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Wet Paper Bag

Some nights I stare at the wall and try to stop thinking of you.
It backfires, obviously. Because now the wall reminds me of
how I can't stop thinking of you. The time has gone like
sea-trash with high tide. Faded like knee-scrapes into skin.
It's been long enough so that I have to pause to name years.
Yet still I feel like an animal in a wet paper bag.
Trapped in a tiny stagnant space. Smothered and still.
The walls are easily broken but I don't know
if I have the strength to wade through
the weight of this atmosphere. It hangs in my lungs
like cigarillo smoke. (You only smoked one once.
It was New Year's Eve and snowing. I slipped on the breakwater
and scraped my knee. You threw the butt at the surf
as the tide was coming in.)

Family

Father needs laughter.
Mother needs peace.
Brother needs something to care about.

"tell me about father and mother."

Father likes to sing.
Mother likes to draw.
They both like to dance.
They are curlicue peals of light.
But they are thin.

"tell me about brother."

Brother's name was not always Brother.
Brother has so much caring.
But Brother has nowhere to put it.
So Brother yells his caring out.
To everyone else, it sounds far away.
But when it roars, it is louder than a thousand jet engines.
But when it flies, it is faster than a comet in space.

"what about sister?"

Who told you about Sister?
I don't know Sister.
Where is Sister?

current events

a little noose in the boathouse,
already shrunken, already low.
a fray-haired girl drinking innocence
and drawing crosses on her ankles to make a shield.
a windy soul whose intents
begin to blow through the cracks.
poison clutching this house from the second floor.
"just make things easier for me!"

the soul of the woman i love
got put inside a madman
and now i can't grow up,
and i want to find some way
to express the mass of regret
drawn over my heart and shoulder,
but instead i just stab and slash
and catch him when he falls and
leave and fracture and embrace.

Nothing of Cities

Fingers pressing on my chest
like holding onto a kite string to draw back the tension.
My ears are asleep behind carnival tents
but the flaps draw back just in the nick of time.
A dozen voices rise in rejoicing
while my raw throat sputters and sits on its hands.
Music notes like an eskimo kiss
and I wonder if that's all I'll ever need,
and I already know the answer.

Nightmares For a Week

When I go back home tonight I will return
to making threats against myself. I will return
to inducing ferity, a new nature like an animal
pushing unhoned teeth through my gums.
I will return to forced sweetness. I will return
to little, obscure reassurances. I will return
to oldest fears resurfacing, hands and teeth,
eyes that refuse to blink, breath, coming
in gasps, the singular thought, no longer
drug-saturated, This cannot be happening again.
I will say this is for a story I'm writing.
And then I will not write about any of it.
If you knew the things that crowd my head.

A List of My Weird Fascinations

-birds
-blood
-angry dudes
-suppressed rage dudes
-Hamlet
-Fear
-physical manifestations of mental distortions
-beards
-loss of sight
-drawing things on myself
-hands and teeth
-earthly spiritualism
-forward motion
-what we all have in common
-plaid
-dreams
-bromances
-Castiel
-things I cannot figure out

A Crippling Fear of Public Speaking

I can't crack my knuckles.
Today I am trusting my brain
to buoy me but my brain
is not trusting my mouth.
My adrenal glands are not
trusting my rehearsal.
My eyes are not
trusting my focus.
Do I get points for speaking
through the throat-seizing tremors?
Does my ranking rise based on
how much sweat pools on my eyebrows?
Do they award merit for me
kneading my hands together so hard
my knuckles crack, and crack,
and crack, and still somehow manage
to stay stuck together?

Happening again. Fuck

Unmoored, cast afloat, by phobias like these,
that catch my throat, drive me to my knees,
make me pray, or meditate, for something new,
but I'm too little too late, too desperate too soon.
Yet I continue to search. I need to be sure.
So that obsession lurks, for the constant lure,
the voice so coarse, the hands and teeth
that bruise with such force, and shape my dreams.

(Is it just me?)

inbflat.net

The old man with the viola draws it to a close
on a stretched third.
It is beautiful. Unutterably so.
And I mean that literally.
You will never hear it again.
Something similar, maybe.
If you can remember it. How it went.
What you did.
Is that cruel? To give us a song
so beautiful, only to deny us from
hearing it again? I don't think it is.
There are so many more paths.
So many more chances.
It was good and now it's time
for the next thing. Always.
Always forward.
(Although if you really want
you can draw it closed with the viola one more time.)

