When, Not If, You Go
- for Adrian
Lose yourself
on controlled terms.
After noon, after work,
at the light, shoot straight,
instead of right.
Be green changing.
Remember how to turn
your world around
requires a wheel
and a memory for streets.
Learn backroads beautifully
worth forgetting time.
Listen for the secrets
others breathe in the night.
Watch for the end
of every road. Beware,
the edge of cliffs
are graveyards,
are full of sleepers.
When you hesitate,
vibrate like a violin.
Make others listen
with a voice like beating
wings against gravity.
Make them see you
have experience in flying
where others fall.
------------------------
Words For Adrian
It’s a humming night - thoughts
like the refrigerator keep running,
beginnings without end,
keeping chilled that freshness
which expires. Adrian
reads across the table as I type,
pause to look at him, catch
a sliver of what we both think,
then forget to write it down.
Instead, I sieve the day for seeds:
did a student ask something
insightful? What is the loneliness
a schoolyard feels in summer?
How do I feel as my mother cooks
dinner for me, her grown-up boy?
Nothing new and everything
a pattern I have been writing
into the pages of my mind.
How quickly a home hollows
late at night, collecting words
and imagining your old self
across the table ignoring you,
engrossed in someone else’s words.
--------------
From One Writer To Another
Remove the scuba mask and drown
in the blinding blueness of a day.
Stop sucking air. Start moving
those fingers, pink like a baby.
Crawl before you walk. Run
your mouth endlessly at the walls.
Do the unexpected. Jump off the cliff
of uncertainty and spill your soul
against the page. It is a thin barrier.
Poke holes. Scar with ink. Keep on
scribbling doodles in margins, anything
to unanchor your hesitation on earth.
Breathe beneath the surface of things.
This art kills only when left bubbling
under your tongue, itching your skin.
Blow up the dam and dive into the water.
You’ll never be more alive.
---------------------
Summer Begins
Like the lightning
bugs blinking in, out
here stars feel their way
up the hill beyond town.
They sit like lovers,
side by side, black on black,
their worlds brushing
for a moment, fire-
flies blinking out, in
the warm yawning
silence of summer.
-----------------
The Shared Bed
At night, stars glow on the ceiling
of our sister’s room, everything
left as she made it. Adrian draws
the covers tight to him, cold
without our brother, who once
when we were children, also
dreamed beside us. I complained then,
but now I see the stars and wish
I could touch distant things.
It was my sister first who reached up,
who stuck the plastic stars above us
as a nightlight. Then my brother,
then I, then Adrian, all summer
made the space our own and believed
the posters were ours, imagined
the stuffed animals spoke with us,
as they had with her. Each in turn,
we wrapped sheets haphazardly
between legs, beneath arms,
alone on this bed, wondering
where the others went - the wanderers
who leave home, who leave behind.
----------------------------
So those are the new ones. I particularly like "When, Not If, You Go", but I think some of the others might have some potential. Anyway, the remaining are all revisions of past poems - ones I've already decided I care about and want to improve.
The Pecan Trees
Tell me, Adrian, what do you see, looking at our city?
Leaves, buildings, dirt piles and ghosts of buildings
run across my face like a picture screen.
Our home
is someone else’s and the old roads don’t bend easily
that way, not since the highway built itself
through the middle of our town like a zipper.
Remember the horse field, where Mother brought us
to two trees, revealed how fallen shells could be cracked
open and discarded in favor of the fruit?
We gathered armfuls to bring to her. We learned
the difficulty of breaking things, the taste of pecans
mouthfuls at a time, and the end of seasons.
The trees were cut to make room, the Spanish moss
grew in the oak trees like webs in vacant homes,
and I broke away like a branch, like a shell, like a seed.
Adrian, I have grown, so why have you stayed,
wandering the white rooms I left behind, cleared out
as I traveled the world (as far as I could) of adulthood?
There are days, heavy days, where I feel you clinging,
on my back, a child. You linger, searching each highway half
for memories to break open.
Those are shells, Adrian.
The trees are replaced, our heart, planted elsewhere,
and that’s where you’ll find me, Adrian. I’m choosing
both what we had and where to harvest next.
