spectacular, spectacular

the sucking sounds of collapse roaring overhead 

like fighter jets screaming towards their target

last night i heard the last recorded call

of the last kauii-oo bird on this planet

its song so sweet and halting and full of hope

and i guess i dont know how to feel as part of this strange species

that implodes broken cranes

records a dying race of birds’ last song

and ive learned to befriend my grief, poor substitute

my grief is shaped like you but fainter, light, intangible, dark and heavy all at once

it presses against my chest at times and i push to breath against it

it visits in my dreams at times and there i see you most clearly in it

i will write myself whole

i will write this again and again and

i will right myself, whole

i will write myself

i will right myself

i will never ever learn

i will walk your combined paths until the earth lies bare

i will make your mistakes and add to them

i will look only backwards

i will write myself into the ground

i will bury our cumulative tragedies

i will take them with me

i will never let them touch another soul

i will right this

i will write this

im playing

a game of tag

where i tag myself a victim

you are a face full of eyes black orbs fixed in clear laminate

you are a sound caught midair bending always upwards

you are a touch of sable grazing skin each strand pushing pulling

you are a space behind closed doors soft and waiting

you are a thought thrown out and left to decompose

that sudden pang, that pressing feeling

the tears springing, so close to the surface

i saw a man talking with his doctors while his mother lay, dying.

i saw my mother, as she lay dying.

i saw myself in him

but instead of the words of gratitude towards his doctors

i had rage and anger and hurt

i had regrets

maybe this man was better than i was

more accepting, more aware

i still wade in swampy denial and avoidance

and it springs leaks in plastic exteriors 

and the hurt comes rushing through

and i cry in hospital hallways

i cried then, with my sister, in that clean hospital hallway

i cried today with a doctor, in that clean hospital hallway

not much has changed

i am still so hungry

so so hungry

i drink sympathy from plastic containers, styrofoam cups

their kindness flowing into the bottomless empty inside me

In a house of curiosities, in a land far away, a group of misfits and immigrants and outcasts and castaways convene --

They bang on stretched synthetic drums while crying on taut strings, They sing in riddles, voices tempered by liquid rye, They pace around tables, knocking balls at each other, They, swathe themselves quiet before walking out onto frozen lakes,

their feet spelling out cryptic messages to the sky.

And their voices are a mismatched quilt of fringes, And their laughter is cut by yellowing teeth, And they speak by the fire about their irrelevance,

while rocking in chairs hundreds of years their senior.

In the dark, my mind’s glaze stretches and thins from the heat of electric impulses.

A crazing pattern spiders its way along a hardening slurry of cognitions,

A network of cracks where images and sounds and emotions merge, coalesce, then fall apart.

A crackled surface would be fine, desirable even. Those lines are hard, deliberate patterns of forethought and intention.

But one of them was — and after you read a poem just knowing you can hold it, you can be in that space of the poem. And it can hold you in its space. And you don’t have to explain it. You don’t have to paraphrase it. You just hold it, and it allows you to see differently.

I just came back from Japan a month ago, and in every classroom, I would just write on the board, “You are living in a poem.” And then I would write other things just relating to whatever we were doing in that class. But I found the students very intrigued by discussing that. “What do you mean, we’re living in a poem?” Or, “When? All the time, or just when someone talks about poetry?” And I’d say, “No, when you think, when you’re in a very quiet place, when you’re remembering, when you’re savoring an image, when you’re allowing your mind calmly to leap from one thought to another, that’s a poem. That’s what a poem does.” And they liked that.

My heart a jarred octopus, each lashing of tentacle pulls me in further.

The ceramic vacuum holds me and whispers promises of quiet.