Something Tookish

There’s a redhead in the corner again
with skin like a snow melt & teeth like rime
before the farmer breaks it.
I can’t help but watch the way
she steals starlight like I steal dawn,
& the closer we come to a clear night,
the more looking at her, looking at the way
her freckles flicker like cold lightning,
I think I see the night again
after losing it to you
& your returning.

Already all the poems I have never finished
come walking in -
I know only half of them by name.
The others I know only
by their smell, by the taste of their mouths,
or the feel of their ass in my hand.
All of them are trying to get back
& all of them are leaving,
pounding at the paper walls
full of words & fruit -

fruit, you see, are full of words too,
& their seeds are unspoken
poems, their skin
the skin of lovers you have never known -
there are always so many of those.

You see the way I work, running in circles
around women that don’t exist,
worrying over ones that do,
but don’t matter?

I am full of dawn, but it is old dawn,
& the words are old too,
but at least the coffee is good
this side of oblivion,
darker than any woman I’ll ever have,
& at home a bed of books is waiting up for me:
all my lovers, all my answers to hours
of loneliness, & skies without stars,
& cold oceans without birds, or smoke
without flames, which is nothing
that needs an answer,
I guess.

I am wandering
again, to find an answer to these broken poems,
which are the only things worse
than the lovers in my life,
though they should probably meet,
I think they’d get along.

they’re full of shit.

Tonight, I will squash this spider; I will turn the eight-armed universe into a stain on my hardwood floor, & afterwards, I will leave Hank’s streets behind me, let him have his hookers in their pink jumpsuits that look like flamingo feathers smeared clean, & let him have his cheap booze & his world I am not ready for -

one day I will walk his streets like the sound of broken glass, like cats gone feral on the black squish of asphalt & the city’s grey skin. For now I will trade it for Italy, & soon I will tire of that too like the Aries I am - I will taste Persia, breathe the red dust until I am the red dust, & I will crush grapes for penance, & drink the wine that follows my footsteps.

Rumi will be proud of me, or he will roll over in his grave, & the entire earth will roll with him. Better to roll in Rumi than the shit it has been; the atomic vomit of a world that needs glasses, but thinks it’s too cool. You’ve had a few thousand years, now grow the fuck up.

See what Dylan does to me, man? He let a spider sit in his head & spin webs from the whispers of gods, stripping the stars from their skin to spin the flesh of angels into orbit, & give a voice to the dead sea -

& here I am kicking up flies with his nephesh.

At best I can make a ghoul of my dead brain,

& wonder why I didn’t tell her that I only hold the coffee cup so much because I have nothing else to hold

(It’s no different than the time I told the girl that I was peachy, when she asked me how I was, & I sighed, & I added that the only problem was that peaches weren’t in season. Ask me again & I will be an orange, but I will tell you that the problem this time is that we can’t grow them this far north without pretending something, & I leave the pretending to the experts),

or how I almost told her that I wished she was the coffee cup, & I could hold her always, but I didn’t because I was afraid of saying something that might not be true because I knew she was a Pisces, & I’ve been trying to give up meat, & the last ten years have been wet enough -

I’m starting to sound like the crackle of spit in the bottom of my pipe & everything is going to ash: I can barely find the cigarette’s sour cherry inches from my lips when the lights go out, & I’m invisible in the sun, & I have loved the water well enough to know it always hurts me.

I almost think it’s time to move inland, to put a little dirt beneath my nails, but every earth sign I know is crazy, & I’ve already had enough crazy for two. I wonder at the air, but I know the wind does not always feed the flames, & I am small enough that a whisper could blow me to oblivion.

Fire speaks the same flickering tongue I do & has sweet-talked the shadows into dancing for it - why would I ever fight over the same food?

I will always go back to the water.

But before the river rises again I will love my coffee, bleed her heat into my fingers, & I will sit here turning my kidneys black with what’s left of a good night’s sky, & try to guess what organ’s going next; then I can start selling them, just before they turn, for fifty cents, because I’m used to selling myself short, & that way I can be as hollow as I feel.

(Side notes:

• My kidneys went before my sonnets.

• My heart, who won two medals for bravery in the face of women, died before he could earn a third.

• My liver told me just before Christmas that he’s leaving, found a better job, & I keep toasting his success.

