Manhattan Has No Safeways
Posted on June 24, 2014 Leave a Comment
On the cliffs of the Palisades,
it is never sure whether what is heard
is the sound –
or the unsound.
Thunder
or the blasting of rock.
The rumbles are low,
and often dimly-sensed
in the background of an empty morning’s distance,
the growling stomach of a half-starved afternoon,
brimming with bare truths.
Truths which don’t ambush
with truculent precision,
but glance haphazardly
over lively lies.
Which is it? You wonder.
Opening and closing the blinds of intimacy
abnormal in actuality, but acceptable –
even ordinary – here,
declarations are made,
then dismissively deleted.
This is where it becomes difficult to hear
what doesn’t ring true.
The one flat note,
the imperfect pitch in the panoply.
From only a short distance,
the reverberation becomes complication,
at first awkwardly noted,
but finally
resonant.
Manhattan has no Safeways,
you remember –
and realize –
lies are always lies.
Thunder is Thunder is Thunder
Posted on June 23, 2014 Leave a Comment
Stealing your thunder –
I can do that, you say,
while evenly flicking rubbery drips off the side of a bottle.
Dark and syrupy drips,
sweetly sad with indignant envy,
that thunder bounces and beats behind me –
and I ignore it as best I can –
but, nanosenconds apart,
it’s upon me
and inescapable.
With hands on my ears,
it’s impossible to shut down,
the ever-present thunder,
a crescendo of punctuated admiration and unwarranted disgust.
Your timbre of vain impossibility pounds like a migraine
beside the feeble reservations
which bring an onslaught of envious rain.
We can never coax this war council to beat
with the thunder,
so our feet dangle and shake maniacally to distract it away.
God, don’t make me listen
to that not-so-distant thunder’s common incessancy.
Again.
What you do
is just like
what everyone else does;
you do it no better –
and it can only sound the same and the same and the same.
To steal it –
now that is the talented flash.
Even if it only fails to drown your unending neediness.
Flared and frightened out the tips of your toes,
and beating like the war council should,
it crawls from every single pore in your boundless crave,
dancing between you and you and you.
So get on with your good news,
the suspense is killing us.
Stop ruining our bad time,
really.
Our eyes are deaf with thunderous applause,
waiting for the trick, the other shoe to drop.
A rosy flurry ignites us,
as the vain thunder of possibility excites,
only to disrupt the fear of our own potent evil.
Be afraid out of the corner of your eye.
We seem unimposing,
but our shadows spread long and dark and spill effortlessly
for all to enjoy.
While your braggart thunder is possessed of emptiness,
our shadows possess slyly, pervasively.
Have your spotlight.
Salty and sweet and bitter and sour,
we hope for nothing less than disaster,
savoring the taste into the deep minutiae
of catastrophe awaiting –
because
as you may have noticed
thunder is thunder is thunder.
The Middle
Posted on June 19, 2014 2 Comments
Having it both ways,
manic agitation glides
into an obligatory forced dichotomy of thought.
A quivering bipolar blanket of murky gleam and glisten
suspending a sightless surge.
Above a muddy underline,
an urge of plainly brown tide shades before the undertow
out ahead of a broken wave, anticipating the impending draw.
Contrary?
If you must ask this question,
it’s not obvious how such mentality
should abide then so strangely
in one place
in one dream of mind,
as confusing opposing undercurrents flow against themselves
in one brain;
all that is known up against the alternative unknown,
felt aside unfelt,
tolerating simultaneous whisperings,
each up against an inside wall,
concurrently instantaneous:
yes then no, no then yes –
not neurotic, but impelling indecision,
the long tow of blood from one vein to another.
As contradictory and conflicting as it appears.
Is it hard to watch? It’s hard to live.
Mesmerized by compulsion
without control or command,
advancing backward
and drowning before you –
not in currents,
but in hesitant uncertainty.
How you live both ways
and not at all.
Beautiful Day
Posted on June 18, 2014 Leave a Comment
The strange thing about memory is its selectivity. How you can lose days and weeks and months of your life, not remembering anything particularly at all about them, moving forward with a clean slate, erased periodically only by the act of time passing. What you did on any of those given days dissolves somewhere into the back of your brain, the neurons disconnecting fully and swinging into oblivion on a pendulum of forgotten banality.
