these days

curled catlike in corners i
close my eyes against
this time travel x-ray vision,
this gift and curse of my condition:
to see the bones
beneath the lovely skin
to watch the dance
of architecture slip and fail.
the frame of things disjoints
and falls away.

i cannot build on these days
cannot love on these days
because i see, on these days
that nothing good can last.

if love is looking for me
tell love it will find me here
eyes closed and waiting
for my vision to clear.
if love wants to help me
love needs only hold my hand
and wait beside me.
love needs only whisper
'the bones are strong,
the blood is clear,
the world is young enough
and we are here together.'

still life with desk, lamp, and blackout curtain

4:30 a.m. in another hotel room
me, up and writing at the green marblette desk.

there's something about the familiarity
of these strange places that makes me philosophical
when i'd rather be asleep.

every hotel room is a single cell
dividing and redividing to cover the land.
we have let our lives fall into predictable patterns;
we are each of us guilty of the easy love of habit.

we fear the unknown
seek to avoid struggle
want to stay home, at least
take home with us when we go.

we drive to new cities but see nothing new:
the same beef and cheese restaurants;
this sterile gas station;
that strip mall cut from the unending cloth of suburbia;

and this room, with this table,
this lamp, this framed print
of an urn full of flowers that maybe lived once
but were captured in a pastel drawing,
died, and were discarded
leaving behind a stain on a wall
in a thousand identical hotel rooms.
multiplied to infinity, a mirror on a mirror
on the elevator wall.

we sleepless victims of the worst kind of art
can only turn our tired eyes towards the window
and hope for a sunrise unlike any other.

the clouds, at least,
still come and go as they please.

Sea of Sound

Preface: My band (trio arjento--check us out! we're awesome!) does a song called Sea of Sound (you could check that out too, if you like--it's also pretty awesome!). One day Marcy, the singer, asked for clarification about the lyrics. I, surprised, said "Well, it's, you know, the story of Ulysses--the Odyssey." I may have added "Obviously," but I hope not. I can be kind of jerky sometimes.

Marcy said something affectionately along the lines of "Not everybody knows the story of the Odyssey, smarty-pants--please elaborate?" So I did. And when I was done storytelling that afternoon, we all agreed that the song needs a preface whenever we perform it. The lyrics make perfect sense if you know the story, but they're otherwise pretty oblique.

This, then, is my first foray into spoken-word storytelling poetry. I had three goals: find rhythm and rhyme to match the push and pull of the sea; find pauses and swells and musical language to match the drama of the greatest story ever told; and fit it all on a single typed page. I don't pretend this is on a par with Homer's original, but I think it turned out pretty well. And I didn't even have to be blind to write it!

…when he turned away, the fires continued to burn behind him;

beautiful—like every deadly thing.

His ship surrendered to the soft pulse of the sea.

“Lost,” the storytellers say. But “lost” is not the word:

Ulysses always knew the way back to Ithaca. The map

was engraved on his heart. Blood flows

always out into the body; blood always returns.

Still, the fires burned. The beautiful hands of destruction

lingered over the land, beckoned him on.

There were so many more mistakes still to make.

He ate forbidden meat; he tasted forbidden lust.

He journeyed to the dark basement of human memory,

To learn that death is final, even if love is not.

He followed the call of the great destroyer,

seeking a souvenir or a skeleton, a trophy or a bone;

something, anything beautiful to take home

to make home a place where a lost heart could finally slow.

Ulysses burned: not lost, but beautiful—like every hungry thing.

Circe who turned men to docile beasts

sang him the song of a secret, the secret of a song:

poured into his ear the idea of the music of the sirens, perfect and fatal,

calling sailors towards the rocks to learn that the future

has no place for them outside the pages of books.

Consumed with longing for a home in this idea, he abandoned

Her too-easy charms and turned his ship around.

‘Lash me to the mast,’ he told his crew. ‘If I cry, if I complain,

 if I beg you set me free, do not listen. Only pull the ropes tighter.

Here is beeswax. Stop your ears.

The perfect song is not for everyone to hear.

Love is not a burden for every heart to bear.’

The ship sailed on, deafened by the hum of absent bees, into the sea of sound.

Ulysses cried an ocean of lost ships, a lifetime of wandering; wept until the song faded.

Slept, a hollow shell held up by ropes, watched by a crew of the blissful deaf,

Ignorant men, free of desires. When he awoke to the soft pulse of the sea,

he turned towards home. “Lost” is the wrong word:

he had always only been incomplete. Never full, never even properly empty, until then.

But in his old age, the music haunted him.

Cadences cracked by the ravages of memory danced the spiral of his ear.

