She Can Hope
Can we name this something nice and new? Beneath the lyft, beneath our heavy-hearts, lays something precious but smashed. Can all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put me back together again? Or maybe bear me somewhere verdant and golden to lie in (an austere) state? Can we name this something scientific and rob it of its virulence? We called it a syndrome and hid inside of those safe and smothering confines, firmly placing ourselves within the demarcations of the sick. Of the curably ill who self-righteously deny medication. It comes and goes, leaving only embers and poisoned memories in its violent wake.
So help me, I used to live better than this. Didn’t I?
Perhaps this chemical melee follows in line behind the unanswerable question—the root cause. The ultimate predication. The vast gulf between knowledge and action carries only the ships of the well-balanced—all these heavy thoughts in my head would surely capsize me quickly. I still see a shade of me sinking slowly through the green murky sea.
These people part around me laughingly genuflect to a dim reflection of a bright idea. No. No. The opposite—a bright reflection of a dim idea, so refulgent in the early morning air that you can’t stare upon it and discern the lack of substance beneath. These men are vile in their unabashed honesty, their unashamed curiosity. You can be a good person or a happy person, but can you possibly be both? Can we discard the last vestiges of animal selfishness and assume an air of altruism? I don’t want to contribute to a system that hasn’t a sense of self-sacrifice anywhere within it. At the same time, the only real tangible result of martyrdom is a dead martyr. Maybe a heaven where real-estate is hard to come by.
These mistakes danced furtively beyond my comprehension while they wreaked a world of wonders into an underworld of despair and disrepair. I can’t understand any older versions of me anymore, because I’ve lost my ability to empathize with a hopeful fool who concurrently know that hope was foolish. There exists no should’ve, could’ve, or would’ve’s…only happens. There abounds much too much of happens.
Can you inject some humor into this lump of indifference? Could it be I’ve failed to accept a fundamental aspect of life, and I’ll continue in this same vein until I do? I recognize that the world doesn’t function as well as it could, and no one gets exactly what they deserve—this existence defines itself in a hodge-podge of happens. Why should I capitulate to it? I’m just so tired of being unhappy, and idiotically entrusting my quicksilver emotions to people who don’t recognize those aspects I don’t brandish as brashly as my jocular persona. I need, if just every once-in-a-while, to have someone I secretly, infinitely respect, to look at me and see something they can respect. I know that I’m an inherently good person, and I know that I brim with conflicting accounts of everything. I need some honesty, and desperately. Talk to me now, and I’ll tell you everything.
The New Season
Ink drawings and a chiaroscuro attitude,
Where the ambivalent gray sky kisses the fields
A flannelled man counts his lucky stars on both hands.
This is a life well led by the reins, he supposes,
As he stoically wipes the rain from his face.
Circle the date and circle the wagons,
Gather your wits and scatter your brains, scatterbrain.
This well-beaten path still redresses
The grievances of summer in the new season’s best—
All crinoline and cinnamon and imminent endings.
Me and you, you and me—we’re tending
Towards an orbiting symmetry.
Breathe in, breathe out, and please, breathe easy.
Have you seen the field’s new accoutrements?
I thought I spied your grace
In her leavings, sailing the autumn air.
<p class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0in0in 0pt”>Will they crash calamitously or never land?
I thought I spied butterscotch hair
As it navigated itself to an earthly home.
Breathe in, breathe out, breathe easy,
And allow yourself a feeling of control.
Where our thoughts and emotions meet,
Where the gray sky and green field greet,
Let’s dream ourselves a pair of souls.
The Recluse
She pressed her crucifix to her lips
And looked up, eyes wide, bright, unfocused—
“Mother, Mother, can you hear me?
It’s been one week since my last obsession.
A boy I’ve met has in his possession
A quiet charm and a pleasant disposition.
Will you hear my sadly carnal confession?”
The silence without and the noise within answered.
“I want him to love me, marry me,
Pick me up and carry me home.
I want him to love me, leave me,
Move on and remember me;
Maybe then I could die both happy and alone.”
She sank back into inactive despair.
“This isn’t right and it isn’t fair.”
Mirrors, Madness, and Bloodstains
The fluorescent filaments in the buzzing lights
Sang a chorus with the flies. Where she’d placed the
Ashtray he’d left the ashes, collected neatly
In a porcelain sheathe and drawn only to ward off the happiness—
Through pinched fingers and closed eyes
He blessed the heads of solemn antiquity:
Chastity, modesty, and loyalty, all unhappily,
A ceremony flirting coyly with insanity.
On a three-legged chair propped against the door,
He listened indifferently to the life outside knocking.
If I let it in, he wondered, would it ever leave?
When I’ve nothing left, will it want more?
The deadbolt, shiny and unworn, took to unlocking
Like a loaded gun took to cocking—
These temptations kill, he thought,
And courageous me, I’m all dressed-up
For this rigadoon, for this ash-bearing urn,
Doused in emotional kerosene,
Ready, willing, and waiting to burn.
The looking-glass in the house had shattered
Beneath his anger-thrown fist,
Leaving shards of itself on the floor.
The mural in the carpet—
Mirrors, madness, and bloodstains
Had spoken to him—“I am what you wear.”
“I am what you always wore.
And when people finally see it,
Don’t worry about having to lock the door.”
Idleness
She held her breath and closed her eyes.
Mentally quiet and outwardly calm,
Gold rosary firmly grasped within her palm,
She marveled at how time flies
And leaves her to crawl.
At work, attentive to a flashing screen,
Yet somehow not ever seeing a thing.
Food, people, and ideas rot—she’s preserved
The idea that she never got what she deserves.
What of love? Of lovemaking?
Hell, what of something to occupy the time?
At times as bad as these
Where everything is what it seems,
Her mother had said to her to
Hasten her heart breaking—
She never gets what she deserves
‘Cause she waits for it to come to her.
A Mess at Forty
A pile of calendars rested threateningly on the corner of her desk.
She shoved them off to land with the rest. A mess of forty
For a mess at forty. Can you understand what it is to live so long?
A Mess at Fifty
A stack of cards sat in the mailbox. Oh, how the fates conspire
With the clock. She fed them to the shredder—a mess of cards
For a house of cards. Can you understand what it is to collapse so fast?
A Mess at Sixty
A cake stretched on infinitely so as to contain the candles. She
Pinched them out one-by-one with her fingers—a mess of burns
For a sack of cinders. Can you understand what it is to live at all?
Alive at Seventy
She can hope.
Bad Sects, by Cursive
For 20 years I’ve held this pulpit
Preached the word, served the Eucharist
Gained the trust of the townsfolk
Made every football game
Never missed a social
Last week, a boy I taught theology
Came back in town with a new ideology
Those feelings I tucked away threaten the sanctuary
A lifetime of burning culminated in one innocent forbidden touch
I know this is wrong because I’m told this is wrong
A new recruit, 25 years old
He joined the habit with a chip on his shoulder
Some nights he’d proclaim his preference
Only flat back drunk on a bottle of Jameson
When all those nights we stayed up, the two of us
Singing our lives, just the two of us
We were hiding in the dark
I fell asleep by his side
We woke to the chimes and the bells of the steeple
And ran off to separate rooms
They can’t know what we’ve done
Our whole world would come undone
You’ll never live this down [repeat x15]
They’re gonna find you out
And when they find you out
They’re gonna drag you out
Don’t let them find you
I know this is wrong because we’re told this is wrong
A lifetime of burning culminated in one innocent forbidden touch
I know this is wrong because we’re told this is wrong