And then there are memories as vivid as if they are unfolding right now in our laps as we sit and remember them. The sloshing of Malibu Bay Breezes, inching to the tops of Styrofoam containers resting between your legs as you speed away from Krug’s with your friends. The way you step heavily and uncertainly wearing your first pair of glasses, dazed by the sudden difference in your depth perception. The shape of a single bolt of lightning appearing as you helplessly peer at the intersection it will touch.
Memories can be so powerful.
Like the day I rode my Mongoose down to the library with a couple of my friends to watch a time capsule lowered into the ground. I don’t remember the date. I don’t remember what was in the time capsule. I don’t remember on what distant date into the future it was to be opened. What I remember is that it was a beautiful day. One of those beautiful days in the not-so-distant past when kids were able to ride their bikes around on their own, before play dates, when sunscreen was a beach novelty and summer was a decent stretch of independence.
There was a small crowd of mostly adults gathered, a few speeches made, and a couple of stragglers – us kids – curious to see the time capsule as it was buried. What would the day be like when it was reopened?
A beautiful day.
Although, like I said, I have no memory of when that day would – or will – be, I DO know that the memory of it I have, myself, opened countless times, revisiting that combination of curiosity, anticipation, and excitement reserved for the big moments.
The big moments, like childbirth.
When the nurse wheeled me back to my empty room after I delivered my older son, the television was singing above my head. I had been given a lot of magnesium sulfate, so it was difficult to focus – a little like it was wearing that first pair of glasses – but I was joyous. Even awestruck. And felt that combination of curiosity, anticipation, and excitement at living this big moment. On the television was the video for U2’s Beautiful Day. And it was just that. A beautiful day. A time capsule in my own life, so that whenever I am blessed to hear that song now, so many years later – and after so much heartache, so much loss, and so many not-so-beautiful days – the day I find myself in becomes beautiful.
A beautiful day. This day. One in which I am humbled by the memories I am lucky enough to remember.
Labor of Unforgiveness
Posted on June 17, 2014 Leave a Comment
Late struggle lumbering
– can’t breathe, can’t swallow –
shallow skin, shiny and taut
with the anticipation of a thought
caught in the throat
like a knot.
Choke on that,
won’t you?
Smiling,
swiftly slit in the back of my mind,
is what I would say
– and mean it –
no, really,
MEAN IT –
for the labor of begging
unforgiveness
weighs condescending,
and you are not forgiven.
Choke on that,
won’t you?
Unsmiling, unbelieving,
and of a sudden,
I say it
– and mean it –
Yes, really,
MEAN IT –
stale efforts and sour endeavors
revisit unpardoned,
so squandered familiarity is the only thought.
Choke on that,
won’t you?
Smiling, again,
here’s the little secret:
I’ll never say it
– and I’ll never mean it –
Sundown
Posted on June 12, 2014 Leave a Comment
By the time we recognize
the aged faces of our oldest friends’ parents
in their faces,
we are ourselves
old.
The creases in their foreheads,
the ginger steps of their thread-veined legs,
the freckled humps of their upper backs,
the deep lines down their forearms.
These faces were unimagined
to ever be our own,
but are our own
– now –
just the same.
We get there,
misconstrued and mishandled,
we get there –
confused between fifty ways to leave your lover
and more than one way to skin a cat.
Which is it? we ask.
It can be no fluke that the same unlined faces
which lined the schoolyards
are now the same despondent faces
lining the outsides of them.
The same deep line down the forearm of time –
DNA trickling, trickling –
eyes aglaze with ennui and acrimony, interchangeably.
All of the boats are identical.
All of the shores are dusted with the same dazzling sand
we can never reach.
No one can.
We get to the place
where the lines are drawn
on us.
We see the point on the line
where we started
and the point where it all will end
for us,
but go on
just the same.
We get there.
Reason
Posted on June 11, 2014 2 Comments
Persistence wends its way through me,
and dogged determination is my downfall –
rendering me as emotionally aloof and socially distant
as a rosy clan of Irishmen
on Christmas Eve,
before there’s been anything to drink –
born of those same people who show up for a free dinner,
but not the funeral of your son.
Bereft of common decency and acrid in approach,
the air around me is as sharp as the air inside me,
so I am drawn to the caustic
and it is drawn to me.
I cannot help but stun with simplicity,
decanting your disbelief while simultaneously
trapped in detachment,
imperceptibly pushy –
I
will
never
give
up.
