i just wanna be a sheep

so much for dancing in time,
you pulling me in,
whipping your arms around,
the You you can sense
pushed against the Me i hope
you think i am
sloppy
and gripping me closer
dragging us around in a waltz
that ignores the music;
i don’t know what to think…
Just take the lead
I’m trying to follow your feet
Which seem to find no certain pattern
As of yet.

why don’t you open me up?

i can’t say why
i understand your need
to raze the peaks and valleys of your genesis
in favor of a new earth,
red and raw
like the skin buried beneath
the whole time.


i think we all need it
sometimes
but some of us
need to cut deeper
and deeper into our stem
to start to grow toward our sun.

i just/can’t get you out of my head

Last night
On the dank and hazy street
Of gray and silver
Two aquiline raindrops fell
And I stepped tentatively on
Wondering
When the storm was coming.

all i wanna do is

the trouble with kindness

 

today I watched an ambulance

weave through a wave of traffic

trying like a child playing a puzzle game

to manipulate the pieces

and win. But in this case,

 

the prize was someone’s life.

I guess when

someone tries to save you,

from mortal danger

caused by your own foolishness or

 

human vulnerability

you don’t complain

about the way he goes about it,

at least not right away.

Today I offered up

 

my still-beating Pride,

my fractured  and compacted Dignity

to what has been your willingness

to treat my open wounds,

and I could not find

 

the same place, the same genuine compassion,

only the amusement at someone else’s struggle

and utter failure.

Did I mistake the signs

and the flashing red sirens

 

for some other

that just happened to be rushing

toward the same place in time?

I guess we are beyond the point

of civility, stranger to stranger,

 

and instead have moved on

to the dry, parched state

of two people who can sit with each other

stare blankly ahead

and say nothing.

 

Perhaps your ambulance was just

stuck in traffic

stuck in the middle of a little boy’s

game, rigid and plastic,

and trying to get through.

 

Or perhaps it is just me

calling for help in

trivial emergencies,

fear-mongering in times of

only slight insecurity or loneliness

 

solely for the purpose of seeing the white vehicle,

official, important,

with piercing sirens and bright intruding lights,

disregard all laws of traffic

and the others, in their separate cars—

 

all struggling to get by

just the same,

blaring their horns and rushing by indifferently

on this one-way street—

just to get to me.

how’d you get to be happiness?

this is what happens when pretty girls talk to me.

we’re all going to die. we don’t know how, and we don’t know why.

Turtle, Swan

Because the road to our house is a back road, meadowlands punctuated by gravel quarry and lumberyard, there are unexpected travelers some nights on our way home from work. Once, on the lawn of the Tool    and Die Company, a swan; the word doesn’t convey the shock of the thing, white architecture rippling like a pond’s rain-pocked skin, beak lifting to hiss at my approach. Magisterial, set down in elegant authority, he let us know exactly how close we might come. After a week of long rains that filled the marsh until it poured across the road to make in low woods a new heaven for toads, a snapping turtle lumbered down the center of the asphalt like an ambulatory helmet. His long tail dragged, blunt head jutting out of the lapidary prehistoric sleep of shell. We’d have lifted him from the road but thought he might bend his long neck back to snap. I tried herding him; he rushed, though we didn’t think those blocky legs could hurry– then ambled back to the center of the road, a target for kids who’d delight in the crush of something slow with the look of primeval invulnerability. He turned the blunt spear point of his jaws, puffing his undermouth like a bullfrog, and snapped at your shoe, vising a beakful of– thank God– leather. You had to shake him loose. We left him to his own devices, talked on the way home of what must lead him to new marsh or old home ground. The next day you saw, one town over, remains of shell in front of the little liquor store. I argued it was too far from where we’d seen him, too small to be his… though who could tell what the day’s heat might have taken from his body. For days he became a stain, a blotch that could have been merely oil. I did not want to believe that was what we saw alive in the firm center of his authority and right to walk the center of the road, head up like a missionary moving certainly into the country of his hopes. In the movies in this small town I stopped for popcorn while you went ahead to claim seats. When I entered the cool dark I saw straight couples everywhere, no single silhouette who might be you. I walked those two aisles too small to lose anyone and thought of a book I read in seventh grade, “Stranger Than Science,” in which a man simply walked away, at a picnic, and was, in the act of striding forward to examine a flower, gone. By the time the previews ended I was nearly in tears– then realized the head of one-half the couple in the first row was only your leather jacket propped in the seat that would be mine. I don’t think I remember anything of the first half of the movie. I don’t know what happened to the swan. I read every week of some man’s lover showing the first symptoms, the night sweat or casual flu, and then the wasting begins and the disappearance a day at a time. I don’t know what happened to the swan; I don’t know if the stain on the street was our turtle or some other. I don’t know where these things we meet and know briefly, as well as we can or they will let us, go. I only know that I do not want you –you with your white and muscular wings that rise and ripple beneath or above me, your magnificent neck, eyes the deep mottled autumnal colors of polished tortoise– I do not want you ever to die.  Mark Doty

