You Stand There

Quiet. It’s always quiet now.
As the flood of the sink flows up
Dishes are the only arks
To be scrubbed down
Spotless. You stand there, washing the sheen
Off. I try to talk to you
But the right words flail around,
Splashing dishwater
In a rainy, wet bowl.

The music gets louder, blazing
Out a hard sound track,
Hot jazz out of Styrofoam speakers.
I want to laugh, or anything, really,
But you just stand there.
And there is quiet.

It strains the bands and expands the empty space
Contorting the corners, gliding across the face
Of the faded wall clock, ticking down its circle round
Waves of heat and color crashing without sound

And you stand there. And I stand here.
And a barrier keeps between
A tsunami wave rising
Almost surmising
The silence settling unseen
Like snowflakes, but redder
Decorating your dark hair
In a glorified haze
Over numerous days
Lying amid Asphodel, fair.

And the quiet, it rises higher
As each minute tocks
On the round, square clock.

And I try to say something
But I lost the words a week ago
A torrent spilled out, stepping over twisted ankles
Without even enough energy to apologize
They lack conviction.
Now I know what it means to be hurricane subtle
I wish I could help you, but I can’t
My words don’t work anymore

And I ask you: are you okay.
You look at me, smile shortly,
And shake your head
In my head.
But you don’t say anything
You don’t even hear me
My lips make no sound
I’ve already done enough damage
I can’t risk doing anymore
Why won’t you—
Why won’t you—
Break the silence

And I’m sorry, and I’m sorry, and I’m sorry
And I wish I could take everything back
But I can’t
And you hate me
And I hate me
So at least we have that in common.
And I’m reeling when I shouldn’t be
There’s really no reason
No justification
For me to feel this way

We are on a boat that is sinking
Into dishwater and rainwater and tears
And I don’t think I can swim.

But you just stand there
In an empty sink
Thinking thoughts I couldn’t touch
In a million years.

 

 

Thus begins Season 2. I know a real explanation for my absence is warranted, but it is not for now. See you soon.

(untitled)

Black and white photographs
Color the paragraphs,
Touching the faces and
Edges of sight
Old blood and ink stains,
It’s always the ink stains that
Keep all the fragments from
Fading to night
They leak from the photos
And cover the railroads left
Under the gaze of a
Decadent sky
Snapshots of sea sides
That blur when you touch them,
Portraits of shadows left
Wondering why
My fingers are covered in
Street corners, street walkers
Huddled in masses and
Spangled in snow
One thousand lighthouses
Blinking goodbye and all
Taken in turbulence
Ages ago

Before I was anything
But a faint scar
Painting the face of
Whoever you are

Kick in the Head

I am the Dean Martin of writing.
I realized this yesterday afternoon
Washing dishes at work while
Discussing the virtues of
Subtle denouements, the best nom de plume,
And how zeugmas demean a serious style
To my disinterested friends.

But I go home to write each night
And my three drafts are dusty
And my poetry is like autumn leaves, crinkled and rusty.
I’m alone in a sea of words I sometimes fear
I’ll never see or even hear.

I drink and I drink
Till I’m so sober that I start to sink
Beneath the arch of my living room foyer.
I don’t think I could write any worse or slower
Than if I slurred my words like a sot-weed sower.
But Frankie wants another performance tomorrow
So I puff up my pride to swallow my sorrow.

 

 

NaNoWriMo Word Count: 1933. I’m getting there. That’s one full chapter, by the way. We’ll see how far I am after the weekend.

nine nonnets

the quality of
her journeys
glory and orange scales
end with
her blood

ghosts of old industry
above woodsmoke fog
shudder in the haze
bounded on all sides

sun storm afternoon
checked red shotguns
white on fingers,
snowing shadow,
painted skin
of blood

she hears each
shrunken
cloud

a woman
motionless,

each is made of
the folding
in the stormclouds

time claims
each dawn
old and broken down

jungle
moon, the centre
above the street signs
oasis
above sky

thin,
white flesh

 

 

The way I formed this poem is interesting, and I think deserves a bit of explanation. This poetry is of a genre called found poetry. It involves looking through various random forms of media, anything from an article on the internet to a piece of graffiti on a street wall. Poets then have the liberty of

In this case, I found a website (here) that generated poems, specifically nonnets. As I mentioned the last time I wrote one, a nonnet is a form of poetry where the first line is nine syllables, the second line is eight syllables, the third line is seven syllables, etc. through the ninth line. I used this website to create nine nonnets (or nonets, as the site spells them). The website isn’t very distinct in lines of poetry, so a few of the lines (particularly the ones with few syllables) were repeated between these nine nonnets.

