9/30/17

Not Waving but Drowning - Stevie Smith


Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

9/29/17

FOR THE LEAVING - Andrea Gibson


Nobody
ever thinks
about the weight
of a comet, how heavy
something has to be to go
that fast.

9/28/17

Trust Is a Luxury - Bucky Sinister

Two of my coworkers are fucking.
They think no one knows.

They come in to work,
one takes the stairs
and the other the elevator.

They take long lunches together but
say nothing to each other in the office.

I want to tell them it’s okay,
I don’t care,
no one cares.

It wasn’t too long ago
that people used to fuck at work.
Fucking off meant just that:
you’d fuck off in the supply closet,
or an empty conference room,
or the stairwell that no one uses.

Now fucking off
means being on the Internet or
texting someone from your cell.

Even in the dotcom days
there were drunken company lunches,
baristas who sold grams of coke and eighths of weed
to anyone needing to take the edge off.
Not much fucking but there was plenty of porn.
A little more than ten years later
it all sounds made up.

***

It’s a beautiful day in Marin County
and if there weren’t a prison here,
I couldn’t afford to stand on this property.

At San Quentin
there’s a gun tower
between you and God.
Pray all you want,
but if you run
you will be shot
on general principle.

The sky is
low on the yard:
starts one breath
above the tower,

San Quentin
is a small island
surrounded by
the ocean of not here.

From the time the outer gate closes
until I get to receiving,
I think about every stupid thing
I could’ve gotten caught for,
How this would be a lot worse
than volunteering to run a poetry workshop.

I want to thank you for coming in,
she tells me.
We don’t get a lot of volunteers in here.
This is the hardest class to get into.
Everyone’s really excited about coming here.
There’s just one thing—
you have to sign this waiver,
we have a no hostage policy here.
If you are abducted during your class
we will not negotiate for your release.
It’s just a formality.         

And I think,
No, it’s not.

One more thing,
she says.
Here’s a whistle—
if anyone gets weird,
just blow this and we’ll be on it.

***

In a big meeting my boss says,
Well that’s all water over the dam now.

I start to laugh and cover it with a fake cough
and throat clearing.

That’s not the expression.
Water under a bridge is normal.
Water over a dam is very bad.
That’s a disaster.
Everyone is going to die.

I know how to do my work,
but I don’t know how to behave in an office.

The only job that ever came naturally to me
was working in a bar,
bouncing, barbacking, working the door;
it all made sense to me.

I understand how to break up a bar fight,
but not how to participate in a conference call.

This job is fine
until there are other people around.

The boss says,
We’re not drinking the Kool Aid on that one.

It’s a reference to the mass suicide at Jonestown.
and he’s talking about a corporate policy
on office supplies.

In the sexual harassment seminar
I was required to take,
they said I wasn’t allowed to say anything
that was offensive to anyone else,
even if it was on accident.
After 45 minutes of explaining it,
and a half hour video,
they said,
Just keep the golden rule in mind.

Which doesn’t apply—
if I treat people like I want to be treated
I’ll be fired.

***

At San Quentin
they tell me,

Don’t ask anyone
what he’s in there for.

Don’t give out your address
or your phone number.

Don’t give anyone
any articles of clothing.

And if you run on the yard
you will be shot—
if something happens
lie face down on the ground.

***

At work
they put up hand sanitizers everywhere.

I think,
Who the fuck
will use this?

But people complain
that they empty too fast.

There’s an extra trash can
by the bathroom door
so people can throw away
the paper towel they use
to open the door.

I have gone to neighborhoods
I shouldn’t have been in,
bought stuff I was pretty sure was drugs
from people I didn’t know,
and smoked them
with a pipe I made from garbage,

and I’m fine.

Raw chicken, old mayonnaise,
rusty nails in the foot—
there are germs to be wary of
but it’s not the germs on your keyboard
that are going to take you out.

***

In San Quentin
loose tobacco is currency
and trust is the luxury of free men.

There’s a guy
I think is mad dogging me
the whole first class.
A little while later
I find out
he’s just missing an eye.

One guy says
all he does
is eat sleep shit
work out and write poems
and jerk off
and I think
that’s what I call Saturday.

Another guy talks about his teeth.
Neither of us had gotten dental care
until the year he went to prison.
and I started working an office job

One guy tells me
he hasn’t been home for a family vacation
in five years.

That sounds great I think,
a perfect excuse.

***

For most of my life
I thought the office job
was impossible for me.
I thought San Quentin was more likely.

I have more friends who have done time
than have had corporate jobs.

I’ve heard more stories
about cellmates
than CEOs.

I read poems to the convicts.
They laughed in the right places,
got quiet in the right places,
they understood what I was saying.
I knew how to talk to them.

At work I agonize over emails,
don’t want them to be taken the wrong way.
I’m afraid of offending people,
sounding snide or sarcastic,
or that I don’t give a shit,
especially when I really
don’t give a shit.

The convicts know what it’s like
to hurt someone and feel bad about it,
that losing a fight heals,
but winning one can haunt you.
Free or convicted,
none of us really gets away
with anything.

