The Inheritance - Stephen Dunn

You shouldn’t be surprised that the place

you always sought, and now have been given,

carries with it a certain disappointment.

Here you are, finally inside, and not a friend

in sight. The only gaiety that exists

is the gaiety you’ve brought with you,

and how little you had to bring.

The bougainvillea outside your front window,

like the gardener himself, has the look

of something that wants constant praise.

And the exposed wooden beams,

once a main attraction, now feel pretentious,

fit for someone other than you.

But it’s yours now and you suspect

you’ll be known by the paintings you hang,

the books you shelve, and no doubt

your need to speak about the wallpaper

as if it weren’t your fault. Perhaps that’s why

wherever you go these days

vanity has followed you like a clownish dog.

You’re thinking that with a house like this

you should throw a big party and invite

a Nick Carraway and ask him to bring

your dream girl, and would he please also

referee the uncertainties of the night?

You’re thinking that some fictional

characters can be better friends

than real friends can ever be.

For weeks now your dreams have been

offering you their fractured truths.

You don’t know how to inhabit them yet,

and it might cost another fortune to find out.

Why not just try to settle in,

take your place, however undeserved,

among the fortunate? Why not trust

that almost everyone, even in

his own house, is a troubled guest?

THE MAN WHO NEVER LOSES HIS BALANCE - Stephen Dunn

He walks the high wire in his sleep.

The tent is blue, it is perpetual

afternoon. He is walking between

the open legs of his mother

and the grave. Always. The audience knows this

is out of their hands. The audience

is fathers whose kites are lost, children

who want to be terrified into joy.

He is so high above them, so capable

(with a single, calculated move)

of making them care for him

that he's sick of the risks

he never really takes.

The tent is blue. Outside is a world

that is blue. Inside him

a blueness that could crack

like china if he ever hit bottom.

Every performance, deep down,

he tries one real plunge

off to the side, where the net ends.

But it never ends.

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.

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.

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.

in which you anxiously anticipate events that will not occur - Mira Gonzalez

in the end he told you that he didn’t want you

but he never did you the courtesy of leaving

out of necessity, you reconstructed your identity around being alone

though you almost never thought of it in those terms

you spent time allowing all the wrong people to think you are beautiful

watching them blindly perform unreciprocated feelings onto you

at a distance twice removed from the act

because you refuse to know the feeling of not loving anything

though the feeling will force itself into you sometimes

everyone will tell you what the most painful part is

they will say it’s the moment nothing is left for you in him

or it’s the moment he finds you in someone else

but nobody will tell you that it is possible

to move further from reality every day

until there are no parts of you in anything

Five of Swords, for all my death girls - Marty McConnell

Betsy’s in the second stall practicing

with a plastic razor, so I lie on the floor

to listen for the janitor, the cart’s

loose wheel squeaking our names down

the evening-empty hallway. the weeks

she was at Lutheran General, I didn’t

go to visit. but I know from her stories

what the doors looked like, closing,

how they strapped her to the bed

for her own protection. we’re 17

and I adore her despair. I think she’s shining,

fearless, carving herself a body that’s nothing

but light. on the way home, she lets me

drive. tells me there’s a trick

to disintegrating in increments subtle enough

not to trip the alarm wires, to hiding cigarettes

and death from therapists and parents and this,

all my girls have had down: how to go and go

until the night is too fragile or grimy

and then the fanfare, the wild dive

from the spire, the water tower, the clock

yanking its hands back, how to dangle

from the spotlight once everybody’s

watching. 1999: we lie on Angie’s futon

searching the phonebook for institutions

that will take her without insurance, curl

our bodies into still commas of want

to wait for morning. they take

her shoelaces, and her cigarettes, and I watch.

they give her forms and more forms

and I watch. they walk her to the room

with its single bed and single dresser

and unsmashable mirror and I ride

the long, high buzz of the door back

to New York. 2003: Georgiana is an expert

in suicide and poetry. her medicine cabinet rattles

like a jar of vengeful bees. she wants me

to find her. all our idols are martyrs, not one of them

a saint. her hair drops like cabernet all the way

to her waist. and how she needs me. my simple body

becomes bread in her mouth, I’m whiskey,

an obliteration who’ll get up in the morning

to call the hospital and make coffee. oh,

my pretty ones in love with the beast

of disappearing, there are many ways

to give birth. not one is without pain.

there are almost as many ways to die

as there are to love. tonight, I drink to you

who chose to keep going, who moved

through my body like a chemical

I could not keep. the night stands outside

like a hungry dog on an old chain, the scent

of lilies rising from the half moons of his teeth.

go ahead. tuck your babies into bed

and lovers’ hair behind their soft ears, as if

there’s nothing left to fear.

