  There is nothing that tethers you to the world but your pain, or so you imagine, or so you etch on the monument you are making to your misery.  And you will carve each last letter into granite permanence even as your every finger bleeds and bleeds...

Let go of these words.  They are the weight that is sinking you.  They are the cement that prevents you from swimming, from flying, from laughing, from making love.  Don't believe them.  Words are wasted on trying to "make sense" of this world, of this life, of this struggle.  Feel your way through the obscure passages, the labyrinth; feel your way without giving names to your feelings, without dissecting their meaning.  Your feelings are more immediate than your words would have you believe, more present that psychology or novels conceive them.  You do not take pleasure in the sun because of some dumb luck of where and to whom you were born.  Likewise, the frustrations of daily living--the flat tire, the cold coffee, the failed flirtation--are not seeded in genes or dreams or traumas.  These are the breezes of today, the sensations of now.  Breathe today's anger and tomorrow's lust without linking these into some kind of eternity.  Words are a timeless malady.  Life is a temporary gift.

for the girl in the singed kimono

Nobody knows the trouble

of another nor the pleasure

that's the measure of the bubble

of the body where sex serves

as a mandate and love

is just a hobby that we learn

from lonely ladies who want

everything to burn.

Hades

is a place while heaven is a name.

The religious chase the after

life but suffer just the same.

Her kisses are a buffer

from a secret, hidden shame.

 I regret my missing children;

though I'd cum, they never came.

Humming,

clever, nelly boys becoming
angels all.  Sorrow pencils tangled poems.  

Our noisy bellies call,

from the bottom of the gullet
where anxiety grows tall,

to the winner of the bullet:
"You must walk before you crawl."

Infants
ain't alone in this eternal emptiness of mind.
A shell of bones, a soft spot
where the saints become a stain,

The pistol knows this territory, assured 

what it will find:  A fast train made of crystal

blurring masts out in the harbor

and the barber spurs your noggin

like strong nog right to the brain.

"One fine day (in Nagasaki) waiting..."

for the song that keeps me sane.

go
go
play play

Egg Rock

The despair deepens, the encroaching tide, the way the waves knock me down (again) just as I establish my tenuous balance.  The sand--saturated, churning underneath my feet--collapses just enough...  And the water seizes my legs, upends me.  I tumble in the foam:  head-first into the cold, itchy salinity.  

The ocean conspires against me.  The dry sand, the new land, is just beyond where the crashing waves won't carry me.  This line is limbo.  My limbs immobilized, I am a walrus thrashing at the edge.

My eyes burn a little.  I look out further, where the sea stops the sky; there is something alluring in that eternity...  It is tempting to abandon this struggle, this insolvent game.  The emptiness beckons:  the inscrutable depths of the beguiling Pacific, the stretching truth of the blackness of space, the lightless cavern of my closet, my heart, my bed.

The morgue is at least well-lit, the florescent glare a kind of garish on the chromium surfaces that surround me.  Waking up, one dream over, another dream began.  I can't even remember them collecting the body--beaten with bruises, torn by lacerations--where it got caught up in the surf below Egg Rock...

Rumination: December 1956

The to-do at the swank hotel,
the ruckus in the street that followed, 14 below and still
an audience has collected,
on glazed pavement, in every frosted window.
The girl knows she can escape
from no door she has ever seen
or held the key to. She is 14 above and warming.

Her slip is visible. Under the fur,
she shivers. The crowd can't keep
her warm. Desire chases desire.
One might be easily caught, ensnared:
seen looking, heard listening;
it is shameful, the way, we anticipate
a scream.

Her body emerges
out of the sun, a street lamp straining
to catch the angel. When she shatters,
the bell boys and the boys in blue
(not the king, not the president)
swarm, heroes ready-made
because of their uniforms,
patriotic shades of red and navy,
the bright white spotlight
of her exposed breast.

The gawkers are all nauseous
on all fours--gloves and mittens--
frosting the snow with their (steaming)
bile.

Meanwhile,
the suicide note rides the Chinook
breezes, tumbling off a thermal,
slowly finding earth. "I give up"
is scrawled across the top:

"I give up your name, your touch.
I give up my ambitions, my faith. I give up
and surrender. I admit
that I'm concerned,
worried, obsessed. I surrender
my fears. I give up the idea of us,
the idea of me."

One of the police detectives,
humming something, spits
out his gum. Softly, to himself
he starts to sing.

Rumi reminds me,
"Songs give pleasure."

The Thought of Suicide

Not to be melodramatic or sensationalistic, but rather to be frankly honest about my experience and its meanings for me, I confess that I am (these days) and have been (over these last few months) much attuned to the very real possibility of suicide. The potency of my thoughts on the matter is comparable to the passion of these same thoughts when I was seventeen. The catalyzing agent of the two occasions is disparate (alienation on the one hand, and bodily collapse on the other) but the antidote is replicated. (At times,) the only solution to life's complex arithmetic appears to be offing the switch. To borrow from the language of cliches circa 1971, "Stop the world, I want to get off."

Oh, to impose on my wild, weedy existence the ultimate act of control: To determine the manner and moment of my final exit. And who knows if I could ever muster the courage to act on that instinct. For that matter, who knows what angels might intervene between now and some hypothetical moment of action. Such speculation is beside the point, because right now, living consciously in the gravitational field of the individual's ability to take said individual's own life, something is happening to me. The power of the idea, the proximity of the idea to action, has begun to touch my cells. There is an inescapable magnetism as I morph inside. Alignment and adjustment come from chiropractors and kryptonite; one can hear the buzz and clicks. The clocks of brain and heart are very much alive.

Ritual

It is the ritual and repetition that appeals to me, the poetry of returning to the same place on the same day every year, the comfort in watching an old movie over and over or reading the same book. These activities place the tetherless soul in relationship to the world. "Hold on," they say, "Hold on. There is a predictability here that can sustain you." And even if these returns in there way only obviate the changes over time, they promise that in the light of change--the ebb and flow of fortune, the crackling varnish on the face looking back from the mirror--that some things, some small things (might) always remain.