Sometimes the brim casts shadows
deep and blue across dry eyes
and coffee's scented grey stings my sight.
From darkened corners
I stare into night-lit spaces
and sip bitter warmth alone.
No street-corner caffeine slinger
made his mint creme preaching existentialism
in a melancholic lair--
their humours are light
like the sunshine tomorrow
I'll face with squinty glare,
with clenched and sneering teeth--
but tonight
slow eyes, sardonic swallows,
and deep blue shadows.
A hundred pinkened skies begot a billion stars
Three lovers' moons waned silently
A million breaths in the summer air
Too many words to count
Too few to still the quickened hearts
Two hearts that beat as one
One heart that beat for two;
Two words were said
Two eyes were red
Two eyes grew wide
Two feet beat flight
Two eyes grew redder still.
II. Alone
Alone in her room
behind the barricades
of pastel posters
and bouncy Techno beat,
she puts her head between her pillows
and shivers herself to sleep.
Alone on the phone
across the widest sea
with the confidant who might be her friend,
with the man who might be her lover,
with the stranger who might betray her.
Behind the hiss she awaits the words,
the answer, the right thing to do,
but hears only the clicks of passing time
and wonders if he's there and if he ever was,
but then, softly, a breath.
Alone and unknown
on the strange city streets
she's never really seen before
and is not really seeing now.
She immerses herself
in the impressionist blur of strangers
and they eddy and babble around her,
pleasantly chilly.
III. Letters (The Redemption)
Beyond the simple blocky ABCs and AKBs
and past the swirling loops of her name
the cold MD in the odd OR
with disinterest enters her
as she lies back
and thinks NO NO NO
but doesn't resist
and with her silent screams
and his inhuman skill
the deed is done
and she is deemed OK.
From somewhere in the inky darkness
the hours explode like raindrops
upon my windshield and roll up
and beyond the safety of my now,
going far too fast and lost upon a wandering road.
But in a brief interlude
the seconds slow to a pitter
upon the roof of the screened-in deck.
We bask in the breeze
as infrequent lightning strobes
and catches shadows in their flight.
We dance slowly through the storm
and shampooed hair clings lightly to my cheek,
and we almost ignore the cold weight of wet
upon our shoulders.
From somewhere in the inky darkness
possibility rolls away from my searching high beam
like fog from an asphalt road.
I'm almost home.
Here lies a pedestal for you, my dear,
a fine and Doric cut of marble white.
Ascend it if you wish, and well you might,
and I will kneel before it, never fear.
Oh, I'll adorn it with a flowered wreath
and murmer prayers soft to earn your grace.
I'll daily dust your granite-carved face
and burn incense to sweet the air you breathe.
So climb, my love, up to your lofty perch
and let my arms become your sacred church.
I'll be your keeper if you so desire
and guard your temple gates with jealous ire.
That's if you want to strip the Mystery
and turn our love into idolatry.
High tide at the Kirkwood Station.
The sea of strangers covers the banks,
and I wade ashore with my gear
on my back and in my hand
to enjoy my vacation.
Upon the wooden platform,
dizzily I spin around, lost,
until above the curling hair
and swirling tide of reunions,
I see my mother's artificial smile.
"How was your trip?" she asks,
cutting through the people.
"Just like the rest," I say.
"What do you think?" my friend asks
over that strange silence
of a strange house in the early morning.
It's three o'clock in Missouri,
and the question argued is
whether one single atom of Helium
placed in the core of the sun
would cause the sun to die.
I hardly know right from wrong
or why I am, much less the quantum physics
bantered about this morning
like sports scores among the intelligent.
I shrug and make a comment
I stole from last month's Discover.
It satisfies him, and he turns to the two strangers
and continues with his argument.
The banter fades to a background music,
and from another room,
someone's mother is talking to demons
who are trying to make her sin,
and I seem to be the only one who notices
and thinks it unusual.
The visit to the rich relations,
unannounced on a rainy night.
My feet were much too wet, I felt,
to walk on their pristine white carpet
as I toured the house.
"That's where Lisa died," my mother whispered
as she pointed to a closed door,
the tone of her hushed voice
between conspiracy and self-righteousness.
I don't know what to say.
"So what are you doing after you graduate?"
The vertigo question of many late nights
is fielded with a practiced hand.
"Grad school, maybe," I offer.
I threaten to master the fine arts
and as the words are spoken, the idea,
the project becomes their own.
"Let's call John," they say,
brother of a chancellor of a local university,
a United States Senator,
"and get you a, what do you call it,
writing fellowship."
My mind reels as my idea, in their hands,
becomes a blueprint, a flowchart of my life,
inked by others' pens, but
"He's retiring, so he doesn't owe me anything."
"Maybe he'll do it just because."
"That's okay," I withdraw,
"It's a worthless degree anyway."
"I thought so but I didn't want to say anything."
The songs of politics, of deals,
of money, abstinence, and caution.
Be careful of women in bars,
because condoms break and people die.
learn from the mistakes of others,
they say, and I do, but their point is rather moot.
I'm not very lucky with women in bars anyway.
And so the clock on the stove silently flips its numbers,
and as I stumble through my goodbyes,
my aunt presses a check into my hand.
I put it into my pocket,
and me into theirs.
"Just overwhelming," the Principal said,
rubbing a thick hand across a suddenly sagging neck.
Then he ordered the parade of unknown names,
freshmen now with world-wise eyes
and collegely real-life dreams,
across the fluorescent dinge
of overdressed rural pride
of the high school cafeteria.
Up to the obsolete mike they went
with springy steps of youth and hope,
of what they've done
and what they might now do,
to shake hands and smile
with nervous little suited men with money.
