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| ‘Isn’t it time,
though still loving, we learned to wrench ourselves
free of the beloved and, though trembling,
endure as the arrow endures the tensed bowstring,
becomes something more than itself in the leap
of release?”
--Rilke
“Indifference”
Could you even find me within these wells of grief?
The ones that make no noise as they spill
their rainbow oils slick and deadly
until my wings are useless, bedded down to my sides.
Who can I ask for help? Not nature.
Not angels. Not this mechanical age
that created this mess inside and outside of our bodies.
Not you. Hidden among the palate of stars
that burn my tongue as you speak into my open mouth
as if that could communicate more strongly
your sentiment. What sentiment? What?
You act as if you believe there is an equation,
a way it will all turn out alright only
if each step is correct. What steps? What?
We both know there is no such thing as answers,
but our questions still rain down unceasingly.
Unendurably. Pleading with the broken stems of flowers
caught up between the teeth of the young and the dead.
We have stopped even feeling the difference.
Coming with a great and terrible beauty it arrives,
galloping and bucking against hips like tensed bows
full of arrows embedded where one of many hearts
is hiding—it, taking its words at face value
(failing to have a face in the first place)
and living by being unable to define and ever unstoppable,
ever elusive, ever can always mean never, you know.
I live now where you will never find me,
where it has stolen me away from my idyllic fields,
where I am clipped short and weighed down
and voiceless. Still I cry out, open mouth gaping
horror, but senselessly in the revels of apathy,
with all the grotesque mythology of a winged fish.
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| “Though the heart for the work may be great,
Time is fleeting and Art is so long!”
--Baudelaire
“Cusp”
“We often told ourselves imperishable things…”
and danced all manner of lies through the dark.
November left me blind again, left me cold,
but December came in wild, lit itself on fire.
Frost on the windowpanes can be so deceiving,
look downward to see the bottles lined up
so precariously on the sill, ready to be shot,
ready to be born again through thought, deed,
words.
New day new light falls in shattered pieces
through the glass, marred by the original sin
of living, so we smile, so we break.
Where can I find you when it all becomes
Where can I find me when it all ends up
Where does anyone go when it all just
burns?
Nothing lives forever and so the month begins
again, throwing us into its flames recklessly,
abandoning all idea of return before we commence
because this is the only reality we can hope
to grasp, this is the only thing we can hope
to feel, this is all, this is it, this is it.
This is hell.
We are on fire, pushing out all boundaries
till the glass’s new light shatters,
till all the bottles smash at our feet,
till you see my eyes wide open, resting on your face
we can only hope to perish,
we can only hope to burn.
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| what doesn't just seem like, but really is, forever ago.
At the party where she had just had a little too much to drink, the girl with the long black hair and the tiny waist who had a preference for dancing with herself walked up to the rather collegiate and painfully thin boy with a cigarette tucked behind his ear and grabbed his broad wrist with her tiny hand to say:
“You look pretty fucking cool, don’t you?”
He just looked at her through his bangs and she pulled his wrist harder, her other hand reaching for the cigarette he was storing, snapping it in two, grinding it with the toe of her boot.
“That’s what you think, isn’t it?”
She looked as if she was about to cry, but the room was crowded and smoky, anyhow.
“I don’t care if you smoke you know.”
The boy’s face, void of any emotion, stayed as so beyond a slight, yet suspicious, raising of his eyebrows.
“I just care about why you’re doing it.”
The pause this time was long, but neither of them moved or made any inclination that they were thinking about doing so.
“You’re worth so much more then all the shit you do.”
His eyebrows lowered.
“I don’t know if anyone ever tells you that.”
The slightest tear slid down her cheek, but it could have just been a trick of the night and the lights and the smoke.
“And I know that me saying that has no effect on you.”
Her grip on his wrist tightened, as if just before a final release.
“But someone has to tell you.”
She let go now, but she couldn’t quite walk away.
“Someone has to let you know how much you truly are.”
And then she was gone in smoke, her thin figure slipping between the heady clouds that hung in the room without rippling them as the boy turned his back to where she had been, still expressionless, and removed another cigarette from the pack in his pocket, placing it between his lips this time instead of behind his ear.
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| “‘My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart
under my feet. After the event
he wept. He promised ‘a new start.’
I made no comment. What should I resent?’…
‘I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.
My humble people who expect
Nothing.’”
--Eliot
“Being [His] Wasteland (IV)”
There are no words for the feeling of my age,
not even a sense if belonging to it.
We are quieter with each light-warp-speed movement
of the tube cars passing each other in smoky, close tunnels.
Underneath the world we are falling.
And we do…nothing.
What can be done? when we walk
the streets of witching hours in the mist
only to leave no footprints in the cold, thin dew lacing the sidewalk,
we must follow those others have left.
And in the morning we can only awake
(we have no choice)
but to see wet buildings bleeding black
above a sea of black umbrellas and macintoshes,
under a sky of black that chatters
like the teeth of the meth addict wandering
winter in his shorts, muttering to
his lilac balloon.
He used to have a name,
but now his cricket legs scratch out the discordant tune
of concrete city blocks stacked
as rows of dirty dominoes.
This is a game
and we aren’t winning.
So who, who is?
The sun is a surprise, a backward bleaching
that screams your eyes awake and it is then
it comes upon us,
seeing the same neon littering the halls of academe
(in the form of crisp bags and pop bottles)
that still echo in our bones the deep beat of the bass
in the sweating mass of open-mouthed clubs, it is then
it comes upon us:
that there’s more than one kind of Wasteland.
The sun is crimson this morning,
it is groaning, flashing its skirts
like a gypsy making sure,
quite positively,
that only the blind can see here
as these old houses creak under the weight
of such modern things as us.
But still it rains, rain bloody
with our hearts and the sun
through our eyelids and
mired in contradiction we are condemned
to drown.
It is only then we know
what the waste of this Wasteland is,
what we were born from,
what he meant to say by saying:
“Senza tema d’infama ti respondo.”
Who could be held accountable to their own stillbirth?
[I give up, you win.]
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| it's been seven months since i wrote something that doesn't make me cringe.
lovely.
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