What I Assume

The Author's Just Reward

Muses, Any:
Am I the basket-weaver
whom yet you scorn?

For if I must forever weave
one same basket
Surely I will leave it undone

Mother, what think you
of my house made out of stone?

These years I've raised it tall,
Built these sons,
loved these songs of flesh and bone.

Muse, the one: were you there to hear
Fate knock my darkened door?
Did you guard my house for hours
While I wandered

Lone and far?

Lover, recall
the snuff you'd send me? All packed
into my ears, pressed
upon my brain,

You killed all circulations of this world,
Your comfort brought me home.

Every Muse Together:
Have I missed you? unwittingly
Have I abused you?
I have twisted you to twine,
and wrapped you round and round my woman's finger.

	O binding sting of inspiration!

We turned her warm skin black
As words spilled out
my overfull ears
as flesh melts from the bone.

Found this short poem attached to the end of an unfinished draft of a short story from who knows how long ago. Not sure if it was meant to be part of the story, or perhaps a poem inspired by the girl that also inspired a character in the short story…

Pan? or Pandora?

The glances you return to me
Strike the locks of my confession.
Guilt! They whisper, and thus guilty
I break that old box open

Wherein I'll be shown black, but coy,
With few delights to spare;
So hate me not for hoarding joy
Distilled from our broken stare.

The thing I’m learning about writing (and after many years struggling I thankfully am still learning) is that every day the simple act of writing begins like a fistfight with myself.  I have to defeat myself, I have to beat my brain into submission, I have to tenderize, exercise, and endorphinize.

Most days pit my Heraclean Ambition vs. Lenarean Self-Doubt (my brain, I suppose, the contradictory quagmire of sulfurous intellect and poisonous emotion?).  As I grow older the heads of the beast grow more plentiful, despite my struggling, as if each year I slice one off to find two growing back in it’s place.

“Good Morning. How may I thwart you?”

And so the more years that pass, the more difficult the challenge of finally conquering the Hydra.  The completed novel, published.  The collected poems, edited, selected, all good.  The finished play, revised, rewritten, readable aloud.  I’d like to think it’s a struggle between age and youth, a la E. E. Cummings’s old age sticks:

old age sticks
    up Keep
    Off
    signs)&
    youth yanks them
    down(old
    age
    cries No
    Tres)&(pas)
    youth laughs
    (sing
    old age
    scolds Forbid
    den Stop
    Must
    n't Don't
    &)youth goes
    right on
    gr
    owing old

But even if it were as simple as that, I am no Heracles, and I have no firebrand. Where is my Iolaus? And, if he were to come, shouldn’t I shun him for fear of Eurystheus’s judgement?  For my part, I can only bare-fisted show them what I’m made of, and in the showing make of myself whatever can be made.

Room

Cream swims through coffee;
Black bitterness queers
the sequins of fat.

Haiku’s are fun. Haiku’s are zen. Therefore, I try not to think about them too much upon completion, but I must admit the egotistical part of me is fantasizing that my mundane use of the verb queer causes a row amongst future students of literary criticism. You can parse the many assumptions in that statement.

What began as two lines for a longer poem that I never was able to finish have become two lines of a short poem. Is doing so a “cop-out”? Or a service to prospective readers? I prefer to label this edit the latter, if only because it increases attention to the first line, which (as an alternative to “I wish I had spent more time at the office…”) could acceptably constitute my Dying Words:

Riddle

I'm the tangled rope you wish to cut,

The minotaur's snort in the morning;

    Without trying, just by
    Being I untwine
    the labyrinth of sleep.

A sufferable confessional-style poem. It was meant to only be a list of things going wrong this morning, but it turned into something slightly better (at least until the last line).

Brawling (A January Morning)

Alarm went off, for once I was OK;
I hit snooze anyway.
Half-an-hour later I was in the shower
And hot water drowned out my head.

But Words battered back in my brain as I dried.
I hated them, the busy head.
I said, I don't need caffeine.

