Results for category "2013"

He didn’t

He didn’t give a quarter
Didn’t ask for a quarter
Wouldn’t give a quarter
Didn’t want a quarter

They would pierce
his relentless, wily, toughest edge
Real fighters are just mean, they don’t
mean to win, they mean to hurt

Don’t just cry—
understand
A man who travels
has an interesting tale to tell

Every good musician disrupts
your expectations, riles your confidence
The great ones do it to move you out
from under your skin

Little one visits today
so they play a game—
he gets to be the monster and
she’ll be the princess

Once the joys of coupledom stop
they don’t return
She looks like a gypsy,
like a thief in that black cape

He keeps his wartime memories
to himself
His bags are packed for exile,
for escape

It’s a world that won’t meet her standards
She thinks everyone’s the same
Just like her
but without her discipline

A cough that just persists—
“Doctor, is there something going around?”
Doc says, “There’s always something
going around”

It was an edgy, anxious time
They lost it— their tenderness, their devotion
Singers aren’t always wise and are
rarely dignified

Without violence
there’s no negotiation
Without negotiation
there’s no victory

-December 27, 2013-

Not too far

                1.

He seems tan, trim, happy, fit
He could so easily make you glad, that man 
You wouldn’t know it to see him
but there was irksome, physical pain everyday,
pain that was serious and his alone
He never complained

That is, I never heard him complain
He mitigated it a bit, I guess, and he could walk
with that back brace he wore, with his easy smiles
with that sweet grace, so famous, that fine-toned wit
overlaid by a slick semblance of good cheer,
charm and sunny, ruddy good health

As a kid, they tell you God is good
They tell you, the grown-ups know the answers
to every question
They tell you, truth will always find us
and justice is measured and faultless
You may even believe that for a little

After all, you’re a kid
(Did the tough world-nurtured naïve natives
really think their dances make cool rains fall?)
And then you understand that these are prayers
and not predictions and you become
all grown up, kind of circumspect and guarded

In the middle of massacres, hatreds, assassinations
the laws of elliptical motion
belong to no cult or tribe
Music is a hidden, mathematical enterprise
The mind calculates through every song
unconscious of its calculations

His assassin is a pretentious, self-pitying lout
with a cheap, mail-order rifle and just good enough marksmanship
(Once upon a time they rang the church bells to ward off hurricanes
and in wartime they fled to the woods for refuge)
The goddamn shots ring out to mark the end of a world
that’s gone for now and won’t ever return

                2.

They thought, “I have mad skills
and although the Nazis will kill everyone around me
they won’t kill me because the bastards need me”
Today the corporate-types ain’t real Nazis
but they’re often dumb and they can fire people randomly
even those of us with mad skills

They were picked to carry the coffin
because they were quintessential marines
At least six feet tall with a straight posture and narrow waists
And in his case an added consideration—
the man was black
Now, after 50 years, half the coffin bearers still live

My friend, a photographer, sought to express emotional truth
with a camera and I agree he had some funny quirks
For example, every time he saw a Mack truck he’d sort of cut him off
He loved the sound of their horns
but was too old to make that “Please blow your horn, Mr.”
gesture sign, like a kid does with his arm

In high school there was this math teacher from India
He wanted to teach us the austere, mysterious, cold beauty of math
but could barely speak English
One day he came up with an idea he called, “The silent proof”
He stood in front of the chalkboard where the proof was written out
He gestured at it and made odd sounds with his mouth

There are some emotions that rack peoples’ lives—
emotions we’re determined to suppress or deny
The silent proof—
cold, austere, beautiful, hard, like sculpture
in his head...
The man was sincere, I think, but ridiculous

We carried the coffin in a trance
We were kids really, 21 or 22, with this unbearable burden
Totally focused we wouldn’t trip, we wouldn’t drop the coffin  
One of the marines was later shot down over Cambodia
They managed to recover a piece of his elbow
and buried it not too far from the slain president in Arlington

-November 23, 2013-

His Obsequiousness

                1.

When he didn’t need you anymore
his obsequiousness stopped
He became overbearing, domineering,
sneering, impossible
He managed up but not down
Like for so many,
that usually, if not always, worked

She half smiles as she walks towards me
You know, that half smile of feigned recognition
as though I’m a person that she thinks she should know
but can’t quite place
Intense lovers just months before,
that wire strung tight, tight, so tight
and now, she can’t quite place me

Truth is vulnerability, shock, confusion
Rich, well to do, or poor
you’re just another man in a room
The deepest views of the universe
are the same as our surface views
Yes, the numbers differ, the equations are plain—
but the view is the same

SARS comes from bats,
hantavirus from mice
HIV-1 from chimps
Ebola, again, from bats most likely
and every influenza comes from wild aquatic birds
Oh look, now see,
what they’ve done to him now

He’s got to get to know this place
He’s got to learn which tunnels to avoid
at which times
The basis of delight is wonder
like the echoes of some ancient music
She wakes from his death-dream
to a new and sadder bubble

He lies often
Often, he’s the obsequious yes-man
who surrounds himself with yes-men
Yet, however he got there,
whatever dumb gods put him there,
when he obtained the power he craved
he knew just what to do

Our universe is a bubble
In one bubble you can’t see into the next
We see the one bubble
in the great collection—
the multi-verse
Blood was all over that elegant dress
Look see, what they’ve done to him now

                2.