The reason is simple:
unguarded and languid is the realm of loss.
Unrelenting diligence, well-thought and well-planned,
directs the win.
I won’t be duped by dazzle,
or upended by the ubiquitous.
Keep underestimating me, I say,
you will be taken in
then taken out
and apart.
Refusal is the reason.
Tree of Knowledge
Posted on June 11, 2014 1 Comment
Along this leaning tree overspreads a crooked arm,
wan with tired views
and news of reaching,
forlorn and telling,
assiduously bristled in barky intent and knowing.
It always meant to branch out
in a random shuffling of limbs
its mistakes of revelation –
no telling where they would lead.
But wakeful indecisiveness,
anchored by dreamy flight-blessed instinct,
curved momentarily in the enthusiasm
of what you always wanted to do –
too foolish and too tight-lipped to turn back.
Nothing smarts like a surprise landing of silky shame,
a tulle-wrapped and touted retreat –
tools of uneasy pursuit,
unfortunate to break wild,
but easily let go.
Purposeful ruin admits you in advance
by an imposition of fright,
amid claustrophobic rain clouds, dim and close –
full of second string droplets,
second-rate and stunted flights
of archangelic false starts
which shift in strangeness,
frozen in aggression,
and deception,
delineated in agreement
with unfounded intimacy.
You lead the army nowhere and for nothing;
wasted annihilation fraught vain and purposeless.
It’s the bittersweet bane of my existence,
a theoretic suicide mission,
embarked upon with only graceful apprehension of outcome,
and barely backhanded with a stinging slap of truth.
We are defeated and destined, predating descent.
The intent of ignobility slinks imperceptible until
upon the thrall,
awakened at the intersection of hope and folly,
intertwined hedged bets are belated by boredom,
straining unspoken all the previously-said,
rimmed with cliché
and veined with familiarity –
the different countries of countenance,
the wrong side of the tracks –
this tree is ceded in ruin,
early-seeded by eager heirs.
Opposites of Truth
Posted on June 6, 2014 Leave a Comment
Drawn up on my tongue
like a syringe full of potassium –
with so much thought and effort –
is all the manufactured insouciance,
spit back undeservedly into the air.
The words are sucked back
into self-imposed,
semi-forgotten vacuity,
committed only to my memory,
where I carve them into the stone
of what you don’t even remember,
glimpsed moments of reality blurted
into an unguarded imagination.
Thrust with preschool candor,
I flee to hide behind my wall of
crypticism –
granted the delicate gift
of hinted ignorance
under a veil of suggested wisdom
further disguised as feigned folly
– innocence.
Who, me?
I always speak the truth,
don’t I?
It all emerges antithetical and acidic
from my contrary lips
– opposites of truth –
and I can’t return those acerbic impulsions
– accidental compulsions shot like bullets
which can’t be gingerly placed back into the discharged gun,
or quietly returned
to my shelf of apology.
Feeling the impression of the trigger
on my trembling fingers
– while smelling that faint odor of gunpowder –
is when I always long to take it all back,
to tiptoe away,
looking over my shoulder,
dodging my own thoughtless ammunition.
Opening Day
Posted on June 5, 2014 Leave a Comment
The shore’s greatest stretch is what they called it
– the sport of kings –
which I knew it wasn’t and took for bullshit.
An excuse to be in the sun on a weekday afternoon
an inch away from the beach in spectators,
handicapping behind the paddock,
is what it was.
– Pick a horse for us, Rookie –
I landed an opening day sunburned finger on that racing form,
already dark bay myself.
– Sure
I always know who finishes first, second, third –
laughing with that deep amusement reserved for little girls
and horses.
– You don’t need a racing form for the trifecter –
with that Hudson County inflection.
I bet it won’t be me, him, her
in that order.
And I’m right,
again.
Because I’m always right.
No one has me in hand,
though everything I know comes from Dick Francis paperbacks.
I trace those horses on the covers and hum to myself
like a money rider on a hand ride,
furtively escaping to spare myself the witnessing of badly chosen boxes
and uncomfortably third wheels.
I can never resist the promise
of a sunny pause in the mildly pungent ocean air,
mixed up with filly tang and Route 9,
and the skin of my own shoulders baking proudly with a silvery touch of baby oil.
– Come on, Rook,
pick us another one –
except I just didn’t fire that day.
A Girl by the Bridge 
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