I applauded politely.
"How are you?" she whispered,
soft, like rustling grass on a summer's day.
"Kevin," her mother called,
a distant rumble beyond the horizon.
The blue-grey phone throbbed
a heightened tempo
and its winding cord
stretched to infinity
and disappeared over the edge of the bed.
"Oh, okay, I suppose," I said,
the stock answer
for those who don't know,
who never did, and never will.
I taste my salty sweat
and feel it fall like tears, in trails,
as it rolls from my brow.
Unrecognizable music mixed,
continuous bass beating
like an artificial heart
that drives the dancers on.
My frantic rhythmic flailing,
alone, for none venture near
in fear of appearing my partner
is punctuated by my trips to the bar,
to drink a Coke, which draws a frown
from underage girls who lust a drink,
and me for the stamp on my hand.
"Tell us some poetry," the nameless girl asks,
and the girls at the table are not impressed,
but they never are.
Again on the top platform,
I bounce like a crazed aerobic instructor,
watch others sway fluidly together,
and know I don't look like that.
I flail on anyway.
Below my feet is a star for T.S. Eliot,
next to the one for Marlin Perkins.
Around me the shops of the Loop,
the bizarre clothiers whose fashion
is protestation against fashion,
the music stores peddling alternative music,
a normative bashing of institutions,
and the people who participate in both.
Denim clad, I look out of place,
an alien in an alien landscape.
I don't grok anything.
Two friends walk ahead,
enmeshed in their conversation.
I decide not to look the tourist
and ignore the paragraph Eliot rates,
and as I catch up,
I notice my friends fit in.
Water tumbles languidly
behind the nearly distant trees.
A summer breeze rustles the leaves,
and distant dogs cant.
I sit on the back steps,
an oasis of concrete
in the lush greenery of the yard.
Birds titter in the trees,
unknown song that I could learn
if I cared to stay and listen longer.
I wondered if I did
as the sun disappeared behind the hill
and the day slowly faded to black.
The dark outside loosely curtains the train windows,
and dim and murky shapes begin to swim
beyond my vision as the train begins to roll.
I press my face to the cool glass;
dreamily, the lights float by,
like fish in a dark aquarium
that never know they're being watched.
The blonde across the aisle
puts out her cigarette,
lays her head upon her jacket,
and softly drifts to sleep.
Her unmoving form is dim in the windows,
like too many memories.
I recline the purple seat,
close my eyes,
and wonder if the trip
could really be called
a homecoming.
It must have been near seven o'clock,
the evening dragging itself toward the night
like a sea turtle with a bellyful of life
onto the sand;
Fatigue was rolling down my neck
and settling between my shoulders.
My blackened fingers goose-stepped
across another printed day,
and I divided to conquer some useless number.
I ruled alone,
beneath the silence of eavesdropped conversations
and amid the echoes of weekends past.
It was then, for one particular reason,
that suddenly again I missed you.
Scraping wit against iron routine
with pretensious dreams poring from my brow,
I rub muscles sore from waiting for breaks.
Between my breaths, my gasps for peace,
and my twisting stretches for contented smiles,
I tell myself I am building the strength
to stand erect.
Lay me not bare upon your table
to cut apart with your razor eye.
For when you peel off my clouded covering pride
and probe my self-crossing gloom,
you may extract my wandering thoughts,
bently born and bundled tight
and place them beneath my knightly form;
you may pick out my sordid ideals,
thundering beyond my reaching arms and pounding heart,
and tack them higher above my head;
you might draw out my encysted past,
seeing only dark and snowy pent hackles
and not the light suggested beyond the pain
and cast it to my right
and lay my slowly blooming future to the left;
and you can toss my bloody prickled fears,
my pounding family, disarrayed
and then my enthroned coupleted hope
into their neatly ordered row.
When all your work is done
and I am all revealed,
you might be left to find
there's nothing more to me
than what's in every man,
and you might just wonder
why you cared to look.
Upon the mantle of my memory
above my roaring soul,
a snapshot image lingers--
Highway headlights strobed
and caught her eyes half crinkled,
a chuckle on her breath--
I'd savored the moment
and swirled her voice within my ears
and still I sometimes do....
Distance salts the garden
and silence shimmers like a veil
over the delicate petals unfolding
to catch the killer rays of sun,
and as the drought dusts down
and other things to do sprout up,
the futile buds wither in the gloom.
And beneath the fading photo
the green wood stifles the flames
and though it sputters, snaps, and struggles,
my soul seems just to smoke.
The city grinds on
in the night, when I pause to take a break
and gulp the draught of life
with tightly chested gasps of swallowed air;
the streetlights wink, merry eyes
with knowing nods for weary soles
that wander loosely in the dark....
But cars shush on with destinies
and buzz onto their vanishing points.
The wind like a lover licks
my frantic fevered brow
and murmurs "It's time to go."
The city grinds on in the night
and so must I.
The sun clung tightly to the river's rocks
as Roddy romped across
pursuing hidden scents and canine games.
The limestone blocks (too hard to lie upon)
were blinding white that burned my eyes.
The comforting darkness of your eyes
and hair fluffing in Spring's last breath
cracked my mouth and enflamed my ears.
Bluebirds and cardinals hummed
somewhere among the bursting trees
and water tickled slowly by.
You moistened playful pouting lips
and murmured slowly
"We're not children now.
I'm a woman; show me you're a man,"
and stepped outside the circle of the day.
"Count my teeth," I said.
I shrug into my well-worn doubts
and my darknesses swirl like coat-tails
about my lengthened strides
as I pull my fate low over my eyes
and slip into the rain.
Deep Blue Shadows