I pasted them all, in order of poem generation, into a Word document and then crossed out anything I didn’t want. In fact, many of the lines in the above poem corresponds to an individual line from one of the nine nonnets. However, I did change the lineation and spacing in some of the earlier stanzas. My goal was to take at least one part of a line from each nonnet, while not taking any direct phrases from the poems. That way, I could give the poem a voice unique from any of the nonnets it came from.

Anyway, as for NaNoWriMo… well, I’ll just go ahead and say it. My word count is 151. All of that was written in the last hour, too. I never really get a good start in NaNoWriMo, so I’m not very worried (especially since I’ve been too busy with school and work to care much). I’m hoping to have a very good weekend, though. Perhaps… 15,000 word good? We’ll see.

Thursday

I get on the bus and we’re roaring
It’s late, so late that it’s morning
Thursdays are always filled with
drunks and regret
But you wouldn’t
Know it, all laughing and talking over the speakers
Tucked beneath my ears, a set
Of tiny eyes squinting in the overhead
Lights. It’s going to be like this all night
I can’t hear my own thoughts
And everyone is lively and asleep
They won’t stop being happy, it’s
Sickening. Why can’t we have sad drunks,
My people? But it doesn’t matter

We hit two stops and everyone departs
Except me and two others
One kid not nineteen, wasted, but tries to pay
Thanks to the bus driver, gives him a little prayer-like
Symbol, a plastor (sic)
Blessing the nightly Charon
And he is nearly run over as the ship roars on
Lost in Styx
The bus driver at the helm, concerned over these kids
Like a father tucking to bed a child
Who has had one too many drinks and snores
Our king of nighttime revelries,
The patron saint of 3 am bus stop
Binging, wide awake
He’s the guardian angel of all of us.

We’ve passed the freshman houses
And it’s all jazz now, as we head to
Quiet town, so much quiet I could
Fill my cup in it and forget
Everything. I can hear the sky moving.
I exit the bus, toss two coins to the boatman
And walk home.
I guess it’s sometimes nice to be alone.
In the dark like this, the way I live
On a night so perfect it’s superlative
Doesn’t seem so small anymore
A part of the pitchblack sky light
Music so haunting it only plays
When you’re not all right
On a Thursday night
It’s so clear and bright in the dark
The bus leaves to pick up more patrons—asleep
While I walk away to my streetlamp sanctuary
Both alive and dying in the deep

Fires That Burn

I like to walk as the rain falls by
I’ve said this many times before
To family, friends, the darkening sky
My hallway and bedroom door

It gives me time to reflect on things
As I wade through the raindrops sleek
They hit me like thousands of tiny stings
As they slide down along my cheek

And I’ve found that this is parallel
To the words that I pen out at night
How I shape them into the stories I tell
When the candlelight flickers just right

For these are reflections of what I can find
In my head: what I feel is here
But like all mirrors, please keep in mind
Things are different than they appear

These lines, they are written in marker
But they aren’t written permanently
As sometimes a sunset seems darker
Than it can ever really be

It might appear that my words are the truth
But truth can be relative
It makes something more than the sum of my youth
But it’s not more than I can give

I’m not actually beaten with blinding stress
I don’t just stand there filled up with dread
True, these words don’t turn off the darkness
They turn on a light instead

And for the ones left wondering, please learn
This is life; I can take the hit
These lines are just the fires that burn
And the ones that were never lit

If it needs to be told, I’ll tell it flat
There is no shame or sorrow in that

Sunset’s Farewell

Copper clouds
Traced with a silver lining
Forged from thouands of fluffy dreams
Which float atop hot air
Like balloons on a clear summer night
So fair

They mingle with the dusk colors, proud it seems
Of this canopy of lights, blinding
The wonder of any onlooker
And of the tinge of royal in crimson
Always binding to a sunset’s farewell

In this sight, I light a candle
For all those dreams still drifting in the dark
Lost by the winds of unnatural breeze
Or caught like a kite where dead ones dwell

The glory of shimmering sunlight
Is based on the binds of the broken
Who rarely get their stories told

When they die, I hope they become stars
Guides who can shine when the sun itself is gone

Let them show us a glimmer greater than gold