In the alley behind, Jack smoothed back his wet mop.
And tightened a belt around his upper arm
Only to find the devil had switched his needles
With ones from behind a toilet at the bar.
He forgot who he was.
Which is as good a place as ever to start
Writing someone else’s poem, badly
To sabotage all their dreams of print
To make them cry late at night, punching their pillows
And cussing at trees and calling the homeless snakes
Out into moonlight, with their heads to the ground.
Archive for March, 2007
I pass the mural on the seawall.
It has faded into streaks of green.
I tighten my collar against the wind.
Tracing the cracks with my fingers,
I feel nervous in the uncertain light.
I keep walking, stepping over garbage,
Clumps of algae, tangles of wire.
I pass the pier where men
Cast lines for catfish, the sun sinking,
The first of them leaving, shaking their heads.
Life within human civilization is an inevitable array of tragedy - the tragedy of human irrationality in the face of tremendous pressure to be civilized, to be logical. And it is the tragedy of rationality against the insurmountable irrationality of the mind. There is nothing less logical than the human brain, that collection of chemicals and electrical impulses. It can be made to seem logical, to follow certain rules, but in what are colloquially known as the heart and the head there are essential impossible differences. It is all very well to believe in humanity, in free love, in honor and virtue and right, and another thing entirely to practice such things. I have never met a person, nor do I wish to, who is entirely capable of living up to their ideals, be they staunchly religious and conservative, entirely anarchistic, or clear-headedly rational. Something always interferes.
I would no more wish to see a man or woman wholly contained, wholly controlled, fully rational, than I would to see one entirely animalistic, wholly instinctual, treading the ragged edge of sanity.
So life is a glorious muddle of irrationality, and we must try to cope however we can. I cannot much fault the religious nor those that adhere to any sort of dogma, any more than I can fault the drinker or the acid-tripper or the ascetic. It is a terrible thing to be human.
My father took aim out the window,
Following, with his gun
A dark shape moving
In the Queen Anne’s Lace,
In the goldenrod.
My father came in from the field,
Ahead of the dusk, swinging
A groundhog by its black paw.
It was as big as a two-year-old.
“Nathan, Naomi, Stephen,” he said.
“Come out here, on the porch.
I’m going to show you
The chambers of the heart.”
1. The deer was a list of lichen, stripped from trees.
2. He scraped the skin off the rabbit, I mean, the hairs from the skin.
3. The owl ate the discarded intestines, that we removed from the rabbit.
4. The hive was crafted, cell by cell, corrugated, a feat of geometry.
5. There were worms and I wept.
I am a trilobite.
Or, the hollow shape of a trilobite
Engraved, a prisoner in patterned shale.
I have become limestone.
I have become a picture in a science book,
An image clicking through a set of slides—
The State Fossil of Pennsylvania.
Is such fame, such reknown, a triumph?
Am I trampled in the mud? Crystallised
In a bituminous vein.
So for lack of anything better to post, I’m going to put up some of the products of in-class exercises—or the exercises I do with my writing friends. Feel free to dislike anything, or like anything, or to do anything, or to not do anything.
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