Strangers - Richard Shelton

we find ourselves at the exact place

where the light becomes darkness

and turn our faces toward one another

realizing we could be lovers we could

be anything we could even be friends

we could carry our scars

like banners we could pray to each other

and answer each other’s prayers

                 

this is the earth we can touch it

the mountains expose their nipples

to the last rays of the sun

and day lingers on the undersides of leaves

with so much need on the horizon

surely there is a heart around here somewhere

but we are characters from a book who have

come here on vacation

to listen to the pulse of the sea

which makes an affirmation beyond despair

those who have heard it

do not recommend it to anybody

we have heard the hypnotized telephone

ring itself into a trance of silence we have

seen the poor pass by on borrowed legs

we have been enameled by the sun

and as we are slowly going under water

where all light

is the light of a green stone broken open

we keep our distance it is all we have

Do the Dead Know What Time It Is? - Kenneth Patchen

The old guy put down his beer.

Son, he said,

        (and a girl came over to the table where we were: 

        asked us by Jack Christ to buy her a drink.)

Son, I am going to tell you something

The like of which nobody ever was told.

         (and the girl said, I've got nothing on tonight;

        how about you and me going to your place?)

I am going to tell you the story of my mother's

Meeting with God.

         (and I whispered to the girl: I don't have a room,

        but, maybe . . .)

She walked up to where the top of the world is

And He came right up to her and said

So at last you've come home.

         (but maybe what?

        I thought I'd like to stay here and talk to you.)

My mother started to cry and God

Put His arms around her.

         (about what?

        Oh, just talk . . . we'll find something.)

She said it was like a fog coming over her face

And light was everywhere and a soft voice saying

You can stop crying now.

         (what can we talk about that will take all night?

        and I said that I didn't know.)

You can stop crying now.

LONELY - Natalie Wee

I have taken to being in public places

by myself. My cleverest trick was

to hold intimacy against bone

without telling it my name. Like any

unloved thing, I don’t know if I’m real

when I’m not being touched.

Because who am I but who

I am to someone else?

I know now the ways of nameless

birds & the cost of a life built

from waiting. I go to any window

I please, bare-handed, hovering

a/part. Watching when devotion

becomes duty. When soft becomes

stranger. Look. I was soft once, &

then I was a stranger to

myself. No tender mouth is worth

a slow death. No heart is worth

the belly of a beast. The secret is:

tender attends the heels of bruises.

The secret is: be bigger

than your alone.

MAGIC - Shel Silverstein

Sandra’s seen a leprechaun,

Eddie touched a troll,

Laurie danced with witches once,

Charlie found some goblins’ gold.

Donald heard a mermaid sing,

Susy spied an elf,

But all the magic I have known

I’ve had to make myself.

Thank-You Note - Wisława Szymborska (Translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak)

I owe a lot

to those I do not love.

Relief in accepting

others care for them more.

Joy that I am not

wolf to their sheep.

Peace be with them

for with them I am free

––love neither gives

nor knows how to take these things.

I don't wait for them

from window to door.

Almost as patient

as a sun dial,

I understand

what love never could.

I forgive

what love never would.

Between rendezvous and letter

no eternity passes,

only a few days or weeks.

Our trips always turn out well:

concerts are enjoyed,

cathedrals toured,

landscapes in focus.

And when seven rivers and mountains

come between us,

they are the rivers and mountains

found on any map.

The credit's theirs

if I live in three dimensions,

in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,

with a real, ever-shifting horizon.

They don't even know

how much they carry in their empty hands.

"I owe them nothing,"

love would have said

on this open topic.

The More Loving One - W. H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

That, for all they care, I can go to hell,

But on earth indifference is the least

We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am

Of stars that do not give a damn,

I cannot, now I see them, say

I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime,

Though this might take me a little time.

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.

FOR THE LEAVING - Andrea Gibson

Nobody

ever thinks

about the weight

of a comet, how heavy

something has to be to go

that fast.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Depression, Too, Is a Kind of Fire - Taylor Mali

I’m an idiot because once

before we were married she asked me whether I knew

that we would not be having children

if we did get married, and I said yes.

And because she knew I was lying,

she asked if I was really okay with that.

And because I’m an idiot I said yes again.

And once during a fight, not married

more than two years, she said she felt like my first wife,

and I, like an idiot, assured her that she was.

She worked out at the gym five times a week

and smoked as many packs of ultra lights,

and I’m an idiot because when I asked her why,

She said, Because I hate myself and I want to die.

And I laughed and said something I don’t recall,

something completely and utterly insufficient.

From the roof of our apartment,

I saw 40 or 50 people jump from the towers

on a Tuesday morning—we used to be able to see them to the south,

just as, to the north, we can still see

(and by “we” I guess I mean now just me)

the Empire State Building,

which still steeps me in gratitude

because I’m an idiot—

out of the smoke with arms flailing.

And I swear I saw a perfect swan.

And I was going to write a poem

about how fire is the only thing

that can make a person jump out a window.

And maybe I’m an idiot for thinking I could have saved her—

call me her knight in shattered armor—

could have loved her more,

or told the truth about children.

But depression, too, is a kind of fire.

And I know nothing of either.

LENS - Andrea Gibson

I’ve been practicing gratitude.

I’ve been skipping entire weeks.

Practicing a wider lens. Listening

for the bully’s heartbeat

Hearing it in my own chest.

I’ve been remembering the time I cried

in a cloud of tear gas at a peaceful protest.

How I decided I was too soft to last,

and then I decided to be softer.

I’ve been remembering way way back

to the moment they told me Jesus walked on water.

How I knew whatever I’d grow up to believe

I would never try to wrestle a miracle

away from anyone’s reason to live.

I’ve been remembering how I wrestled a miracle

away from your reason to live.

If only shame could wash me clean,

but that is never how healing works.

Nobody ever won anything from anyone

thinking the whole world was out of their league.

I’m sorry you know

what I look like when no one is looking.

I don’t expect anyone to believe

in justice and forgiveness at the same time.

If it’s any consolation

I feel like a ferris wheel in a snowbank

twenty years after they shut down the park.

If it’s any consolation I’ve been living in my head

whenever anyone tells me I have a good heart.

And I think about you. I think about you. 

untitled 8 - Mira Gonzalez

it is 2:05 in the morning

your foot on the brake is preventing the car from drifting backwards

he is kissing you first deliberately

then in a lazy or confused way

you know he is trying to communicate something important

and maybe he has wanted you for a long time

but his tongue is moving around your mouth

you begin to wonder if he wants to kiss you

or if he wants to push his way through you

you can see his bedroom window from where you are standing

he is climbing over fences and unlocking them from the inside

he says ‘go up those stairs and turn right’

you swear that you would have loved him a year ago

and every day since then

you are waiting at the top of his stairs

you don’t know where to look or what to touch

you are thinking about the ‘check engine’ light in your car

you are aware of certain things while he has sex with you

helicopter noises through an open window

a bottle of blue cough syrup

street signs indicating the direction to an eastbound freeway

he is strong and gentle and you wish he was only one of those things

he is tracing his fingers across the edge of you

everything is quiet other than a barely audible sound

in the space between his arm and his shoulder

he says ‘why are you sighing so much’

you say ‘that is just how I breathe’

he says ‘you don’t want to be here’