Pleasure’s about where you are
whom you are with
what you eat and drink
your good health
the grandiosity of your house
the wit, the generosity, of your tribe
Happiness is, in contrast, on you

When this man wears a mask
it’s indistinguishable from his skin
so thoroughly does he become
just what he pretends to be
He tells no one everything
His privacy, his freedoms are so precious
It’s not his real face you think you know and see

He could be good mannered, gracious and opaque
Understand this—
don’t think you can read the man
Love is not love if it changes like that—
it never was
What’s beneath had been broken
many times when he was young

His nemesis was an arrogant, narrow,
rude young man
If he himself was not guilty
there was his two-faced elegant brother
Their hatred for each other
was instinctual, visceral, ruthless,
stony, starry-eyed hatred

After he jumps from the Golden Gate Bridge
a fool in mid-flight may change his mind and want life
and sometimes, by chance, he might live
Bedbugs, tapeworms, cancers and
deep sea scavengers
You wouldn’t predict it but this man
is good in a tight spot, calm and decisive

What to make of the feelings you feel
when it’s just bad as it can be
The universe we now know
is mostly dark energy, dark matter
Add it up, the equations don’t lie...
We and our stars the few flecks of coarse light
We sparkle the light quick sparkles

Dad on the bed seemed to us kids to be recovering
I remember the hint of red tint to his skin
He had cancer and would be dead by the end of January
He talked to us about the assassination of President Kennedy
shot yesterday and said,
“I hope nothing like this ever happens again
in your lifetime”

-October 26, 2013-

False Accusations

Unlike his dad, he was
pragmatic, cynical, tough, shrewd
“The most important thing a man has to tell
is what he doesn’t tell
The most important thing he has to say
is what he doesn’t say
Watch his hands, look into his eyes”

We think relevantly, valiantly,
validly, much of the time
Brief twinges lurk, vanish
below a conscious net
like a persistent ache
or a soothing coolness...
Like panic or relief

Small victories...
Two beetles crush together for warmth
Their hard shells pressed together
like two very encrusted humans
My father collected stamps
for a kind of smallish delight
Failure for him was terror

At this point, she hoped to be better known
She thought she owed that much to her talents
“They have taste cells on their wings
Their bodies are covered with sensors
and unlike us earthly bounders,
they fly!!!”
These aren’t the thoughts that terrorize

Here they are—
When bad things come to you, do you
decide that it’s all your own damn fault?
Does that thought make any sense
of your world?
Caught in a prison-like place
they’d try to get him to admit

to things he didn’t do
(He was always lying, lying, liar)
to feelings he didn’t have
to meanness that wouldn’t occur to him
But he wouldn’t do it...
Truth was, he didn’t harm or want to harm her
despite what they said

“If any one of you
(There were at least twenty of them)
comes at me
I’ll bash your goddamned face in
with this fucking folding chair
Don’t think that I give a goddamn
what happens to you or me after that”

-October 12, 2013-

Joy

                1.

Joy, so close—
He can feel it almost
Just past those orange rivets of sky
over there, over the grassy dust hills,
like specks of silk moonlight
A short way only from the dank, dust tracks
his joy glistens on the surface, kneaded
in tapestries of despair,
emergent and raw

                2.

He probably would have died
if he’d kept that up
All those hangers on,
all those sweet drinks, ladies, and drugs
It was easier with no family around to see it—
Easier, obtusely, to enter oblivion
“Don’t stop,” she’d say, as they fucked
“Don’t stop” as they fucked
He didn’t stop, no he didn’t stop...

                3.

“It’s clear, he cleverly observed,
that you have given up any pretense
of middle-class, bourgeois respectability”
She would somewhat resent gay men
She felt she had no real sexual power over them
He disdains the “marketing personality”
that “emotional intelligence” so admired today
Those who study what folks generally like and dazzle
us with their smiley charmed ways, accordingly

                4.

“I’m not a mat for you to pull out
and then put away”
An old song that, sung first
by a sage in ancient China
who lived alone in the cold mountains
The scars itch him like war wounds
She lacked, let’s just say, a certain loyalty
and hadn’t the discipline
for either friendship or love

                 5.

The city flushed orange
with a surge of good cheer in the lights
500,000 or more of us in the streets
ecstatic over the end of the war
Craggy men and women I’d never seen
before smiled at me
Men who’d lost an arm or a leg
beamed and chatted amiably
next to buildings pockmarked with bullets

                 6.

He came from a world
where certain things were discussed
and certain things were not
His voice, its tone, its resonance,
its understated power, reflects that world
She acts nervously along the way
Until she gets there its fear,
irrational fear, until arrival
He lawyers her for now, he defends her

                 7.

Somewhat regretful
and a little forgetful
Without that searing golden bling
without those pearly jewels, alone
Just try to survive here,
just try to make it alone
It will cost you your good energy
and time, like unspoken violence,
like the silence between the notes

                 8.

The others in the trade
had no strong feelings about his work
They couldn’t care less, actually
though they certainly envied his sales
He liked the way I played the acoustic guitar
she said, he wanted me to play guitar
Sing of our sorrows and desperation,
as only you can, he said
Trip through the notes like you can

                 9.

The things we tell everyone
The things we tell to a few
The things we tell our lovers
The things we tell ourselves
The things we never tell
even to ourselves
You ask why these poems are sad
It’s because these poems are songs
and true songs are sad

– September 28, 2013 –