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.

"For some there is no music" - Henry Rollins

For some there is no music

No lights

No fire

No untamed madness that breathes life

There is work

Anguish

Frustration

Rage

Despair

A dullness that rings like wooden thunder

The essential - Aleksandar Ristović

I was not allowed to live my life,

so I pretended to be dead

and interested solely in things

a dead man could be interested in:

petrified reptiles,

museum bric-à-brac,

fake evidence passed off as truth.

I felt a great need to be really dead,

and so at all times I wore

a mask made of wood

on which someone occasionally drew,

with colored pencils,

the look of contentment,

impatience, desire, bliss,

or the look of someone who is thinking

about an entirely different matter.

Mirror Image - Louise Glück

Tonight I saw myself in the dark window as

the image of my father, whose life

was spent like this,

thinking of death, to the exclusion

of other sensual matters,

so in the end that life

was easy to give up, since

it contained nothing: even

my mother's voice couldn't make him

change or turn back

as he believed

that once you can't love another human being

you have no place in the world.

At Dusk - Gösta Ågren

I will be forgotten,

he thinks. Oblivion is

a deep mother. No one

will touch you there; no one

will forget you any more.

Richard Cory - Edwin Arlington Robinson

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean, favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich--yes, richer than a king--

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

"Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines" - Stephen Chbosky

Once on a yellow piece of paper with green lines

he wrote a poem

And he called it "Chops"

because that was the name of his dog

And that's what it was all about

And his teacher gave him an A

and a gold star

And his mother hung it on the kitchen door

and read it to his aunts

That was the year Father Tracy

took all the kids to the zoo

And he let them sing on the bus

And his little sister was born

with tiny toenails and no hair

And his mother and father kissed a lot

And the girl around the corner sent him a

Valentine signed with a row of X's

and he had to ask his father what the X's meant

And his father always tucked him in bed at night

And was always there to do it.

Once on a piece of white paper with blue lines

he wrote a poem

And he called it "Autumn"

because that was the name of the season

And that's what it was all about

And his teacher gave him an A

and asked him to write more clearly

And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door

because of its new paint

And the kids told him

that Father Tracy smoked cigars

And left butts on the pews

And sometimes they would burn holes

That was the year his sister got glasses

with thick lenses and black frames

And the girl around the corner laughed

when he asked her to go see Santa Claus

And the kids told him why

his mother and father kissed a lot

And his father never tucked him in bed at night

And his father got mad

when he cried for him to do it.

Once on a paper torn from his notebook

he wrote a poem

And he called it "Innocence: A Question"

because that was the question about his girl

And that's what it was all about

And his professor gave him an A

and a strange steady look

And his mother never hung it on the kitchen door

because he never showed her

That was the year that Father Tracy died

And he forgot how the end

of the Apostle's Creed went

And he caught his sister

making out on the back porch

And his mother and father never kissed

or even talked

And the girl around the corner

wore too much makeup

That made him cough when he kissed her

but he kissed her anyway

because that was the thing to do

And at three A.M. he tucked himself into bed

his father snoring soundly

That's why on the back of a brown paper bag

he tried another poem

And he called it "Absolutely Nothing"

Because that's what it was really all about

And he gave himself an A

and a slash on each damned wrist

And he hung it on the bathroom door

because this time he didn't think

he could reach the kitchen.

Beauty: A Poem - John McDermott

A few months before

my older son took his life

he called home and told his mom

I saw beauty

and know what you and Dad

have been talking about.

I was up so late last night

that I looked out from my balcony

and saw the sun come up.

It was so beautiful that

I just wanted to tell you.

I love you, Mom.

Void - Louise Glück

I figured out why you won’t buy furniture.

You won’t buy furniture because you’re depressed.

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you: you’re not

gregarious. You should

look at yourself; the only time you’re totally happy

is when you cut up a chicken.

Why can’t we talk about what I want to talk about?

Why do you always change the subject?

You hurt my feelings. I do not mistake

reiteration for analysis.

You should take one of those chemicals,

maybe you’d write more.

Maybe you have some kind of void syndrome.

You know why you cook? Because

you like control. A person who cooks is a person who likes

to create debt.

Actual people! Actual human beings

sitting on our chairs in our living room!

I’ll tell you what: I’ll learn

bridge.

Don’t think of them as guests, think of them

as extra chickens. You’d like it.

If we had more furniture

you’d have more control.