----------------
Home of Departures
What I would love to relate to you
is an airport quiet and shuddering
in a dark blizzard in Atlanta.
This is the place I remember my parents
struggling with their age - wheelchaired
and pushed or riding passenger
on an old shuttle between gates.
And this is the station meant to be
transient, unstable, a home for migrants waiting
on a delayed flight, the next one home.
We each have the need to fly,
but I’m glad for the days I’m given
a reason to stand still and see
the hand of God in a snowstorm,
where there’s no need to run
to catch a gate-closing flight,
no need to leave anyone behind.
I want you to know how time stops
when everyone sleeps
off to the side. How far the aisles reach
when they let their luggage down.
How certain memories always stay:
a wall of glass, a window,
my parents and I watching snowfall
on a white open runway,
sleeping across two chairs, all night
no planes landing or leaving.
-----------------
The View Down
The man works in an office
emptying baskets, wiping down desks,
and pausing at a high window
on the 47th floor, like his age.
At night, the city is a stranger, speaking
sounds and sights he wants to trust:
clocks click like the polished shoes
of shadows striding the hallways,
while behind a crowd of buildings
sirens shine like the stars,
which also mourn their arched fall
in a quiet corner of darkness;
the moon crawls over roofs
like the boy the man once was,
eager to discover the keys
to each locked hole in the sky
and every door closed on him
on normal sleepless days;
and always homeless cars
swim through the depths
of the city’s cold rocky floor
like the anglerfish whose light
is left dangling in the eyes
as a simple dangerous lure.
But wages also pull at him,
so eventually the man turns
back to vacuuming the dull rug
of his life, slow as a fishing boat,
tugged towards the shore
of a sea that drowns the world.
---------------------
Words For Adrian
It’s a humming night - thoughts
like the refrigerator keep running,
beginnings without end,
keeping chilled that freshness
which expires. Adrian
reads across the table as I type,
pause to look at him, catch
a sliver of what we both think,
then forget to write it down.
Instead, I sieve the day for seeds:
did a student ask something
insightful? What is the loneliness
a schoolyard feels in summer?
How do I feel as my mother cooks
dinner for me, her grown-up boy?
Nothing new and everything
a pattern I have been writing
into the pages of my mind.
How quickly a home hollows
late at night, collecting words
and imagining your old self
across the table ignoring you,
engrossed in someone else’s words.
--------------
From One Writer To Another
Remove the scuba mask and drown
in the blinding blueness of a day.
Stop sucking air. Start moving
those fingers, pink like a baby.
Crawl before you walk. Run
your mouth endlessly at the walls.
Do the unexpected. Jump off the cliff
of uncertainty and spill your soul
against the page. It is a thin barrier.
Poke holes. Scar with ink. Keep on
scribbling doodles in margins, anything
to unanchor your hesitation on earth.
Breathe beneath the surface of things.
This art kills only when left bubbling
under your tongue, itching your skin.
Blow up the dam and dive into the water.
You’ll never be more alive.
---------------------
Summer Begins
Like the lightning
bugs blinking in, out
here stars feel their way
up the hill beyond town.
They sit like lovers,
side by side, black on black,
their worlds brushing
for a moment, fire-
flies blinking out, in
the warm yawning
silence of summer.
-----------------
The Shared Bed
At night, stars glow on the ceiling
of our sister’s room, everything
left as she made it. Adrian draws
the covers tight to him, cold
without our brother, who once
when we were children, also
dreamed beside us. I complained then,
but now I see the stars and wish
I could touch distant things.
It was my sister first who reached up,
who stuck the plastic stars above us
as a nightlight. Then my brother,
then I, then Adrian, all summer
made the space our own and believed
the posters were ours, imagined
the stuffed animals spoke with us,
as they had with her. Each in turn,
we wrapped sheets haphazardly
between legs, beneath arms,
alone on this bed, wondering
where the others went - the wanderers
who leave home, who leave behind.
----------------------------
So those are the new ones. I particularly like "When, Not If, You Go", but I think some of the others might have some potential. Anyway, the remaining are all revisions of past poems - ones I've already decided I care about and want to improve.
