Noctiluca Culex

The Key to Everything May Swenson

Is there anything I can do or has everything been done or do you prefer somebody else to do it or don’t you trust me to do it right or is it hopeless and no one can do a thing or do you suppose I don’t really want to do it and am just saying that or don’t you hear me at all or what?

You’re waiting for the right person the doctor or the nurse the father or the mother or the person with the name you keep mumbling in your sleep that no one ever heard of there’s no one named that really except yourself maybe

if I knew what your name was I’d prove it’s your own name spelled backwards or twisted in some way the one you keep mumbling but you won’t tell me your name or don’t you know it yourself that’s it of course you’ve forgotten or never quite knew it or weren’t willing to believe it

Then there is something I can do I can find your name for you that’s the key to everything once you’d repeat it clearly you’d come awake you’d get up and walk knowing where you’re going where you came from

The Normal Heart with lines borrowed from Auden

Walking to the streetcar in this dress shirt makes you look too much like white boys coming from money, gets you jumped for your six bucks & the wallet your father got at the prison rodeo. A few bruised ribs stiff against startled abdominals & a lip won’t stop its throbbing, but the emptied keepsake turns back up at the streetcar line— like to think they tossed it from summer’s open windows letting breeze crease through.

Tell yourself they didn’t have a gun at least. Tell yourself another motherfucker tries it & I’ll dress the evaporating sidewalk with his teeth. Practice your pleading, walk like a balled fist all stomp & knuckle, dream of a joke that undoes their need but mostly wish you could stab a person for making you afraid of living your life. Your life.

Is it your life really if you live it wincing— the base reaction of any normal heart. Fearing its repeating is a gaseous scream like a rigged up Ryder truck buckling the stunned structure of a Federal building, distorts more than a pundit’s logic before all the murdered have their names returned by nervous coroners too knowledgeable

in what hate can do to schoolchildren, to gay pride writhing without judgement in its sacred spaces, to parishioners whose open hearts make them targets—

martyrs in this war between cowardice & existence. As prayer seethes with self-defeat & mournful words ring hollow as speeches given on the stump, search for an answer undoes the blood, removes the shock of violence & a shrug from the conservative dark that deepens

wounds too deep to ever heal. Accept that maybe there isn’t one, that living makes you a collector of the harshest scars while someone unlike anyone you know pockets tidy sums from human misery.

Dear Bad Poets (all races, creeds, genders, economic backgrounds, ages): keep writing. Read more. Share your work with critical people. Learn. Immerse.

Dear Decent Poets, of which I sometimes include myself (all races, creeds, genders, economic backgrounds, ages): keep writing. Read more. Share your work with critical people. You are not as bad or good as you think, or as people tell you. Learn. Immerse.

Dear Good Poets (all races, creeds, genders, economic backgrounds, ages): Get better by writing more. Read more. Share your work and your knowledge with the bad and decent poets. We need you to help us.

after Sonia Sanchez (via samdigspoems.tumblr.com

I feel ready now.

Maybe it was Moose giving me the nail with a note that said “for hanging a painting on your next bedroom or your coffin, whichever comes first” or Denise asking saying I’d keep sleeping in my car until I decided I didn’t deserve to or the coldest night in January (after they towed you, after your engine threw a rod) burning copies of my hometown paper (I was front page news) for warmth.

Maybe I did deserve it—punishment for trusting New Orleans would provide when all it ever did was show me how much shark I was capable of. Maybe it was falling asleep during poetry readings because I hadn’t slept in days. Maybe it was losing 100 pounds in thirteen months, my exercise an eye always open even in the dark trunk of my car. Maybe it was the inky smoke thick as irony in my lungs and eyes in that abandoned Ninth Ward flophouse, or pneumonia and a hospital bed one month later. The millionaire

I worked for didn’t understand. The paycheck wasn’t what I needed. Sleep was. Home was. A stopper for my mothers tear ducts was. To realize man can’t live

on poetry alone, on being needed, on apples and coffee, on someone’s couch, in dingy trunks of cars parked behind the AllWays Lounge. Being there wasn’t enough.

How did it begin?

She said she was homeless. She needed a place, so I offered up my own. We drove her to the NA meetings, to the ATM for money to buy rocks off our neighbors, halfway to Little Rock before she chickened out afraid her parents wouldn’t recognize her. She said you raped me is what I’ll tell the cops if you think you can kick me out. She kicked me out of that shotgun house, that city, she woke the shark inside me. She made you my ocean, made me the city: Uptown heart so hard to navigate, Mid City chin kicked in for a cell phone, CBD knees stiff as pressed collars, Marigny coffee shop heart (they’d open early and close late so I’d only have to wander seven hours instead of eight), Ninth Ward hands raw from scrubbing dishes, and French Quarter lungs filling with fluids. I was homeless for thirteen months. I didn’t sleep or slept on couches. Poets thought it so romantic. Poets wrote my story in their poems. Poets exchanged couches for clean dishes, rides around town, a cook, a bookmaker, proofreader. They made plans that didn’t include me in them, moved to cities I couldn’t follow to, divorced their wives, said they didn’t need me now, that someone better came.

after Patrick Rosal (via Samdigspoems.tumblr.com)

She empties graffitis on the heart like a coke can, she lipsyncs Prince songs that crawl out like twining smoke, she is kisses missing like keys these keys in your pocket, she gargles a garbage past and floormats dingy doorways, she

tickles the tuba music that Christmas gifts insides, she botanical lower back encased in lace replacing sadness, she douses wolf howl on your timid like gas and then she strikes gazes like matches, she grazes your inner with bent knee, she’s

the home-cooked, candied moan of no time off for good, she swallows lonely like a tongue tip and dips into shoulder skin, she apricots and honeydew sweat, she endless bus change, she

the dream I had once happening after I quit dreaming it, she lift into ecstasy of eye contact, she whose yes is best porn, she whose absence causes sickness and is cramps, she oh she

is bellies caressed, tsunamis converged, earned orgasms, she napkins dirty mouths, conjures dirty thoughts, she gets what she wants and she metes wants in inches and thrusts, she tall pint glass of sexiness with with a whisky chaser, she