....From The Tree Of..................Pain Around Us
|
_______________________________________________________ The Flaggelant All she said was 'We're out of sugar. Will Equal do?' The hand came like a baseball bat and cracked her good. A tooth loose- another one. Her mind bloomed with carnations- the smell of death flowers; her own or his she couldn't tell, but none of that had happened. That would have been a simple- choice: the battered leaving- but a slow strangulation's the way it went...it was one that could not be borne, could not be gotten through, passed over into something better, maybe- for the sake of the children, those points of light that danced even when the evenings grew longer and he, with some excuse had missed another dinner, they still skipped, as children do despite her cored out heart. She has a photo of the three of them, mother, daughter, son- the day before she told them she was leaving. They stood under a spray of ten-foot fountain, arcing its crystals in a park- small arms reached out to feel the tickling water; smiles from here to Sunday. Her face already a ghost fading; she would save herself. Twenty years later it seems an ignomimy. She wished he'd cracked her back when she was tee-ter- ing. Lady Of Sorrows There was a statue in a garden where I used to walk. Chipped, ravaged by birds, dripped brownish tears when it rained. The white girl, half-reclined on a fallen tree, more gray than white with age, her hands hung limp, fingers opened, loose; mouth parted, grooves of gruel licked brown down both her cheeks beneath eyes as mournful as the place. She sat where sunlight never entered completely; rain dug deep. And I could take my sadness to her- leave it in the brackish pool that lapped her feet- that garden's gone now. Drowning Man It was Christmas in the dream. I walked toward the house that I grew up in and there you were- on the porch next door. Plaid shirt, thick, tousled hair, pinwheeling arms, yelling "Hey- Merry Christmas." And next to you was your wife. A darker shape pulled into itself and staring straight ahead. She stared for miles at nothing but you- your Christmas heart upon your sleeve, waving drunkenly with Save Me eyes- looking like a man on the deck of the tipped Titanic slowly going down. Impeccable They really couldn't talk anymore. The fashionable couple dressed as formally as possible, took their separate cars to separate restaurants; he ordered the crab coquille and she, the creme broulle. She sat just off the piano. Wrote little notes on flimsy, paper napkins: tiny squares of paper with the writing going runny from her water glass, as limp as love gone tired. He took his Monte Blanc pen to scribble down what hurt his heart, then tucked it neatly underneath a coaster on the bar. They left; drove home again to sleep in separate beds, curled round the millstones of their lives and in the restaurants, the waiters or the patrons would retrieve the sodden notes and try to read the ruined writing. Gone it was, save traces of a stray 'I love' or 'why'. Everlasting Now And Again So there won't be a Wuthering Heights ending: Catherine and Heathcliff hand in hand in fog. I see now what I couldn't see before: that forever is only sometimes, a convenience store for the heart that shops around- maybe another moor, perhaps a flawless face held frozen on another glass- another bolted door. Can't Connect The sound's all gone. Mouth's open in a Munchian scream- I don't hear you, you don't hear me trying to make a point. We hurl these medicine balls of lead- we are the Hod Carriers of Barely There. Haunted I look at Dan Rather and see my father's face; caved, dried. Older -after they found the cancer and Dan, too has had reversals. His soul pulled through the top of his head again and again on national television; tear ducts fauceting the news- the aftermath, the Crater. The Hill, 2 miles away, Manhattan where the bones whisper Dan..............Dan........ watch his haunted conversations with the dead- like dad, who used to look like that looking in the mirror. Sunk Why do I do this day in day out?- this pathetic tapping of keys like someone trapped in a submarine banging a spoon against the wall heard on radar too far to fix anything. Mars Rising There is but one war. We are in it ever, the fly buzz and beetle meal, the stench of rotting crops broken from stems along with the stench of men chopped down untimely, blackening under sun. Here is the thing cut short in the unrelenting sorrow of its shortening- here where life has stopped bacterial life remains. Here there is no pain where once their red and open mouths were mime to death, their vocal chords stay stretched in useless pose; we know the sounds they made. We grieve as they, without a prayer without a word and there are only meatbirds here to sing them home. Wake Up Call In Amityville Ice cold anger up the spine jumps over the line from ice to burning turpentine. The clock is fixed on 3:15 each time the bad dream wakes him, just like "Who is dead in the in the Whitehouse?" Lincoln said, and always bullets answer; a dark recognizance is what I fear most too. If it will be, be swiftly, no, I do not mean it- ...........................Be not .......................at all. On To Page 19 .............. Return To Contents This site sponsered by 
|