5/1/17

LETTER TO A LOST FRIEND - RICHARD SHELTON


War, trade, religious debts to discharge, these are mostly the reasons
for men’s distant journeyings: but you take pleasure in distant journeys
without reason.                                                               – St.-John Perse

we do not realize what we want
until we learn
what we are willing to give up for it
and you did God knows you did

when swimming was no longer possible
you learned to sink you learned
to live at the bottom of the sea

now tell me of the chambers where you sleep
tell me it does not matter
lie if you must

is your bed luminous is it festooned
with seaweed do all your narrow windows
open onto water
is the tide kind to you

forgive me if I do not understand

last night a stranger asked me what
gives you most pleasure and before I thought
I answered her revenge

4/30/17

PARTY - Andrea Gibson

I was 13 the first time
I drank so much the bugs stopped.

A high school party
at Chrissy Olden’s house,
a senior, whose mom worked overnights
at the truck stop and embarrassed the customers
by not being embarrassed to lose
a solid 10 minutes
rambling over the register
about who wrote what in her yearbook
in 1971.

I was sitting in the middle
of the living room
on a corduroy couch
telling Katie Mathews,
the only other 8th grader there,
something about the temperature of music.

Somewhere there was a DJ
holding his finger under the faucet
of the party.

Every few minutes
I’d be handed a bottle of something
that razored my tonsils all the way down.
If someone had told me
it was nail polish remover
I would have believed them
but I would not have stopped drinking
the red off of my heart.

Do you remember
the first time you knew you
were absolutely safe?

I stumbled into the bathroom
and locked the door behind me
so I could smile as wide as I had to
without anybody knowing I had to.

The mirror was caked with Aqua Net.
There was enough hair in the sink
to mistake the drain for a pet.

The last person who had vomited
in the toilet had missed the toilet.

A year prior, just before my grandfather
swallowed the worm of his life,
he leaned his yellow face into my terrified eyes
and made me promise to Never
go near the bottle.

Nobody had to tell me
that booze was a terrible way to die.

But this was a party,
and I was person for the very first time.

You won’t know what I mean
unless you’ve been there too.
The bugs drowned till morning.

Say what you want about addiction.
I pulled the hair out of the drain with my hands.

I took it home.
I gave it a name.

4/10/17

Bad Habits - Richard Shelton


how could I leave you behind
old friends
since I am going nowhere

here is good and there is evil
and again I fall like a drunk
between two stools

of all the things I have
I cherish most
what no one else would want

4/8/17

At the Restaurant - Stephen Dunn

Six people are too many people
and a public place the wrong place
for what you're thinking--

stop this now.

Who do you think you are?
The duck à l'orange is spectacular,
the flan the best in town.

But there among your friends
is the unspoken, as ever,
chatter and gaiety its familiar song.

And there's your chronic emptiness
spiraling upward in search of words
you'll dare not say

without irony.
You should have stayed at home.
It's part of the social contract

to seem to be where your body is,
and you've been elsewhere like this,
for Christ's sake, countless times;

behave, feign.

Certainly you believe a part of decency
is to overlook, to let pass?
Praise the Caesar salad. Praise Susan's

black dress, Paul's promotion and raise.
Inexcusable, the slaughter in this world.
Insufficient, the merely decent man.

4/2/17

Untitled - Chris Mc Geown


Mental illnesses
Are constellations
Of the mind–
Most people won’t
See them
Unless you point
Them out.

1/1/17

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE - Richard Shelton

                                                      For Michael Hogan

on December nights
when the rain we needed months ago
is still far off and the wind
gropes through the desert
in search of any tree to hold it

those who live here all year round
listen to the irresistible
voice of loneliness
and want only to be left alone

local knowledge is to live in a place
and know the place
however barren

some kinds of damage
provide their own defense
and we who stay in the ruins
are secure against enemies and friends

if you should see one of us
in the distance as your caravan passes
and if he is ragged and gesturing
do not be mistaken

he is not gesturing for rescue
he is shouting go away