Category Archives: Poetry

That’s All I Am Going To Say About That

I used to write poetry and woke with a fragment floating around the last remnants of a dream today. Like an old song, one that came through the static of a radio 30 years ago. It began “Belive it, hip sucks…” and ended with some notion about being crazy about illiviation. There was a butterfly slicing the air like paper to flesh, letting bad blood flow. It became the ink and asked what was the advantage of taking pen to paper. Poems, elegies, even a last thought are only for the living, to give us comfort or fading solace.

Even at 44 you were too young to die, but that was your choice. You let loose in the black ribbons of storm that have no gauge or alliance. I woke and rushed to write the poem, but each line I tried to put to paper faded like our youth, like the image of the trails that ran through Woodbridge Valley; each line failed to capture the truth of our lives.

There was a low stream that stumbled under a canopy of oaks, feeding on the eroding bank, muddying our feet as we ascended the other side. Perhaps it rushed by in ragtime, perhaps it was was where the silence I become lost in rose from.

I can not really remember where it began, perhaps on a dirt hill where the wind pulled the clouds down. I only know where it ends, where I will turn to stare back ‘why?’ and ‘convince me it was real.’

Perhaps I did not write you a poem because they tend to distract us from the flowers around the grassy knoll, the rivers bend, as much as they offer comfort or attempt to give form to our grief.

Yes, that stream became a river rushing by many trees before becoming the sea and returning as rain. If I look closely I can still see the rainbow at midnight hearing of your death gave birth to. If I look closely I can see your dark eyes peering into the cool blue pools of mine.

Yes, that brief glimpse of water in the forest could grow a spark to a flame, could in burning commanded a vision, the angry blind that only now lifts when we can’t look back.

If I knew last Tuesday, perhaps i would have picked up the phone, took your hand and walked with you from the forest toward a new horizon, one that we could forever see draped in the sunrise. Perhaps I wouldn’t need to write these words for you.

“Jerry’s”

It was the only thing I could be sure of — a certainty in a life that had become lost in a mad rush to escape the past that held onto every breath. Before I gambled there was always hope, but after that first spin of the wheel I knew I was a loser and it gave me some strange comfort. I began to spend every moment I could at ‘Jerry’s’, it was dark and Lisa, the cutest blond bartender in South Baltimore, fed me Sierra Nevada drafts and shots of Jagermeister as long as I fed the Cherrypickers along the back wall of the bar. She had seen many gamblers come and go, but for some reason befriended me.

Jerry’s was a hole in the wall, dark and smelling of stale beer, dirty mop water and morality. There was a sad cast of characters from 6 in the morning until well after midnight. The jukebox played a schizophrenic mix of  70’s country, 80’s metal and 90’s dance.  The older folks liked the hits from their youth, the kids liked remembering the music from highschool. When you walked in there were two pool tables, then a large square bar that sat in the middle of the room. Behind the bar were tables to sit at and the poker machines.

I was always anxious when I went, either because I had money to gamble, was copping coke, or was fighting the nagging notion I should be at home.

Christian was the person who took me to Jerry’s the first time. He was a guy my wife introduced me to once when we wanted to get high and was always lurking. I had stopped gambling after Marybeth left me at the dive she worked in; it had been many years before that November night. It was his birthday and my wife wanted to hang out so off we went. It was an excuse, as if we needed one, to get wasted. After we were there about an hour, enough time to do a shot, drink a beer and snort a line of bad coke off the urinal, I placed my first dollar of thousands in the poker machine.

They’re illegal in Maryland, they even say “for entertainment purposes only”, but if you know the bartender they pay off. I won $50 that night for spending $10.  The next morning I was back, up early and playing again. By the time winter had turned to spring I was a regular, spending my days playing the poker machine, snorting crystal or coke, and getting drunk. I was there as often as possible.

 

 

 

The Problem With Spilling Ink

It’s Thursday night, one of those nights when I remember I can find the words, be they crumbled and barely legible or bold and screaming from the tree that allows night to creep up from behind the sun. I don’t know if I believe in poetry anymore, if there are songs that can speak out the innermost feeling. I think they often just flutter along the outskirts and we assign some deeper meaning with a comfort only found at the edge or when lying ravaged.

When I was a child I knew, at seven, or eight, that I wanted to be a poet; I didn’t know what a poet was, but it seemed that the rhyme and reason went so hand in hand that there wasn’t much of a choice. When I was in highschool I thought a poem was they key to a girl’s heart and her pants; highschool boys spend a lot of time thinking about sex and how to get it, poetry was my answer. When it didn’t work and as I ‘matured’ I found another truth; poetry became a vehical to both avoid and express the myriad of emotions my outward self tried to hide and compress. I pursued it, took the words and wrestled through forms and years at university; I was going to be a Poet, known from coffeeshop to bookstore from coast to coast. That didn’t work out so well either. I am older and know now that I just want the poetry, not to necessarily be the medium. I want to see it rise from some benign catalyst and come flooding out as I try to stand and control it only to get lost in the ecstasy of the image; like a faucet, a hot and cold running love affair —– ON & OFF, ON & OFF, ON & OFF — over a sink in a basement, installed and forgotten except when you venture down.

I often think of Sara, the woman who never speaks in The Eolian Harp, how she plots the latent’s manifestation in a world populated by archetypes and gods; where biology, religion, line, and melody are fused to create a landscape, this strange dark where we chase our shadows beyond the street in exhaustion. Her silence is where all words dwell, where we can pick a few, give them form, a shape, and a name. It becomes a poem that now will rest, for a day or a month, and then tell me whether it is real, that will offer up salvation in the tiny pool of water I cradle in my hands.