• & this week I put my lungs on sale. BOGO. First come, first served. I have ten bucks against my ribcage that they’re the next to go

): I’ve been short on breath lately, but that’s what happens when you switch to single malt.

There goes the night, & I’m three cents short of a refill, but just one more for the road -

Once, I drank with a goddess that smoked like a fish.
When I kissed her in my sleep, I tasted every fire I had ever owned,
& I learned the only question worth asking:

why is there always a redhead in the corner?

I have been reading Rumi,
but maybe it would be better
to say that I have been walking
the same steps
that he walked,
& now my brain feels greater
than the sum of its atoms;

atoms which are only doorways
to each lotus thought,
which blossom with the sun,
& open with the moon,
& which feed the falcon
who pollinates the earth with stars.

I have been reading Rumi
for a cure,
& I have heard the Opener’s whispers
in the song of neurons,
which are distant like planets in the great beyond,
but as close as lovers
on the couch before the fire,
huddled in woodsmoke, which is the warmth
& the smoldering kiss of God.

I wish that it were yesterday morning, when I woke to the smell of hazelnut; the warm simmer of the dark universe, which is endless & liquid – when I woke to the conjurer’s croon & the old magic of Christmas music from the other room; oceans away, carrying snow.

Some days it is not so difficult to be at home;

to hear the scribble of the calligraphy nib against the grainy yellow paper, to smell the vinegar & acrylic, which is almost as lovely now as coffee at the start of sun.

But then I remember waking to my father’s words before the sun –

when the coffee is too black somehow; when the sounds of his regret stir the floorboards with unyielding sorrow, when his sadness floods the silence of the morning rooms, & his anger is most like the fury of floodwaters that I have learned to respect, & my parents have to taught themselves to fear.

Here I remember that I am my father too,

or I will be, or I might be,

& for now, at least, I am not my father, but I know that it is in me, & that I may one day still turn my heart to fear –

that the color blue that I am sometimes, & have been lately more, or the red edges that are somehow too red, have had a lifetime living in his skin, & they are my inheritance if I will have them.

& I will not have them.

Listen to my weirding. Listen to my flux of words.

Some days I am better at pretending than my father; better at ignoring the unwanted colors.

But it seems always now I find him ready to remind me that they are still there, & this is what home is; unwanted colors & a burden of unnecessary thoughts.

It is difficult to right/write when you are moving in blue & too black & you are edged in red, but your world is grey from the ground hoaring over, & the water is fresh with rime, & your lips are jealous, & you are lost in old pages, & you keep going backwards, sifting through thin sheets, which are like moth wings, like corpsewrappings, like dust –

& you worry you are dust,

& you fear the wind

for nothing.

Today, I slept on the border between morning & noon, & in those few seconds before the trumpet of my pestering phone rang a clarion in the still, sleeping air, I held my dreams so close that I could see her in the wetdark of psychic stars – the molten infinity of a mind’s broken universe.

When I woke, I wanted nothing to do with dreams, which are too near the heart. I wanted nothing to do with the blue smoke & the particle thunder of thoughts, or the atomic pearls that the day-sand threads through the cracks in my dreamcatchers.

(Dreams, which are the shape of longing & envy; dreams, which are the future’s dead eyes turning back the sun.)

I wanted nothing to do with the girl, with my bright latelyhaunting, always wearing her bracelets of winter mist, hanging birdsongs from her white throat like skulls. I wanted nothing of her whiteriver dress, which was sunlight also, & current, & hunger; nothing of her hair which is the nonlight on the moonangle of collarbones in a nightroom, hot with new flesh –

Or her greywealth eyes; always the mooncolor of an old coin, the fading of ink catching up;the stone I tied a wish to with a night heron’s scream, & skipped into the sinking dark.

I am waiting & waiting for it to sink through the ripple,

& she is waiting, & waiting for me to follow.

There are some nights where the only thing you want is someone beside you to read poetry with while the world is breaking; someone to listen while Celaya silvers the air & you darken your tongues on Bukowski & wine. Someone to recite Cummings, a texture you know by heart, or Neruda, whose dance you have only seen matched by the sea. Someone who will swallow Johnston & Hower, & will love them as smallgods for what they were, instead of dismissing them for what they never became.