The Pecan Trees
Tell me, Adrian, what do you see, looking at our city?
Leaves, buildings, dirt piles and ghosts of buildings
run across my face like a picture screen.
Our home
is someone else’s and the old roads don’t bend easily
that way, not since the highway built itself
through the middle of our town like a zipper.
Remember the horse field, where Mother brought us
to two trees, revealed how fallen shells could be cracked
open and discarded in favor of the fruit?
We gathered armfuls to bring to her. We learned
the difficulty of breaking things, the taste of pecans
mouthfuls at a time, and the end of seasons.
The trees were cut to make room, the Spanish moss
grew in the oak trees like webs in vacant homes,
and I broke away like a branch, like a shell, like a seed.
Adrian, I have grown, so why have you stayed,
wandering the white rooms I left behind, cleared out
as I traveled the world (as far as I could) of adulthood?
There are days, heavy days, where I feel you clinging,
on my back, a child. You linger, searching each highway half
for memories to break open.
Those are shells, Adrian.
The trees are replaced, our heart, planted elsewhere,
and that’s where you’ll find me, Adrian. I’m choosing
both what we had and where to harvest next.
----------------
Home of Departures
What I would love to relate to you
is an airport quiet and shuddering
in a dark blizzard in Atlanta.
This is the place I remember my parents
struggling with their age - wheelchaired
and pushed or riding passenger
on an old shuttle between gates.
And this is the station meant to be
transient, unstable, a home for migrants waiting
on a delayed flight, the next one home.
We each have the need to fly,
but I’m glad for the days I’m given
a reason to stand still and see
the hand of God in a snowstorm,
where there’s no need to run
to catch a gate-closing flight,
no need to leave anyone behind.
I want you to know how time stops
when everyone sleeps
off to the side. How far the aisles reach
when they let their luggage down.
How certain memories always stay:
a wall of glass, a window,
my parents and I watching snowfall
on a white open runway,
sleeping across two chairs, all night
no planes landing or leaving.
-----------------
The View Down
The man works in an office
emptying baskets, wiping down desks,
and pausing at a high window
on the 47th floor, like his age.
At night, the city is a stranger, speaking
sounds and sights he wants to trust:
clocks click like the polished shoes
of shadows striding the hallways,
while behind a crowd of buildings
sirens shine like the stars,
which also mourn their arched fall
in a quiet corner of darkness;
the moon crawls over roofs
like the boy the man once was,
eager to discover the keys
to each locked hole in the sky
and every door closed on him
on normal sleepless days;
and always homeless cars
swim through the depths
of the city’s cold rocky floor
like the anglerfish whose light
is left dangling in the eyes
as a simple dangerous lure.
But wages also pull at him,
so eventually the man turns
back to vacuuming the dull rug
of his life, slow as a fishing boat,
tugged towards the shore
of a sea that drowns the world.
---------------------
Portrait of a Tragedy
He wakes up again
to the news of children
gunned down by an unknown
man. He knows
he should clean up like normal
and his cereal is the same cold
you might hear in a voice
today as any day.
Before leaving, he can’t recall where
he dropped his keys last night,
pats himself down in a panic: his sides,
his back pockets, his heart,
but there on the table, they linger
by yesterday’s paper, splattered
with gray pictures and words
that leave him confused.
Already, a photo, a face
who could be anyone.
Next door, his neighbors
begin a war and he hears
their infant wailing.
He hurries out to the car,
flips the radio on then off,
and beats his fingers on the wheel.
He struggles to explain
how distance makes a difference,
how today’s drive is longer.
Almost there, he notices
as a girl drags behind her mother
who pulls harshly and with words
and he brushes past them
down this road to his routine.
Work will consume him,
he trusts; he prays
it’s only a bad beginning,
a morning that feels like night,
though the sky is bright
as normal, another day
where nothing’s changed,
only he doesn’t know himself.
