verbigeration

When it never ever ends,

How she’s learned or not to take it

When she has or hasn’t friends,

Always playing Wheel of Fortune,

At the bottom or the top,

Never passing an equator,

Pole-to-pole biyearly drop.

I have asked her how she sees it

Coming for her every day

And still accepts the dead and flowers,

Dresses bones and brings the hay,

Takes the sun and turns it green for

All the dead beneath her feet,

Takes the gravefoods that have been for

Shades and given them to me.

But she never sees it fit to

Answer me a good reply -

Only peaches when she’s living,

I used to love the woods to either side of the road on my commute. I don’t anymore. A dry carved earth I can hate honestly. Green sunlight stings. Sunburn. I worry for my rib cage, for the softness it used to protect, but that’s dry, too. I let the basil scorch in the Alabama sun. And there’s no coming back from that.

You see, screams the refusal to look at the trees, I’m not Hamlet. The bad dreams are outside the walnut. The walnut’s all you can hope for. Hard.

That year fed me a bowl of spaghetti and I’ve spent every hour since trying to untangle it all. I don’t know how it escaped but I can feel it in my ribcage, around bones like vines where they’ve calcified. I’m all shell inside but it still squirms, I’m all aquarium and everyone is stealing lobsters. I want to eat until I’m happy again.

There’s blood on the roads and I’m supposed to admire the sunlight? Every tree is marked for death and I’m supposed to keep smiling at them? Give me a reason.    Give me a reason.       Give me a reason.          Is there a reason?       Anymore?    Ever?

(When she paints my bare back, reflected on the water and the hot bright skin of my cheeks, when she blisters me without so much as an  apology, this is closer to the truth.)

My shoulders are covered and she is a gentle lover; steam the air with last night’s dew and makes no motion towards the weight of wounding on me / in me / poeticizing me -  Time to wake up, she suggests through this  window, and we pretend not to pretend.

to the Cass on keyboards in a punk rainbow mirror: you can have my apathy and scream it into harder things of lengthier lifespans. to the point-eared fantasy whose name I can’t pronounce, whose hair is green because they love the trees so much: you have my tattered tennis shoes and the compound bow I never shoot anymore. to the Collin in grad school with a face shining like a hundred myths of seeing God and gods and the circle come full: you can have my perpetual panic over running out of time - and contrariwise, to the Doctorate-holder spoken to with a surname I have yet to choose, wearing patches over your elbows like I have, pettily, always dreamed of, you can have all my dread that I’ll last forever. I think you both know better. to the Cassie in another life’s Virginia, never tangled over girls and always answering to ‘Ma’am’ with an ease I’ll never get the hang of, I give the colt-legged joy of running your fingers through your own soul and accepting that the tangles will never come out, and that the only true name you own is the one in the white stone.

to the Mx. Collin in a world fifty years fast, with dust in your nose and fingernails and old, bulging shelves bastioning you in, I have to ask: Can you draw a map of this future on pages of Flannery O’Connor and Lewis? Can I find you if I follow Beloved to “The Dead” to the Pequod to Good Omens to The Martian Chronicles to the O Henry stories I never liked and finally to the blue and gray copy of The Tempest and find out if we are Miranda or Prospero or Ariel?

from the kid with the pomegranate tattoo behind a coffee shop counter, I take the courage to look a stranger in the eye. from the silent tourist drinking illicit wine on a balcony in Paris, exchanging the silence of obedience for the riotous reward of a single taken chance, I take that certain holy discomfort in seeing the world from somewhere off my accustomary rails. from the hey-Collin in an office, blue-faced with computer glow, paying through the nose for a graphics program that, in turn, pays for oil paint and cat food, I take a hardscrabble grinning strung-out willingness to not care.

to the Mx. Collin in a world fifty years too far away, tending the counter with a book in hand because we have always been too tall to drown in them, no matter how many books there may be, I have to ask: When do you meet me? Where is the station where I get off and you get on?

to the Collin in the wardrobe wedged down a rabbit hole, I give the advice I’ve always wanted to take, you lucky bastard: when they ask you what your name is, ask them for cocoa and pomegranate seeds and a good sturdy bow, and they can decide for themselves what to call you.