Familiar

I don't feel safe anymore. Like, I know rationally,
I'm okay here, nothing ever happens here,
things are all right here. But then part of me thinks,
what if, say, the roof cracks and caves in on my head,
or I fall and I can't move and no one ever finds me,
or there's an outbreak of some new disease,
and I'm susceptible, just for no reason,
just because of who I am? And it's all I think about now.
Like, whenever my mind happens to go blank for a moment,
then I get so scared, without warning, just out of the blue.
And I almost can't stand it, like it's always
verging on unbearable. Like I'm always
this close to totally breaking down forever.
And I wish I could fix it, or do something about it, anything,
if I could reach my hand into my insides and
move them around, to try and relieve the pressure,
or if I could take my brain apart and lay it out
and look for the dark spots, and cut them away,
like using a butter knife to slice the bruises
from a banana. And I keep asking myself,
Why is this happening to me? Why is it happening now?
I don't have any of the answers to these questions.
I don't the answers to anything. I mean,
what do I know, even? Who am I to say
that I'm safe here, or that it's gonna be all right?
Who ever knows that? And how do they know it?
And how can I ever know that? How?

romance dreams

I listen to the mail truck driving away,
a little sad, and fold my hands,
give a little smile. My friend smiles back
knowingly. We both know what it's like
to sort of be in love with someone, then
listen to them drive away every night
with no gesture of returned affection.
To see them every day, support them,
become vital to them, even, when
the time requires it. To see them
bravely defend you with no inch of give.
And then they leave.
Behind me, outside the loading bay,
I hear an engine idling. But my eyes
stay firmly glued to the riveted floor.
I do not dare look for fear of having
all my fallen-in hopes erased.
But I see my friend staring past my shoulder
so at last I turn and look.
And it's him.
Returned, for some reason.
He leans out the mail truck door
and smiles at me, and I lose myself a little.
And then he is suddenly very close to me
but it is fine. It is all fine.
Being so comfortable with each other.
Content to do the depending this time.
And being absolutely sure
that this is it.

(in sum: after having terrible dreams forever, I FINALLY had a happy dream. A romance dream, to be exact.
Too bad it would also have made good fanfiction material. I don't know where that came from lol.)

The Sigh

(note: I wrote this based on a piece of music by Schubert, and based on the "sigh" motive in classical music, which is a downward half-step used to symbolize sorrow but often creepy-sounding when used in dirges like Bartok did. That should provide some context, as well listening to the Schubert piece, which is here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKVnL9JvuO8 )

Schubert takes his time returning home,
pausing, and it's not that he enjoys the pain
again, but that he cannot not remember.
As his eyes lift, he feels his throat drain
slowly, feeding the little pit of terror
in his gullet. Frozen, struck suddenly dumb,
he wheels backwards a little, deafened,
still turning, still moving, but troublingly numb.
Upon finally reaching his home, he sits
at the piano, to write. His fingers trace the keys.
But the note is too jarring. He slides down, startled,
and that's all he hears. No more melodies.
Nothing but this figure, the simple half-step,
creeping like a ghoul in his ear. The sigh.
He tries to move away from it, leaps a third,
but again the note falls, a drawling cry,
settling deeper now, digging itself a den.
Panicked, he stumbles to his feet and out the door,
needing to escape, but his head falls and falls,
half-step by half-step, then the diminished four,
lurching him off-balance and pulling him back down.
Suddenly he finds himself there once again,
where his eyes lift and his throat drains, but here
there is another, and he can't remember when
the last time was he saw another person, but now
he sees a man, weeping openly in the street.
Schubert steps closer to glimpse his face,
but a terrible sight —this man is me!

The same pale face! The same brown hair!
The same dark expression, the same despair!
The ghoul is clawing and wailing and sighing,
its sermon unearthly and its hymn undying.
He screams out, "Who are you? And why are you here?"
He swallows his nausea, but chokes on his fear.
Collapsing, he clutches at paving-stones
but can feel the ghoul taking his breath and his bones.
His ears, he is sure, are useless by now.
By degrees he feels himself sinking down.
The doppelgänger, meanwhile, lifts its socket eyes,
opens its rotted throat — and sighs.

Always There, Never Going Away

Hyperaware of how my legs move too fast and
the awkward fit of my clothes.
Tapping absentmindedly to reassure myself of permanence,
exhaling in a rush of humpbacked relief.
Yet permanence still drags my bones to ground.
The last few years braided and pinned down my back.
I would cut them off and lose my strength,
but even now am not strong enough to wrench shut the shears.

Two Poems by Richard Wilbur

"The House"

Sometimes, on waking, she would close her eyes
For a last look at that white house she knew
In sleep alone, and held no title to,
And had not entered yet, for all her sighs.
What did she tell me of that house of hers?
White gatepost; terrace; fanlight of the door;
A widow’s walk above the bouldered shore;
Salt winds that ruffle the surrounding firs.
Is she now there, wherever there may be?
Only a foolish man would hope to find
That haven fashioned by her dreaming mind.
Night after night, my love, I put to sea.


"A Measuring Worm"

This yellow striped green
Caterpillar, climbing up
The steep window screen,

Constantly (for lack
Of a full set of legs) keeps
Humping up his back.