------------------
“Only The Words Remain, Floating In The Air”
In an open passage of his home built with broken garage doors,
northern Mexico, off a ditched dirt road sloped down from Main Street,
he says this of unkept promises while his little girl, recovering from the shock
of live wires, clutches his legs. They said they would clean up this mess.
But their words were white wool lies, remaining static
charges waiting to reconnect, to return to earth.
Where are airplanes that never touch down? They circle
with whale shadows; they sweep through the saline sky
and swim between the gathering storm of more gray flights
and jets of smoke. It’s all I can do to hold my breath
as a return passenger, stuck where the air only thickens inside.
But other marbled days I’m your childhood balloon man
who hands you the yellow and red ones at the fair.
Parents buy so many balloons; it’s not out of the blue
to hear that one more child has floated away,
clutching the thin strings of his rainbow cloud.
The wind shoves and some days I don’t come home either,
rocked in a silver current of news like winter streams.
At times my feet have pounded down a steep green hill,
but more often I forget the grit of dirt and the strike of gravity.
The words must come down. This truth is as the dark side of nature:
these clouds rising, the ensuing crash of rain and thunder,
the light flashing blackness, the explosive echo.
Across the world, lightning leaps the hollow chasm
between abandoned wires hung high in the dusty air
and where we stand, as proud as trees on a crimson plain.
---------------
That was a lot of poetry to get through all at once, so if you did it, thank you. I hope it was worth it. If you did this in multiple reads, thank you for coming back. Please let me know what works and what doesn't.
P.S. - If you hadn't noticed, I'm up to 40 books this year. 16 book reviews to come, hopefully soon.
He wakes up again
to the news of children
gunned down by an unknown
man. He knows
he should clean up like normal
and his cereal is the same cold
you might hear in a voice
today as any day.
Before leaving, he can’t recall where
he dropped his keys last night,
pats himself down in a panic: his sides,
his back pockets, his heart,
but there on the table, they linger
by yesterday’s paper, splattered
with gray pictures and words
that leave him confused.
Already, a photo, a face
who could be anyone.
Next door, his neighbors
begin a war and he hears
their infant wailing.
He hurries out to the car,
flips the radio on then off,
and beats his fingers on the wheel.
He struggles to explain
how distance makes a difference,
how today’s drive is longer.
Almost there, he notices
as a girl drags behind her mother
who pulls harshly and with words
and he brushes past them
down this road to his routine.
Work will consume him,
he trusts; he prays
it’s only a bad beginning,
a morning that feels like night,
though the sky is bright
as normal, another day
where nothing’s changed,
only he doesn’t know himself.
------------------
“Only The Words Remain, Floating In The Air”
In an open passage of his home built with broken garage doors,
northern Mexico, off a ditched dirt road sloped down from Main Street,
he says this of unkept promises while his little girl, recovering from the shock
of live wires, clutches his legs. They said they would clean up this mess.
But their words were white wool lies, remaining static
charges waiting to reconnect, to return to earth.
Where are airplanes that never touch down? They circle
with whale shadows; they sweep through the saline sky
and swim between the gathering storm of more gray flights
and jets of smoke. It’s all I can do to hold my breath
as a return passenger, stuck where the air only thickens inside.
But other marbled days I’m your childhood balloon man
who hands you the yellow and red ones at the fair.
Parents buy so many balloons; it’s not out of the blue
to hear that one more child has floated away,
clutching the thin strings of his rainbow cloud.
The wind shoves and some days I don’t come home either,
rocked in a silver current of news like winter streams.
At times my feet have pounded down a steep green hill,
but more often I forget the grit of dirt and the strike of gravity.
The words must come down. This truth is as the dark side of nature:
these clouds rising, the ensuing crash of rain and thunder,
the light flashing blackness, the explosive echo.
Across the world, lightning leaps the hollow chasm
between abandoned wires hung high in the dusty air
and where we stand, as proud as trees on a crimson plain.
---------------
That was a lot of poetry to get through all at once, so if you did it, thank you. I hope it was worth it. If you did this in multiple reads, thank you for coming back. Please let me know what works and what doesn't.
P.S. - If you hadn't noticed, I'm up to 40 books this year. 16 book reviews to come, hopefully soon.