PREFACE For the purposes of the work, either everything matters, or nothing does. This is the only tightrope worth falling from.

I. What I’m about to write you will sound like a metaphor, but it’s not. I might wish it to be - I could be proud of it, as a conceit, a thing of mine instead of a thing in me - but it’s not. I took a walk and saw everything. Not the world and all its plants, creatures, rocks, fires, soft winds, bone and water; just the place I stood, the roots beneath it, the air, the clouds -  My skin - the thorns in my feet and the thorns that would grow and die which only ants and smaller hearts would ever know - The needles of the trees and every unborn cone still brown and wet on the branch -  each hair on my arm alive with the breath of everything crowding in, always crowding in, always crowding in - Green. So much of green. The lattice of rust around the garden where -  more green. Strange lines of metal wire leaned against the fence - and this did it, set my eyes frozen into  wide ultracomprehension and the air between my atoms alight - I did not know what they were but I knew

they meant something. Each rusted angle, stationary, useless, as suffuse with meaning as my own awkward lines, as me, another rusted unresistant angle outside the garden.

To stand too close to the binoculars which bad brains and bad angels tantalize with is to stand in a jigsaw wreckage, in a desert of pieces. In truth we can't put together a box’s worth, but we can hold the pieces in our hands like cards, and play them to make a rough edge.  With ourselves, with another, with a stained glass window, an amber glass, a rattle in plastic, dirt under feet, glow in our face. We cannot build a world out of the world. I cannot see the world in its pieces. I saw a piece of the world in its pieces and my breath refused to still and I know my eyes did not ache but they should have and I know my eyes did not bleed but they should have bled like a haunted Madonna’s, at least I wanted them to so it would mean something.

II.  Close my eyes and still my heart -  every wish turns into wanting a quiet you can’t find here.

III. This will sound like a metaphor, but it isn’t. I would like it to be -  the shell of words wrapped around a non-event, to make me feel wise - but it isn’t. Years younger, I sat in a chair with no cushion and opened a Bible in my lap and wept because I could not feel. I begged the one without flesh to make my heart meat. I begged to know how hot meat felt in a ribcage of my own. I forgot that meat rots.

IV. Everything matters, or nothing does. Ice and skin know equally well. Nothing matters, or everything does. To see or not are equally hell.

I want to have another face than mine - To push my fingernails beneath the edge  of it and pull - rip - tear - the mouth away - The lips - the nose - the eyes - the bones beneath -

I want to have another face than this -  To never turn it at another mirror and see it looking back, between the me it shows me and the one I know should be

There, with less of cowardice and cold -  With more of what would bless instead of curse - Whatever that is, since I wouldn’t know - With more - more - more - than I have ever seen

Part 1 After the evening of watermelon seeds and stories, after the cleanup, the walk outside in the dark, all lights off now, goodnight. Then the fireworks.

Stay a while, barefoot in antsy grass, stay to wath the aftermath in the clouds: stay to watch and wait, wait, wait— white-limned in silence, softness sharpened with shadow, silence until the purr in the dark, felt in the feet and the teeth.

Stay a while, arm in arm, in the dark, ant-bitten, and write your poem in your head; accuse yourself of not living in the moment, of falling down a stairwell of self-awareness while fireworks are there, flickering, cottony soft, caught in night clouds.

Know, anyway, the words are your only now, your only moment. Write your poetry.

Say, “That’s how you know it’s over, when they’re brightest of all.”

After, laugh when you find out— no fireworks. Only lightning. Laugh, anyway, at your second-hand fireworks, and your pretty, bright words.

Part 2 Red-veined record player, thump the beat with thunder, sing old words with blood. When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.

Scraped, moving feet, spin on concrete, spin in grass puddles. Make a tornado, that oldest of impulses, spin to scare the lightning back, spin, arms flung, to bring it in. When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know.

tw: explicit self-harm

i.

