The 11:30 Club Poems '98-'00
untitled
I am inside;
for once I am inside
and I belong to things
and things are only parts of me.
I feel the ground pull back,
preparing to spring me to glory.
I feel the crowd press in
to stand me up a little longer
when I might fall.
It’s as if I chose the music,
as if I chose the light,
as if I chose you before my birth
to counterweight my spin
to understand my smile
and take the necessary measures
to fix me in the firmament
below and slightly to the left of Venus.
Light through leaves
Red Velvet Cake
is colored with beets
beets are funny, you say,
pickled beets, they’re actually good
and the waitress says,
how are you guys doing?
Ready for another beer?
Outside on the deck
the night is clotted green with
lights through leaves
room temperature wind
citronella candles exhaling smoke
exhaling and never breathing in.
How are you guys doing?
We’ve got last call out here
you guys
Thanks a lot you guys
before she even sees if we’ll pay her.
I know why we were jealous at
each other’s weddings
I say
despite years, despite vicious letters
and cheating and self-pity
and the media tells us
where there’s love there should be sex
for this reason we were jealous
and for this reason we have
no right to be.
My cat kept me awake all night,
you say.
Selby arches its back like a cat
I have to downshift
it climbs until I believe
at the top we’ll launch --
you make the drive too often to notice,
you say.
Cops make an illegal left turn.
My head is full of M. Doughty
which colors everything with irony
and everything is new and sweet
and taken with a grain of salt
as if seen through foreign eyes.
At Perkins they love my jacket
everybody loves my jacket
I have to tell them where to get one
so I won’t look like a snob.
You tell the waiter how long you’ve known me.
He takes my glass and never comes back.
The girl who sees everything
in terms of astrology
finds a white daffodil on her table
gives it to you as if it’s not a real thing
and when you put it in your hair
eggwhite cup and saucer
buried in your coffee curls
you don’t look any less a man.
She is in love with you.
Who isn’t?
Saint Paul thumping underneath my wheels,
grinding past my eyes on either side,
you point out how the line of lights
defines a hill so shallow
I have never, in all the times I made this drive,
seen it there.
Double-parked,
turn down the music
for the customary call-me speech,
the customary good-night hug.
My fingers find your thin shoulders
through your hair
my fingers which know
your thin shoulders
and your hair is over my face
and my chin digging in
and every time we do this I wonder
if I’m imagining you holding on
a little longer than you have to
and every time we do this
I remember how easy it would be
to turn my face that much
and taste the skin where your throat
meets your jaw, and take that skin
between my teeth and
though I’ve known you ten years
I still don’t know what you’d do.
94 Westbound I begin to be in love
with America, with concrete
and yellow lights at night
overpasses like harmonicas
trees shifting uneasily
behind the sound barriers
like impatient monsters.
I take my hands off the wheel
to light a cigarette with a match.
I don’t remember losing my lighter.
Emerging from this curve
onto the Mississippi bridge
is like the first scene of a movie
is like going outside after an illness
is like being on a much longer
road trip than I’m on
every time I do it.
Dirty gray-brown-gold cement
strung like spiderweb in a wind
my car is weightless
my wheels hold to the road
like a toy train to its track.
Downtown is a shoebox diorama,
it is a poster behind the bar,
it is a very detailed model,
it isn’t real.
Coming up behind me,
passing at no less than eighty,
a baby blue Audi
driven by a bottle blonde
on the far side of forty
and I know she’s sunk in her own
mental catalogue of the road,
her own radio playing her own music
which may or may not shake her
the way mine shakes me.
Mine would not shake her.
She will never know me.
I am not interested in meeting her.
And then we all merge right
for the 35th Street exit.
Stopped at Nicollet,
black girls cross in striped shirts,
hair piled high, long necks
and summer shoes and acrylic nails,
laughing.
The shaking trees
as far as the light reaches,
yellow lights in a wavering line
like baby flying saucers
and off Nicollet onto 40th
the side streets magic with shadows
and I want to fly out my car window
and dart in a dream down those alleys
to where the pools of porchlight
are pools of electric water
where I can bathe my hands
and clean off this layer of flesh
which keeps me from flowing out
into the asphalt, into lawns
and out the eyes of cats.
On a night like this
I will lose my body
at the end of a tunnel of
streetlights and branches
and become the backlit green
I have always, actually, been.
Note: poems after this point are also in The Other Sky, so if you alreay read that you've seen these.
The sky on the last day
Living by the train tracks,
falling into a deceptively easy blue decline,
about to preface every
statement with your name,
I am learning the exact descending note of loneliness.
