The Public House

PUBLISHED IN THE COPPERFIELD REVIEW: Volume 10 Number 4 AUTUMN 2011 Edition



The Public House

The public house
challenges me to a duel again.
I walk to it as though
I intend to answer.

Behind the sky
the great senseless
eye un-blinks at me.

The clouds roll overhead
like knotted mounds of change  
as I go shuffling along into
a field of a lesser yield.

The harvest:
bloated gobs of shadow,
the overgrowth of the forgotten
and the tomorrow nights.

In the bar room haze,
we keep to a steady sway,
clinging to the drinks in hand

and howling
to the rafters
like a naked choir
in the Church of night.

We clink
our hanging heads
in obscurity,

little mechanical phantoms,
grazing together on the edges
of a muffled horizon.

A glimpse of the eternal(2003)

I counted the steps today

on my way out of the apartment.
It's not uncommon. Children do it all the time.

When I was little, I was always counting.

I always hope a staircase will have precisely eleven steps.

Eleven is the number that matters,

two lines running ever parallel.

You can't say the word parallel

without evoking the spirit of eleven

--a manifestation of some primordial magic!

In separating things, we are forever linked!

It is not uncommon.

Baseball players and golfers do it. 
Musicians, accountants, actors

and suicide bombers do it.

Maybe even big boss Bush does it,

"seven blinks in the left eye, five on the right

and now I'm ready for a thorough lie-fiesta, yee haw!" 

While we are on common, well understood themes,
Time, that other deceiver, catches me in its voracious jaws

and joins in on the fun; chews my mind like a licorice twig.


I don't wear wrist watches anymore, especially the digital ones.

My mother says to me, "when are you going to join the adult world
and get yourself a watch. Maybe for Christmas, I'll buy you one."


I turn her down. I cannot wear them anymore.
At first it was a playful thing, silly fun, then I became addicted.
"Look", I'd say to my friends and family, "1:01 and 01 seconds".  

A minute later, waiting to pounce on it,

"look now, 1:02 and 01 seconds". The apex of it all,

exhausted in a sweat of obsessive delirium,

"look, look, 1:11 and 11 seconds."

Five ones in a row, my straight-line guides to infinity. 

They mean that I have somehow captured the eternal.

They mean, nothing at all! 


All day I would be trapped like this, in a cage of moments.
When I saw a clock change to 1:23 and 45 seconds,
I thought I was using my time appropriately. 

Sorry mom, wrist watches are forever banished.


Pocket watches I can manage. 
If I have to reach into my pocket to get the watch,
Without really wanting to know the time for practical purposes,
my mind becomes aware of the pending lunacy
and the mania fizzles out with a series of deep breathes.

Something about symmetry, inherent and omnipotent;
Numbers, sidewalk squares and bathroom tiles. They soothe me.


I'm tracking the quiet movement of things,

propelled by a need to know.  I'm aware of the patterns,

keeping control on top of a bubbling planet!

Its not so bad anymore, not that I care much for those terms
That bind us to our fears, the phobias and the disorders.
Yet sometimes I search the bricks on buildings

or count the drops from a leaking faucet,

--at eleven I start all over again, 'again and again, 

--always eleven, eleven, my control and my relief!

We children who become men...

We children who become men

We children who become men

I will not speak for everyone.

In fact, I am less and less comfortable

with the 'we' as the years go on.

We children who go fast becoming men,

we who might not pan out before the day's end.

I will not educate with my experience,

you will learn by watching all the others,

we children steeped in our becoming

and the empty shell casings of our undoing.

Then there is the matter of my family.

Among that 'love' I am the last to let them know.

Among that 'we' I am the last to let it go.

I will not speak for everyone,

because so many, they may have chosen to forget,

we, the children who resist becoming men.

Outside the word

In the safety of skin

You have to know when to keep certain things separate, its a delicate trick.  It may seem like a fine idea to put some people among the snakes but in the end, the snakes would rather rest beside a hot stone and be free of bad breath and snapshot judgments.  "We are not the same" they'll say,  "It is you who created the devil, who laugh at the moon and sea and masterbate all over the quiet face of goodness.  It is you, not us."

Fondness Now---For Nelly(2001)

Fondness Now

--for Nelly

It was the day

that we drove to Tuxedo

up the 17 North

and we stopped to eat pizza

and you convinced me

to leave without paying;

they were so unaware,

preoccupied with motocross
and racing things.

You got up
to use the bathroom

and then slipped
out the back door.

I watched you
start the car and 
then I scuttled along
and we went driving
up the 17 North

to cliff dive
where the spot

on the ledge said ‘jump here’

spray painted next to it,  ‘Pink Floyd’

and I forget
what color it was

painted in but I am sure
that it is up there
even now.