Took clothes, took food, took bag, took keys
Frost was on the ground, ice was on the windshield

Bad news on the radio, but
I listened anyway in the parking lot of the cafe
Just to keep myself from going inside.
I took a deep breath, I went inside, ordered with pleasure,
sat myself down nervous beyond measure.

And I avoided writing, I avoided the story
I glanced at the poem and hated it too.
I took a sip and was, though not inspired,
subdued

Thusly I sit, subdued and sour
While still frost preys upon the ground
"But not yet on me,"

a muttered mantra
of the scrubbed clean, the self-soiling.

Myself, I woke up late, wanted some punk rock in the car on my way
to lunch, found the iPod was dead, flipped on the local High School
public radio station to hear the opening chords of Social Distortion’s “Ball and Chain“.

Though I don’t relate to all the down-and-out scenarios in “Ball and
Chain”, the thrust of the song is surely the same for me as it is for
songwriter Mike Ness. We’re each stuck with the life that we’ve made,
and because of the burdens we’ve forged for ourselves it’s damn hard to
start anew.

I do not pretend to be immune to the symbolism of the New Year, and
in synch with the song my mind hovered about all the useless burdens in
my own life that I’d like to leave behind this year, and of course all
the work it’ll take to cut just another few links off that self-made
chain. Dickens’s Marley said of his own heavy, spectral chain, “I made
it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will,
and of my own free will I wore it”. It’s amazing how resonant these
words still are, and how universal the imagery is as shown in both the
20th century punk rock song and a 19th century classic of fiction.

One should take warning that there is a paradox inherent in attempts
to break away from the old and redeem one’s self in the new: even as
one files away at the links of one’s chain, one must simultaneously
stave off the gradual but constant formation of new links. These links
come from ourselves, our imperfections, our vices, our bad habits. It’s
certainly the same cold iron Mike Ness of Social D gnaws at when he
sings, “But wherever I have gone / I was sure to find myself there.”

This begs the question, If you can’t escape yourself, can you ever
be free from self-made chains? Doing it on one’s own is a constant,
exhausting, and precarious struggle; it’s no surprise that many in the
US choose to ignore their own chains, and reject the redemptive hope
that can still be found in New Year resolutions.

This is my first revision of the first poem of 2008. It has gained a title (the parentheses added at the last minute).  It has gained an ending (though I fear it may be too simplistic).  It has gained a more rhythmic patter of line spacing (line spacing flow consciously inspired by Donald Hall’s very natural style). 

Exempting Everything

For Ever, my beloathed sweet

What can a soul see in a black hole?
To that's where we're all spinning
Wrapped up in the gravity of the situation

The inevitable "To Be..." of this event horizon

Round it churns like some galaxy
Flushing dust and chaos
Down with you and me

But dizzy we're not
None of us
numb-brained as we freeze
All of Us

Tugged further from the sun

Oceans of intelligence turn to orbs of ice,
All the seeds we've thrown and sown
Tamed as they grow, densening to mere debris

the ever-increasing clutter

Our only hope is in the hole
And towards it we invertibly sputter
About it we only can stutter

  A stream of light?
  A spat of disorganized matter?
  Evaporate in a singularity?
  Reborn through divine charity?

Or Alpha
the Above,
as my father and his science said,

  Stretched, compressed, singularized,
  Expunged, expelled, reorganized

That must be the worst lie I've learned

The omnipresent torment I've earned
For seeing the other side of the black hole

Gazing straight through the Rent Veil: the whole

World As We Know It emptying
Prince Hamlet's dreams cemented
Our ignorance exempting
Physics and philosophy equally contempted

The Inevitable Tomorrow impending
Death Himself suicidally tempted
Both God and Man repenting
And Life Itself resented

For seeing the other side sees nothing
Feeling nothing
Voided in the voidless something

Rounded up and corralled in
the diaphanous Om 

of Amen.