Words should not twist me so hard:
an earthquake voice in time with
my pulse is not enough to apply the kind of
mountain-grinding torque --
I am right this second a sort of mountain.
If sand is what you want, keep talking.
Did you figure it out?
What it was you were chasing
that was almost like the skin of my waist
and almost like the cut of my teeth in your throat --
that was almost me, and was not?
Did you find it? Where is it?
I am going to go there, and burn it to the ground.
The quality of light after last call
when all the dim corners are lit
and the neon begins to look dusty
is the light that shows me
how perfectly wrong it would be
to enshrine your imperfection
the way I am about to.
-- but I will not excise you.
You may follow me like a rumor
all the days of your life,
waiting to retreat when I turn,
expecting any moment some
spectacular breakage --
you may orbit just out of reach
until your gas jet eye fades
until your sharp white cat teeth rot
until your hands like diving sea birds
wither to bone
for all I fucking care.
With one sharp bright shock of recognition
it will come to you
(some moment when I am nowhere near)
that it mattered to be wanted
(around the time I am
demolishing your shrine).
Hungry for time
I hear you were wondering
what’s gotten into me
why I don’t call
I hear you wanted to know
It seems you were asking
what you had done
to drive me off
or what my problem was
or if my problem was you.
I’ll spare you an inch and inform you
there are things that aren’t about you
-- there are things that aren’t about me
even where I’m the axis --
and in truth I haven’t thought of you
for weeks.
What you want this guilt to accomplish
is impossible under normal physics
because now I’ve been running
inertia forbids me to stop.
If I could live until I was finished,
if you could say what you mean,
if they didn’t need all this lying,
my friend, we would speak again.
Smoke and Mirrors
You are the slim pale flame
which burns away my colors
You are the black silk veil
across my lips
You are the new color
I want to paint the world
You know everybody
I’m under the table
Your triangular smile
I’m hungry
You move like rising smoke
casting shadows
I would cut myself open
what would you do?
Emerge an insect
to your disgust
Made of aluminum
stroke my spine
God let me be dangerous
this time
Let me keep what I threw away
peel back the skin
and years
I’m sorry
but this is all I have
flesh
and bone
smoke
and mirrors
Your intangible
my static
your sky
my stone
I am going to hide my eyes now.
Don’t speak.
[untitled]
fix me in your mind’s eye
just like this
lolling drunk and drifting
right in your face with
shouted incoherent truths
obvious
this will remind you
in later years
why you laughed when you
touched me
why you made such
shouted incoherent
lame excuses to leave.
[untitled]
Shut your mouth now --
every word you speak to someone else
is nailed into my skin
so sharp it doesn’t hurt
until I move
I’m on to you
and you don’t even know it yet.
Three words I hold
in escrow for your
frozen eyes and shadow:
Never.
Later.
Now.
Spark
You were thinking
the filament was broken
you could not again reach that
blue-white burn
and you were wrong
you thought you had smothered
what was open to pain in you
were sure of your callus
and therefore you spoke --
not prepared for any consequence
to reach beneath your skin
you were certain this did not
concern you;
so this will come as a shock.
The hands you were asking for,
the teeth you weren’t expecting,
the answer to your arrogance,
the spark in hydrogen,
the knife.
Some Haiku
Cat shaped like a loaf of bread
purrs as I throw him outside.
He likes himself.
------------
E=MC^2:
it is only ashes
that prevented us from noticing.
-----------
No way!
I’m covered in tiny hairs
like a fly!
-----------
Orange maple leaf
lacquered to the glass with rain:
stormy October.
What I know about Tom
Tom says he knows me --
and wouldn't it be nice if that were true?
His hands are so big
mine barely cover his palms.
He has never read Rimbaud,
he has never bought geranium-red chopsticks
in the Japanese quarter of San Francisco,
he has never been fat.
Tom's eyes are like a child's painting of eyes,
as blue as china plates,
with lashes a black crayon line above.
He doesn't like to shave but he does anyway.
He says he can read me easily.
He says that some people are like, what the fuck?
-- but he can read me.
He makes things sound simpler than they are.
Tom's arms are so long he can hold the world,
hold it down so it can't run away,
long enough to get a good look.
But not long enough to hold me.
Tom likes to talk about
how he could kill fictional people
but has never really hurt anybody
that I know about
and as far as I know
he doesn't cry to himself
when he's alone
but nobody tells anybody that stuff.
His would be a bony shoulder to cry on
if I trusted him enough for that
but you don't want to be too comfortable
when you're using somebody that way.
Tom understands debts of honor.
He understands friendship in terms of favors owed.
And then he says he understands me --
wouldn't it be nice if that were true?