We made love
before the bugs eyes
and the waterside

and walked among
that hum and quiet
in-between the highways.

It was that day,
I remember it.

I remember you so well now,

Your nervous laughter
and your music.

I regret not thinking fondly of you,

for so long in that period that

came after us and now it’s gone.

I am still
the same but I am not,

still gentle and hiding a sorrow

and perhaps you know
what I mean.

It was that day
that we went driving

Up the 17 North

to little tucked away Tuxedo

And all my pizzas now are paid for
with the fondest memories of you.

So many buttons

The first one is the original version which has been published in Askew Poetry Journal: Issue 10, Spring 2011

So many buttons

In Madrid, I was catching street signs one by one,
dragging them behind me in the long loose net of the day;

El Pintor Juan Gris, Alcala, Gran Via, Lope de Vega, San Bernardo.

All the names weighed less and less with every ‘avenida’ I burned across.

Todos son flush, perfectly in place upon my memory

like so many buttons on a winter coat;

so many plazas and stones, so many footsteps make a road.

I drank café con leche everyday and my words
turned this warm stain of moreno, bubbling in a froth of sweetness.

In Madrid, New York, Austin, Honolulu,

my desires have been dragging always just behind me, too close for me to see.

-->a revised version was written before the acceptance by Askew and is my current version of it.

So many buttons

In Madrid,
I was catching street signs one by one,
dragging them behind me in the
long loose net of the day:

El pintor Juan Gris, Alcala,
San Bernardo, Lope de Vega, Gran Via,
sign after sign, they burned me alive, 
I drank in every avenida 
like I do rioja.

These memories,
they are imperfectly in their place,
hoisted high above and weightless, 
like so many buttons on a winter coat,                                                
so many plazas and stones, 
so many footsteps make a road.  
   
I drank cafe
con leche everyday
and my words transformed
into a warm stain of moreno,
a sweet bubbling froth
of lispy castillano.

In New York,
my desires had been dragging
always just behind me, 
too close for me to see. 

 

Wally, I have foresaken thee

I started off this blog with commentary relating to poet B. Copeland's commentary in her own blog, about how she can't read Wallace Stevens.  I wanted to make it my point to read him and then decide if I too, could not read him either.  It has now been close to 6 months and I have yet to read him.  It seems, perhaps, her dilemma (and the use of the word dilemma in this situation is truly up to the beholder), has become mine, albeit for different reasons altogether...i am sloth personified...nahh, I'm just absorbed in my own work....eh, well, maybe its denial too..digress digress,, ahh, to be sailing down the Nile!

Me and magritte--(2002)

       Belgian painter Rene Magritte(1898-1967): "The Subjugated Reader"


Me and Magritte
Magritte, you've succeeded.
I was merely skimming you when I fell asleep,
and there in my lucidity you made your first incision
upon my heart. Your portability, my nightmare.

Inside the dream, a chair began to fold in on itself,
the front legs bent up and inwards, breaking its own abdomen. 
It looked as though there existed more space behind it than in front of it.

Steel pin light rained down on me from a ceiling of smoke,
stabbing me in the eyes and in my pain I was a God,
reeling and gasping in the boredom of an eternity.

My mother walked by, shirtless and coughing blood,
weak and gurgling my name, her eyes cast downwards
looking at the missing square cut from the center of her chest.
My father stood beside her, seething with clenched fists,
panicking, the ghost of the last buffalo, hot ash white skinned
wide mouthed, broken horns  and gargantuan tongue in full on rot,
panting, waiting for a drink of cool-water Hope, for the taste of ancient reverence,
-his face frozen like mine, the horror stricken jowls of the 'subjugated reader'.

I ran back and forth from her room to the bathroom,
wetting towels to soak up the blood that was marking a path
into her disappearance.  My mother, she could not stop paling into death. 
I cursed Magritte, with incomplete conviction, for attacking me, the reckless sleeper.
I knew that I should wake up, to sketch out the shadows of these images,
yet I seemed content, living out the terror of things that touch me.

I did panic, like my father.
I became angry and all the dream was suddenly swept away.
I felt for the missing piece, the square where once my heart had beat
and looking down through that hole in my chest, I saw myself,

my eight year old self, running away, giggling and clutching
the waning glow of the cut away meat and it looked, I think,
that there existed more space behind me than in front of me
and I woke up because I knew, surely this could not be true.

Healthy release

Healthy release

I must appear to you
a song half remembered,
the words have their meaning
but I lack what you structure.

I see you sitting among degrees and awards,
gold-set and gilded print on creamed velum,
framed with hues from collegiate colors,

and you see right through me, I'm not quite the fit:
"We hope that you make it, we'll adore you like Brigit."