Three poems from August (sketches)
I’ve been writing a lot of short, metered poems lately – just as a way to help me process the world, and keep up some bare minimum of a writing practice – and getting a lot out of it. I think of these almost like a “sketchbook” – the things I write to get myself warmed up to write – but then, they are what often end up being my favorites, even and especially in that unfinished state.
Here are a few from this past month.
-A
[UNTITLED]
Democracy is getting old
Enough for trouble sleeping through the night
To start. Once woken up
They get on phones and peter out.
A middle agèd kind of vibe: weak heart;
Receding hair; sheer violence and
Belief. The darker side
Already here. Furry monsters, scales and shields
And glass refracting many-colored light.
Pointed toenails poking out from chicken feet
Below a human head. A serf will turn
These images awake in time
And awful rhymes will history forgotten forge
Where rows and rows of blood and soil converge.
[UNTITLED]
No state by any right exists
Only serves at the privilege of its constituents
And, in some sense, the world around it.
Stick and bone arms, protruding spines,
It makes me sick and want to run right in
And play avenging friend. Instead I wait
At home, a coward with a family warm.
The age I’m in is overfed and starved.
The images of bone-thin parent arms
Beholding children, and a world that has
Forsaken them. Their sunken cheeks
Like mummies on display for all to see.
Our sense of kindness, justice atrophies
Like entire peoples under threat.
Muscles come and muscles get
And remain when loss of fat
Accelerates a waking grim.
The tumor on my grandma’s back.
Each age eats the last.
Horror confines where joy enlarges.
To say before the saying thins.
This world and all its many sins
And songs. We carry on
In temperatures extreme
And leave all dreams behind, for when.
[UNTITLED]
ICE masks unfold, and in patient time reveal
Expressions, life, a mission
Some purpose buried deep within.
“Please go away,” they say to me.
“This world you think is warm and kind
Is but a joke. Why trust the kind
Of husks of men that shaming speak?
What makes you think you know this life?
My struggle? The things I like?
To even put in words
So far beyond. I’d rather live
In curdled anger than
To open up and let you in. A cage
Has bars and waking words will walk
Too far. Please make it stop.
Release me from this open air
And let me live my life in cold betrayal of
All motherly alms.”
He slips his mask back up.
I stutter back. The offered hand
Falls off and searing splits.
We enter combat.