poetry alone can halt the progression of time because poetry is all that remains of a moment. in this moment, Mark Doty’s lover is still alive; Doty still feels his presence; Doty is still in that place in his life where he fears the loss of his love, he does not yet have to deal with his lover being gone ten, twenty years. by writing poetry, by reading poetry we give ourselves to that moment and, in the process, lose the present. even in our minds we cannot pinpoint an exact time or an exact place in our lives; things shift and change, subject to human error and will, thank god. human error is what makes life beautiful. in a perfect world we wouldn’t need art because we could say whatever we needed to say directly; beauty would spill from me to you and you to me, perfectly articulated and perfectly understood, and that would be it. writing is the closest we come to perfection as humans because not only is it the only solid, concrete piece of evidence that can remain–the dregs at the bottom of a tea cup, the only thing that remains of a person sucked dry–but it is beautiful and delicate, too.

i need a lover with soul power, and you ain’t got no soul power.

you: ignore me and play with my advances alternately. Confuse me enough so that I’m still interested and curious and chasing after you. Don’t show too much interest and won’t do everything for me. Hide things from me, but not too much that I think I have to compensate to get your attention. Smile at me for no reason. Tell me you care by doing things for me and not by saying it. Keep a picture of me in your wallet. Think I haven’t seen it. Tell me when I’m boring, tell me when I’m whining, tell me honestly my writing sucks, tell me when I’m adorable, but not too often. Don’t mind my quasi-dykiness, don’t top all the time. Laugh at me when I feel like an idiot, tackle me in fits of love. Hold it together most of the time, but sometimes breaks down in fits of weakness, to show me the human inside. Committed, but you don’t need to wear it on your sleeve. Not touchy-feely, except when we’re alone, and then can’t stop touching my hair, my hands, my knees, my hips. Will look me in the eyes in a way that almost makes me uncomfortable, forces me to stare back nervously; convince me with your gaze that you know; that I can’t get past you. Can’t leave me, even if you try. Attached to me in ways you don’t know; can’t understand. Let me look at old photographs, make me guess. Let me touch your face.

 

me: vulnerable. Awkward. Will tell you anything if you ask for it. Wants to touch you everywhere, wants to know you care. Wants to be wildly attracted to you, wants to be a secret, wants to be known but not to be talked about in a secretive way, but in a casual way, in a normal, always-was-that-way sort of way, as if I grew green like the grass or bare like the trees in winter and blooming in spring again and again in a cycle, such common knowledge. Pathetic. Takes things too seriously, worries too much, wants to know everything about you but won’t ask because she’s afraid of losing you. Likes warm cups of coffee on cold nights sitting alone with you or walking alone with you on streets surrounded by people, driving in cars with you down dark roads, lying with you in bed feeling your warmth, sitting with you on beaches at night hearing the waves watching the stars and the fireworks, sitting with you anywhere. Old-fashioned romantic, wants to hold open doors for you, give you flowers, cook you breakfast, but wonders if that is too dominant for you, wonders if you are doing the courting or am I or if it matters? Wants to touch you tentatively. Wants to be able to look you in the face, eventually, wants to be unashamed of her own body, her own self, but can’t help it.  New at this game. Shy with love, but open to suggestion. Subject to change.