Again, writing a lot (and all of it boo hoo)
I've got to get those baby feelings out somehow, friends.
Poem(s) behind the cut...
In Manus Tuas Commendo Spiritum Meum
(Into your hands I entrust my spirit)
Because love is a scarring thing.
And those things we hand our life to run and smear like chalk in rain, unrecognizable.
God loves you.
He hitches you to a universe of real and imagined pains.
The charm of serpents in threshed fields.
The weight of their eyes.
The inosculated beech tree
devoured and bent out of affections.
The bitter beechmast that breaks
beneath strong and perfect teeth.
What smiles more bitter?
What breaks more precisely?
Those things tangible as dirt, sun, water, act?
Or one single childhood desire, persistent and dumb,
that there be a forever
and that it be full of lost moments,
found whole and heavy as stones in our palms?
So we pray that god love us less:
Fingers, please be song and sing all parts of me out of the everafter.
Locks behind which I guard my tender self, be strong and sequentially more difficult to break.
Moon, be thou a cold spy and fond of mercy-killings.
Sparrow. Come. Sparrow. Come. Sparrow. Come.
Guide me into the dirt that loves me not at all.
In Statu Nascendi (Being Born)
When we were very small we spent days
wrapped in each other--everything worse, everything better.
And after the nightmare of moving waters,
after the nightmare of resurrection men,
the nightmare of no me, no you,
I tell you this is just another new dream we wake to,
a remembered long dream
like the clay of the creek remembering my foot,
small and then growing.
And if there is pain, or water, or loneliness this time,
it is just passing.
This time, like every time, we try to get it right.
Shove ourselves together in the face of loss.
But you are gone again.
So, next life, baby, let’s just cut to the chase.
Cozy on up straightaways and we’ll be parasitic
and whole for the first in a good many whiles.
You wedded and rampant in my blood.
If we miss the way we tried, it will be alright.
Alter ego
(Another I)
You can say it’s just a river, but I feel the same.
I know you don’t just drive over it without a desire
to whoop and holler, to sound your big sound on your own soil.
And I know there’s more’an fear washing into it,
the way all the rivers wash down into it,
downstream and fast.
It is the dividing line and the border
your heart lays straight on,
hanging on for dear life to whatever it can.
And I know the sound of a train,
no matter how you spin it,
is not ever just the sound of a train.
It is the sound of the way tears taste in the dark,
dripping salt-thick in the back of your throat,
so much so fast you half-choke.
The river is a prayer living inside you,
found outside you.
It cuts and soothes, threatens and blesses.
It rolls you around smooth,
and you roll around it.
Although it seems impossible,
a box within a box, a klein bottle, a mobius strip,
trapped inside it as it is trapped inside you,
fearing it will all burst forth,
sweep away everything you love
when it is part of what you love.
It carves a groove
against which the train sounds
and resounds and goes on.
You build a dam to hold the past from you.
I chip away when you aren’t looking.
We are two things one inside the other.
And you are terrified. And you should be.
Poem(s) behind the cut...
In Manus Tuas Commendo Spiritum Meum
(Into your hands I entrust my spirit)
Because love is a scarring thing.
And those things we hand our life to run and smear like chalk in rain, unrecognizable.
God loves you.
He hitches you to a universe of real and imagined pains.
The charm of serpents in threshed fields.
The weight of their eyes.
The inosculated beech tree
devoured and bent out of affections.
The bitter beechmast that breaks
beneath strong and perfect teeth.
What smiles more bitter?
What breaks more precisely?
Those things tangible as dirt, sun, water, act?
Or one single childhood desire, persistent and dumb,
that there be a forever
and that it be full of lost moments,
found whole and heavy as stones in our palms?
So we pray that god love us less:
Fingers, please be song and sing all parts of me out of the everafter.
Locks behind which I guard my tender self, be strong and sequentially more difficult to break.
Moon, be thou a cold spy and fond of mercy-killings.
Sparrow. Come. Sparrow. Come. Sparrow. Come.
Guide me into the dirt that loves me not at all.
In Statu Nascendi (Being Born)
When we were very small we spent days
wrapped in each other--everything worse, everything better.
And after the nightmare of moving waters,
after the nightmare of resurrection men,
the nightmare of no me, no you,
I tell you this is just another new dream we wake to,
a remembered long dream
like the clay of the creek remembering my foot,
small and then growing.
And if there is pain, or water, or loneliness this time,
it is just passing.
This time, like every time, we try to get it right.
Shove ourselves together in the face of loss.
But you are gone again.
So, next life, baby, let’s just cut to the chase.
Cozy on up straightaways and we’ll be parasitic
and whole for the first in a good many whiles.
You wedded and rampant in my blood.
If we miss the way we tried, it will be alright.
Alter ego
(Another I)
You can say it’s just a river, but I feel the same.
I know you don’t just drive over it without a desire
to whoop and holler, to sound your big sound on your own soil.
And I know there’s more’an fear washing into it,
the way all the rivers wash down into it,
downstream and fast.
It is the dividing line and the border
your heart lays straight on,
hanging on for dear life to whatever it can.
And I know the sound of a train,
no matter how you spin it,
is not ever just the sound of a train.
It is the sound of the way tears taste in the dark,
dripping salt-thick in the back of your throat,
so much so fast you half-choke.
The river is a prayer living inside you,
found outside you.
It cuts and soothes, threatens and blesses.
It rolls you around smooth,
and you roll around it.
Although it seems impossible,
a box within a box, a klein bottle, a mobius strip,
trapped inside it as it is trapped inside you,
fearing it will all burst forth,
sweep away everything you love
when it is part of what you love.
It carves a groove
against which the train sounds
and resounds and goes on.
You build a dam to hold the past from you.
I chip away when you aren’t looking.
We are two things one inside the other.
And you are terrified. And you should be.