Some nights you need someone with languages, like starlings above a deadrusset field, that has spoken more novels than you have ever known; someone that can paint you the heartbeat of a mountain as well as the shape of the wind - someone who will know the poetry of a bough breaking beneath the snow, & will listen for the splash of trees against the water, & go still at a chatter of leaves, waiting for a whisper of wings or a harsh cry from a night heron as she flees her nest.

Some nights all you need is someone, or words, & you can find neither -

you go on shivering the small lightning of snowflakes against your broken mouth, stroking the mostlydark of your bedroom’s black hair to untangle the stars, & then you sleep in the blue orchid of your pillow’s breath until you wake to the shipwrecked remains of spent dreams & cracked moonlight; & the corpse of a coffee cup; & the woodheart of a plum;

& the glass feathers of another morning wrinkle in.

I have some nights wondered at your eyes,
which are so much
like you, so much like broken earth,
& how I still see sunlight
squeezedbetweentheircracks –

white sun,
which settles
through a thin fiber of skeleton leaves
like a revenant breath
on your riverskin;

how you are some days like mist
burying long fingers
into the twisting current,
& how you are like stones too,
fitted like greywealth in glacial sand,
pearled deep with living wet.

I think that I will see you always
with the water,

& sometimes with the moon,

but that I will love you most when you are beach glass
along my strange ocean,
when I can cut my fingers on your green edges,
& rub the salt from your wounds.

This will probably not be the only time that this happens, but the era of the beard has gone, & I think that it is time to reinvent the blog. This is not to say that I will be beardless, or blogless!, but rather that I am no longer comfortable identifying myself with my facial hair. Some days I want it & most lately I don’t, though it is getting colder & I suspect my bare face will be displeased with the wintery bite when fieldwork in five below arrives.

For now I want freedom though & that means no more beard blog.

It has taken me a few days to get around to writing this; probably a week even or more, though time is blurry & always uncertain in my thoughts that are scattered like stars, but I have had trouble deciding on new names. In the same sense that I cannot choose what tattoo to get from the calamity of images in my head, or what my favorite poem is, or which girl in the widening night to love in the language of inky fingers; similarly I can’t imagine how to limit myself to a few words. I mean even if I had an unlimited number of characters I don’t think that it would be any easier to choose.

As with all of the transitional times in my life, I found myself going back to The Hobbit. I may not be able to choose a poem, & probably that’s because to keep writing I have to love my own work more than everyone’s, but I can definitely choose a book. I am always reading it, always remembering at weird intervals scenes from the animated movie & when I was trying to decide on a new name, instantly recalled the line a few pages before they set out on their long journey.

(At this point in writing the blog I thought that I was still unsure of the name, but it is here, while La Dispute, my new musical love obsession, filled the low silence of my room & while the animated movie played above it, that I made my decision)

In this scene, they are all in the room, all thirteen dwarves, Bilbo, & Gandalf, but because of the movie I never imagine the dwarves as really being there. Their bodies are gone, at least, replaced by the music of their melancholy greed. I see instead, & always, the wizard, white beard & smoke, filling the air with colored rings & many shapes, & beside him our reluctant hobbit growing larger; his long-contained self is expanding beyond his little frame. & there is a wonderful line there, spoken by Gandalf in the animated film, but a sharp, hammer driven thought in Bilbo’s mind in the book, just after, “something Tookish woke up inside him,” where he considers what it might be, “to wear a sword instead of a walking-stick,” and I thought that these were things that the current evolution of my brain could get behind.

You’ll notice I didn’t go with it exactly, but that’s because I feel like my days of carrying a sword are done with. I feel like I’ve spent my entire life mostly fighting who I am & fighting the going & fighting & fighting & fighting. I have spent my entire life bloodying a sword & I’m sick of it. I’m sick of slitting my throat with worry, of anger bleeding me out, of an asphyxiating depression & of trying to be somebody I’m not.

I am a weird, nerdy poet with two atomic soles, ready to turn miles to shadows behind me; ready to carry a walking-stick & to leave the fighting & the giving-a-fuck to somebody else. Someone else can wear the sword.

I’m ready for the full-blossoming mellow, to see the great mountains & for the full poison of life. I am ready to take America into my arkenstone heart & break her into diamonds that will by melt by noon – melt into the water & melt into the mouths of many between the breath of a kiss, on the sigh of the broken, over prayers of the lost. I am ready, I am ready, I am ready.