The thing is, it’s always been a little funny. That’s not a thing I could admit to anyone, there’s the solemn and unspeakable air around it that would never let me suggest that it’s anything but unthinkably serious. If it weren’t funny, I couldn’t live with it. But the air of the hysterical, the fruitless, bootless drama of the act, is funny to me.

and one verse gets me every time. I think of it as apocalyptic, but in a front-porch twilit rocking-chair way. Backstage sounds of an Armageddon.

It’s because that verse  makes me think of a book ending, its pages running thinner in my fingers, the spine, precarious in my palm, disbalancing itself.

It’s because it places me at the end of the path I’m on.

Minor keys, stuttering drum, phantasmal Nowadays harmonizing in what sounds like the distance -  preceded by the firm beat and syncopation of past-tense words, is it a wonder it feels like the world dropping off into a final sunset?

Minor flaws, a stuttering set of lungs, spirits harmonizing off-key in my head and ears -  preceded by nothing, only the ghostliest sense  of a world before myself, is it a wonder I think that the apocalypse could fit into one person?

These days, I listen to a song on repeat (a spark flying upward). It makes my feet feel solidly placed in good red earth, on a path that, verily, ends.

FRIDAY None of these pages hold the promise that there will be no more crucifixions. The ones on the hillside never called this day ‘good.’

Oh, by noon, the sky churns with gray and black, and there is nothing left for us to do but walk home. Some of us have endured more than others.

But all hands are heavy, sorrowful with blood, either our own or that from some neighbor’s veins. Whether from drawing or staunching is not our business.

The tearing of the veil is a B-grade horror movie effect and what is to be seen behind it is little more than a disappointment to us today. There is nothing there.

Go home, take your arms full of selfish sorrow and pride-laden guilt, take your heads full of woe and weakness and lay them down on your pillows. We are heavy and would sleep.

I am heavy and would be alone to study my wounds, which I thought I saw given from behind the clouds, nails in his grasp. I know Hamlet’s speeches too well.

The hill is littered with crossbeams and I know the faces of those lifting them high, know the bloody hands smearing clean wood with scarlet. How will I stay here with them?

SATURDAY Saturday is the cruelest day, suspended between the sun and the moon. It is far too long - a full, thick day of noon-to-three. Each thread of the veil snapped one at a time.

I slept too late. I move in order to survive - to hold my faculties in place. I am mindless and dumb and my wrists hurt.

Saturday is the cruelest day, a whole day spent holding my breath. And held breaths carry no words. As far as my lungs are concerned, there is no one to pray to.

The clouds yet hold water. My eyes are yet dry. My lips are yet faithless.

Numbness begins to feel like wellness. Suspension begins to feel like steady ground. Perhaps I will make it through today, if today never ends.

SUNDAY None of these pages hold the promise of any more resurrections - not in this particular situation - and while the crosses are propped in pride on the lawns of neighbors

(they are empty, empty, empty as an unpainted canvas, as a cup running over with air, only air), and while the closed halls of this house ring with cries

(they are not mine but, God, I wish they were), there is light streaming through these windows and puddling, unsympathetic, across my feet,

a dog that can’t be driven away in its enthusiasm, as if it can’t understand this 'no’ in the lines of my body and the gingerly flinching of my hands away from it

because the idea of warmth and hope is close to blasphemy against this exhaustion in my bones, and because I don’t want it, this resurrection meant, they say, to cheer me

or at least to keep me going through a Saturday that lingers in the shouting noon of the third day when all I want is this fourth, this next, this new day

when no one weeps but no one joys the air, either, with the overflow of unrestful happiness I can’t partake of (selfish, selfish, empty, empty, empty) -

and the golden stain creeps up over my ankles as does a tide coming in and everyone is happier or sadder or angrier than I can measure up to and so all there is to comfort me about this day, about You,

is that You made your move drained of blood and energy, pinned where You had to be, as if you had to be bound to stay there, kept down to keep You from fleeing (and how could I blame You when my feet are so fickle),

and when You finally came back to me it was after a long day of touching the souls of Hell, with their cries louder than those I have ever heard,

and something in this frame has to believe you were just as tired as it is now - more tired, weary from the rips and tatters of that place, crying out as I do for

rest, only rest, a silence, a place to lean my head against Yours, bloody fingers interlocked, and to know that it is finished.