In the ‘90s I was temping.
Fight Club came out.
We were talking about it,
I said, How the hell would you find
that many guys who had never been in a fight before?
The room was quiet.                                                                       
I was the only one.
It totally ruined my next
ecstasy trip
I was in the Cat Club.
They were playing T Rex:
70s music 80s clothes and 90s drugs.
I was almost thirty,
still figuring out why
my life wasn’t normal.
Until then I thought it
was just me.
I thought
there was just something
wrong with my brain
that I couldn’t take it
I tried to tell this girl
who looked like David Bowie.
I said, We are all normal,
it’s just our lives that are fucked up.
She looked at me and smiled,
pointed to her ear and mouthed,
I can’t hear you.

The convicts know what it’s like
to be small
and have to protect yourself
the best you can.
That fear and small
are forever connected.
They know what drugs make you feel big,
and that big means not afraid.

***

The workshop was only two weeks long.

I went back to work.
One of my coworkers accidentally
forwarded an email to me.
He was talking mad shit.

Bar life
Drug life
Says I have to call him out
in front of everyone.
Don’t look like a punk

But I wasn’t in a bar
or a crack house.
This wasn’t a drug deal,
this was an office
at the end of the F Line
at a job that
bought me a condo,
a truck,
and got my teeth fixed.

I printed the email out and took it to HR,
filed a harassment complaint.
There were a bunch of meetings after that.
I never felt any better about it.

I went home,
worked out,
wrote a poem,
ate,
shit,
jerked off,
and went to sleep.

8/27/17

At Last the Secret is Out - W. H. Auden

At last the secret is out,
as it always must come in the end,
the delicious story is ripe to tell
to tell to the intimate friend;
over the tea-cups and into the square
the tongue has its desire;
still waters run deep, my dear,
there’s never smoke without fire.

Behind the corpse in the reservoir,
behind the ghost on the links,
behind the lady who dances
and the man who madly drinks,
under the look of fatigue
the attack of migraine and the sigh
there is always another story,
there is more than meets the eye.

For the clear voice suddenly singing,
high up in the convent wall,
the scent of the elder bushes,
the sporting prints in the hall,
the croquet matches in summer,
the handshake, the cough, the kiss,
there is always a wicked secret,
a private reason for this.

8/26/17

Healing Hermann Hesse - Buddy Wakefield

Hermann wants to eat nicotine sometimes. He asks
for a lot. He paces space to make himself nervous
because some people are better at surviving than
living. If you wanna get heavy he'll teach you. He
knows it. Spends his time falling from the weight.
Got a lead brain. It's a battle magnet. He carries it
around by the guilt straps. Don't laugh. You didn’t
see the size of the blizzard that birthed him. Fits
of snow. Cotton rocks. Whipped white bullet stretches
pinned with chips of teeth to his habit of crying for help.
He doesn't land well. Hates landing. It reminds him of not
living up.

Listen.
I know there were days you wanted to die.

Days you misplaced all the right words then waited
to make sense once everyone here stopped watching.

Nights you let them beat up your body in bed
because redemption was still alive in you howling.

Uncompromising.
Gathering strength.

Happiness
is too far to fall.

Felt like ecstasy
when they pounded it out of you.

Those days of dead weather high strung out together
and spoke for you.

You told everyone here it was a good life,
smiled and waved back into the wails of your wind fight,

into the parts of the past that haunt you,
all the days you weren’t being yourself.

It’s why most of the past
still haunts you,

Milk Worder,
Mr. Self Murder.

Hiding is not an option for people
so good at showing up. You show up.

It is okay that you showed up missing.
We’ve all abused ourselves

then looked over
the wrong shoulder about it.

Call it Fatherlock.
You were picked like this.

I know you hate the hope.
It’s all the hope that makes you stay.

And you stay so far off the ground.

Hermann will not bow down to gravity. Falling
he catches up to himself midair just before the ground
smacks. Pullthroat, they call’im. Sharp turner. Nothing
touches the ground here.  Ground is at capacity.
He sees that. He falls back. He patches parachutes
together with a kite knife.  It's big enough to raise him
in the updrafts where he hides himself away in angles
of air outlined by his knack for believing that this life
is gonna work itself out.

8/12/17

On Being Captain of Philadelphia's Top Ranked 1996 Academic Decathlon Team - Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

We had a problem with Talisha.
She was known for being a bad highlighter.
She would highlight everything.

She told us she highlighted only
what she felt was important but it seems
she felt everything was important.

The academic team would sit around and
have conversations about how to address
Talisha’s highlighting problem.

Do we keep her away from team materials?
Do we have an intervention? Someone suggested
giving her two differently colored highlighters,

in an attempt to teach her the difference
between selective highlighting and a free-for all.
Turns out, two highlighters made her problems

worse. We were finally forced to agree
that we’d all just have to accept Talisha’s
highlighting issues, because we needed her.

She was our regional Teen Jeopardy champion,
and was the only one who knew anything about
Victorian Literature.

Sometimes, when I hear stories about other
people’s teen years, I feel like they are talking
about some exotic country,

one I know I’ll never visit: the slang they used,
the boys they kissed, the nights they snuck out,
the parents they’d upset,

all the things they had to worry about
and all the things that they never ever ever
had to worry about.