BECAUSE WE ALL KNOW WHOSE FAULT IT WAS

 

https://onedrive.live.com/view.aspx?resid=F62F90DD5F3FA824!141377&authkey=!AJmT3GPa4VKzBRs 

TRYING TO CONTAIN THE IDEA OF FEAR, WHICH CANNOT BE CONTAINED

 

there is always the threat of another religion

 

                        https://madswirl.com/poetry/2024/03/holy-poem-after-the-death-of-god/

the right words

 

pockets of sleep & pools of rage and

if the poem is left unfinished

then it won’t need to have any meaning

 

if the mountain is sacred

a massacre is inevitable

 

a blanket of lies to cover it up

 

you map them out in your head,

one for your husband, one

for the children, and i am left here

without enough pieces to make a whole

 

i am afraid, always

 

i breathe in, then out, but

can’t get enough air

 

what we become in the end are our own

prisons, our own prisoners,

our own priests

 

days rise up like clouds above the

hills, like the

threat of brilliant blue skies

 

heat without warning & a blanket of haze

and i am there at the front door with

flowers and with lies and

i am godless

 

this story is a dead end,

just like any other

 

we are dogs fucking on floors

of broken glass

 

we are poets

waiting to be blindfolded

 

waiting to be marched out

onto some bloodsoaked field and

shot because the power of words,

of course, lies in the power of fear

 

because the weakest are always

the easiest to kill

 

all it takes from you

is a little goddamned effort

these soulless days

 

THIS SMALL RITUAL OF NOT DYING

 

In the Palace of Remembered Light

 

It's not the words that matter, not the stories or the poems.

 

Listen.

 

All energy is used, and then there's nothing. I approach the page with my hands on fire. I read what I've written with my tongue cut out.

 

This is the century, and we've abandoned rules. Children starve so that the war may be fought. The dead are counted carefully, and are labeled. "Good". "Bad". "Accidental".

 

And there was a goal at some point, but we've lost it. There was reason for this bloodshed, a need for these words.

 

There was the woman in my bed who said she had to leave. Said her husband would be home soon. And we had talked for hours, and I couldn't remember anything we'd said. I missed my children, but knew I would still end up yelling at them.

 

And she showered, then got dressed. Said she'd call, then she drove away, and it was snowing. It was grey, the lawns all brown, the houses dirty white, and the air smelled of gasoline and burning. I could still taste her.

 

It was energy spent on going nowhere. It was all of the reasons my wife had for leaving. Said she wasn't happy. Said she'd met someone else, and it wasn't her words that mattered. It was her actions.

 

It was the fact that I'd already stopped loving her.

 

And so I approach the page with my eyes gouged out I stand on the edge of a vast desert. What I believe in is my father's fear. A thousand miles away from home when he decided to stop drinking, and he ended up strapped to a hospital bed with blood running down his cheeks. Ended up screaming at people who weren't there, and it was my mother who flew down to drive him home.

 

It was my sister and her boyfriend who started the fire while they were gone.

 

And these things happen, and you think that they're the stories. You think they matter, that they have beginnings and endings, but it's a lie.

 

You can't pick up the paper with your hands cut off. You can't win a war against people who are willing to sacrifice their own children.

 

Look at the rape camps. The amputee camps. The world is full of human atrocities.

 

And so who is it that decides which wars we'll fight? How big a factor is profit in these decisions?

 

Don't kid yourself when you answer.

 

Don't believe that your answers will matter.

 

Look at Pollock, at the energy that went into what he made. Look at what was left.

 

And I was 21 when my grandfather killed himself. I was 27 when Cobain put the gun to his head. And there was a woman, a minister's wife, who disappeared Was found a week later wrapped in a dirty blanket and thrown from a bridge onto some railroad tracks seventy miles north of here.

 

I was working the day the dishwasher found her dress in the dumpster behind the restaurant I was hung over and sore. Had spent the night in a motel room with three other guys and two girls. Couldn't remember either of the girls' names, but I thought I'd fucked them both. I thought most of it had been filmed.

 

And the trucker was found, and he was sentenced, and then a fourteen month old baby was killed in the shithole town I'd grown up in. Was locked in his room by the babysitter, and the thermostat was put up to eighty five, and he was left there for two days.

 

And did I mention my own children? Two boys, six and three, and I'm terrified of all the things I can't protect them from. Flyers arrive in the mail, two or three a week, mug shots of recently paroled child molesters mailed out by the police department, and I think to myself Why aren't we killing these people? Why aren't we shipping them off to die in our wars?

 

And my six year old comes home with bruises on his arms and a story about being hit by a bully on the bus. And I want to find this little fucker and choke him to death. I want to burn his house to the ground with his parents still inside. And two weeks later he and my son are best friends, but he still needs to pay. I still need an eye for an eye.

 

This is how the poems are written. This is how the stories are told. Everything starts with a rush of anger and ends in fear. The words are laid down in blood, then the pages are burned Nothing is left but the hands that commit the acts. Nothing is left but the people who survive.

 

None of it was ever meant to be fair.

Shimmer

 

And I'm 22, and it's my day off, and so here I am at work, sitting at the lunch counter and waiting for Cathy's shift to end.  Waiting to drive up to the lake, waiting to get drunk and get laid, and I shoot her a smile from across the dining room, and she licks her lips and blows me a kiss.

 

And someone's got the jukebox on, Guns 'n' Roses with too much bass, Paradise City making the coffee tremble in the truckers' cups, and on the front page of the local news section of the paper I see a story about a kid I went to high school with.  No one I was friends with, but a face I knew, a quiet guy named Allen, can't really remember if I ever even heard him speak, and what it says is that he's dead.  Says his truck went off the highway at three in the morning, hit a bridge abutment at better than seventy miles an hour, and the picture looks like it's from the yearbook, his smiling face airbrushed free of pimples, five years left to live, and I'm not really sure how much this news is supposed to matter.  I'm not sure how I'm supposed to react.

 

Guy probably had friends, I guess, maybe had someone he loved.  Paper mentions a mother, a younger sister, not much else, and I fold it up and set it on the stool next to me. The sun is too bright, even through the tinted windows.  My head starts to pound in time to the music. I finish up my Pepsi, set the glass back in the ring of condensation its made, and Cathy walks by, lays a check face down in front of me, keeps walking back into the kitchen.  I turn it over, and she's drawn a heart, a smiley face, a sun.

 

And the song picks up speed, finally fades away, and nothing comes on to replace it. Conversations step forward, the clinking of silverware, of plates and glasses, the sound of the dishwasher roaring to life from somewhere behind the deep fryer, and it comes to me from out of nowhere, how much I hate this place.  How many years I'll waste working here or at other jobs that I'll hate just as much, how Cathy will become Lisa, and then Nikki, and then Tina, and then here we are.

 

I'm 38 and it's my day off. I hate my job.  I have an ex-wife, two children who I don't see nearly enough, a friend who's just been diagnosed with prostrate cancer.  I've met a marrie

d woman who calls me up to tell me she can't stand her husband, who stops over every few weeks to fuck, or maybe just to sit and talk and be held.

 

And I have no use for God.  For any god.  Have no clue what happened to Cathy after we broke up, but I remember her on that afternoon, hot and sticky in the tiny bedroom of a cabin that belonged to her parents.  Told me she loved me, and maybe she meant it, and I said it back, and her hair smelled like flowers when I pressed my face against her neck. Her fingers traced circles around her nipples, mine drew a path over her stomach, down through her pubic hair, between her lips, and she arched her back against them.  I was blind to everything else. We were through with words.