It’s as if he sent
By a sort of semaphore
Dark omegas meant

To warn of Last Things.
Although he doesn’t know it,
He will soon have wings,

And I, too, don’t know
Toward what undreamt condition
Inch by inch I go.

Great Friends of Mine

Two brothers on the couch.
Words bearing us out.
Things like spontaneity.
And how he's so much smarter than me.
The axiomatic things,
logic unspooling in strings,
a declaration at most.
A wayward riposte.
But this is exactly it,
the odd and clunky fit,
difficult to label
but precisely (precisely) stable.
I'm challenged and I fight
(though I'm no longer sure I'm right).
But we know now. We know.
This is the only way to grow.
More give and more take.
More icing, less cake.

Choke

Butcher's bridemeat fitting slickly around your hand.
Sewer rats and their unborn pups dripping from your hair.
Concrete like a homeless animal sniffing at your legs.
And a queen bee's birth canal expanding inside you.

It Happened Twice This Summer

My biggest fears don't really have a whole lot
to do with me. They're pretty common, and not
very specific, though they manifest in
specific forms. You've probably guessed by now
what I'm getting at, with my recent titles (although these
poems, which seemed to me so vital to record,
to get these events down on a page, are really
important only to me, and my restlessness, and rage).
But while I am scared of guns, and Roth of the dark,
neither of those are what mark my days with
the feeling of being somehow less. Every day,
nearly every minute, I obsess over very small things.
Things you don't even think about. This poem
has nothing to do with the guns, or the blacking out,
or the paranoia to which I referred, or
the vanity I take in my own written word.
This poem is about what I fear most for me.
Not my friends, real or, like Roth, sadly imaginary.
I wrote this because I'm constantly afraid, having
my most sensitive history so transparently displayed.
My biggest fear in regards to myself
is they will look at my face, and be able to tell.

However, I begin to think that it is not fear that motivates this paranoia, but something less discouraging.

First, he sinks. Quickly, like a fragment of cinder.
Fatigue wells in his eyes like jaundice.
Bruising sighs, sweet and cerebral.
Freedom ties her hair back. Fear rolls up his sleeves.
He feels compression wash through his ribs. Greatly alive.
But paralyzed. His nail beds scrabble.
Glacial, shallow against the green.
He engages. Finds teeth, catching, carves a lifeline under the beds of his nails.
Salt water slowly soaks into the green horizon.
He feels it on his forehead.
He engages. Builds a bridge with his shoulderblades.
Starts counting stars again, automatically.
Fear is ready with a punch in the gut.
Suddenly the paralysis has its hands in his stomach and throat. He fights.
Feels the worms in his limbs. Thrashing, writhes.
Retching. Almost. No. Gripping. Head heaved over. Paisley.

Paisley in red and blue.

His eyes well up and he starts swearing and he swallows and bites his lip and stops himself. His whole body hurts, but he has to move. He is not alone here after all. Blinking hard, he realizes that he has no place to go. His bare toes flex in the underground air. He needs to keep his head down. Put himself back together. But anyplace safe is far away from here. So he'll keep moving. No rest yet. Just running, and hiding. And healing. And making do.

How I Feel

Color is critical. It fades in and out.
Arms lose their strength. Bodies lose body.
I crack my teeth on stones and draw blood.
I hear voices burn. The city hunts us. We fight it with noise.
My nerves howl and rattle their bars.
Bravery screams, "Where did the world go
when our fathers lost their youth? I will not give it up.
Not until my hands rot from wanting."

As it happens more often, it begins to weigh on me.

clouds like small children. threatening to fall.
to turn into a grey ceiling again, where the pores look like stars.
feet clutching the wet ground. he smells gasoline & home.
freezing and abrased. his extremities are clubs and spades.
his dead fingers part the fog and prickle with rebuke, or some seventh sense.
his hand over his heart, he listens for the sixth but cannot feel reassured.
he reaches out but he is stuck. everything is dark, like diamonds or vampires.
people simply vanishing. he is alone on an intravenous island.
his shoulders haul his arms like blocks of giza. he is alone.
he will hide by himself in case he disappears too.
the bilco doors close and he wraps them around him like a shroud.
but it is too dark and things start flashing in his head. reddish hair.
he swats the air and his fingers tangle in something. afraid, he tries to pull away.
light. light. he is alone. his fingers tangle. something to hold on to.
in the mirror his face is red. red dripping from his eyebrows, drawing lines.
red rims under his eyes and red reaching for his irises. like a warning. stop.
he turns away. finds in his blind spot an open field.
he curls and feels his breath curling into dried skins in his lungs.
flattens his hand against the green expanse that threatens to get away from him.
over the edge and spill onto the concrete below.
turns his face into the felt. tonight i am sleeping here.
i am sleeping on a billiards table in the basement of someone who has vanished.
i do not know what day it is. i do not know the last time i slept.
i am alone. i am finally alone. no more reddish hair coming in the dark to