Haunted by whispers of beauty half-remembered, Ulysses took an oar,

put it on his shoulder, and carried it inland until he found

a place where no man had ever heard of the sea.

Content at last, he built a house, and sat down, smiling, to wait for death.

silence after song

i dream this dream not every night
but intermittently:
house lights dim
stage lights pick out
chrome on my guitar.

there is an absence of sound; no coughs,
no sniffles, no murmur of conversation. wires
do not hum. i am alone, frozen,
unsure of what to play.

the wrong note is fatal; the world
waits to be created from the fabric
i will weave here this night.

i hear in my head a sound; see the map
of music. play
a single ringing chord and watch
(not as horrified as you might think)

as my hands explode--

there is no blood. no pain.
just pixie dust drifting to the hardwood floor,
sparkles under spotlights,

and me, mostly mystified,
arms useless like stumps of ancient trees
waiting for what happens next.

backstage you wave: 'come here,
come here,' your fingers say.
lost, fingerless, mute, i can only obey.

you take the guitar from my shoulders.
you lift the weight of the music away.

you, my love, have hands enough.
a world without my music
is still a world with you.

you were never waiting for me to play;
you were waiting for the silence
after song.

Unjumpers

the kid who won't jump
     (a little bit pudgy,
           big for his age)
stands at the lip of the pool

arms outstretched over elementary water
     an incomplete sketch
          of a plan for a bridge
from here to the safety of homeagainquick.

lifeguard pretends to care, counts
     backwards from three.
          and again.

bends knees and waist, cranes neck
elbows out wide ass far behind
lowers himself to lessen the
                                              drop
but never leaves the side.

meanwhile
in the observation room

i can't decide
     if i should cheer him on
          or shove him from behind.
"it's only up to your goddamn chin," i say
to the window that keeps me dry
while he struggles and shivers poolside.

but i know fear: know he's thinking--
it doesn't matter how far up it comes;
but how far
                 down
                         it
                            goes.

we are each of us alone
on a ledge somewhere sometimes
bridging out to an indifferent hand.

we are each of us weighing
the distance from here to joy
against the stiffness in our bones

every day at the breakfast table
we bend our knees,
count down from three,
prepare once more to spring
     out into life.

Grade Five Knives

We are curled up in bed--
the usual routine

when Alexander breaks my heart again--
the usual routine.

'I auditioned for the talent show," he says.
I answer, "Oh?

I didn't know..." bite my tongue, decline
to end "...you had a showy talent."

Opt instead for "...you were doing that."
"Yep," he says, "I sang."

"Oh?" I lurch inside. See, my son,
my sweetly naive son

is not so hip sometimes, and I
having been there fear the cruel

knives of grade five. "What did you sing?"
"The best song ever," he says. "Oh?"

"Baby Beluga--you
sang it to me when I was born."

He drapes a thin arm over me
And falls fast asleep.

He cannot see me crying in the dark.
He cannot see me smiling through my tears.

The Bed Poems--disambiguation

If you've read the three bed poems, you are probably thinking "wtf?" They are odd, it's true. They are also an experiment I conduct with my Writers' Craft class every semester, to try to get us in touch with the oneiric logic of dreams that so often differentiates poetry from prose.

We start by writing a descriptive paragraph about each of three beds: our earliest memory of a bed, our current bed, and our dream bed (all laws of physics, causality, economics, etc. are waived for this last paragraph). Each paragraph is then typed, double-spaced, blown up to fill a page, printed, and finally chopped into random snippets of 2 - 5 words.

Armed with an envelope full of our own words--our own memories, hopes, dreams, and realities--we then set about assembling poetry. I give the class three deliberately suggestive titles each day for three days, and we have the rest of the hour to sort our words into relevant piles, choose which poem to write, create our poems and glue them down to pieces of construction paper.

The end results are sometimes baffling, sometimes hilarious, sometimes poignant or disturbing. We see our own words on the page, but they are now saying things we never would have said. We discover other voices, other patterns, lurking in the things we say every day. We converse with our own echoes, dance with our own shadows. We make ourselves strange to ourselves, and so hopefully discover ourselves and others.

If you feel inspired to try it at home, do send me a link to the finished poem!

~tom

The Disappointment (Bed Poem #3)

I slept in a bag

     It was cheap and unpleasant
          and empty no earthy green
                                 not succeeded yet

I feel like I
     was the best we are all
thin old-fashioned
     green with speed and soft
          clutter no chaos just
                    pine unvarnished

begins me again when
     my head like a mother
          memory wrapped in
               walnut veneer

                    kill me but
                         end my dreams