Thursday, April 24, 2008

What I Would Say to God

Here's something I've been beating my head against a wall about for a few weeks.
~isaac

What I Would Say to God


In the minutes before I sleep, I pray and in this prayer I say:
Dear lord,
I’m tired. I’m sick of love and sick of being lovesick for individuals who are not lovesick over me. I’m closer to crying when I watch Gone with the Wind or Singing in the Rain. I don’t sing much anymore. I don’t pray enough, I know. I’m working on that. My job isn’t the best and I know you have better things planned for me, so I’m not upset. What makes me upset though is I lost my keys again. If you could, please give me a hint tomorrow when I’m looking around for them. Also tell Bev to get off my back about backing into her car. It was an accident and you know that. She should too. This may be too personal but I’ve been curious about this lately: did your bones click along the spikes when they were driven into your hands or was it a clean break? Sorry, probably not appropriate to ask that. Sorry, I’m not good at this type of thing. I just want to be there with you, you know. Not as in also crucified. I can’t honestly say I want or wanted that, but I think it helps to have a visual. Seems more real that way, more stunning. As if that bloody blossom of your palm cupping the inserted metal were a way of understanding why I bump into my neighbors’ cars when I’ve been drinking or why the kid at the corner house was found face down in his neighbor’s backyard without clothes on. I don’t mean to sound condemnatory or critical. Just need something to see. Need to witness your face wince while you most likely mutter a prayer to your Father to save you, to make it less painful, although you didn’t mean you weren’t willing to continue. I’m less of a man. You’re more. So when I say, I want to see your side spill out, blood folding around the guard’s spear, I mean my hands couldn’t hold onto each other tighter. I mean if I didn’t pray as if an ocean were tearing me away from the shoreline or I want to say butterflies do this when they fold their wings together or it would be a sin not to touch you, place my ear on your lips and listen for any ocean. Your skull must be made of music. Your tongue the indigo of my dreams. For every artery, ten small tractors pushing uphill. So I pray that you might need me the way I would press your mouth to my ear hoping for the miracle of sound.

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Van Gogh Drinks PBR on the Paria Plateau at Sunset

Sunburned, leaning on the pickup’s hood, his eyes ripping up
the stone’s red surface, the sharp horizon line.

He searches his pockets, says he has something
to send to the night-black raven which just dove

into the canyon. Finding nothing, picks up a rock
and hurls it after the bird. Light never catches up to light,

he says, then tilts his head back, gets the last piss-drop
of gold onto his tongue, and stops and stares.

Navajo Mountain over there, beyond the lake’s open eye.
Grand Staircase to the north. This desolation

of stone and piƱon trees, dead cows and sky.
He fingers his ear. Wants to call some woman.

I tell him it’s three hours to a phone. Tells me
to fuck off and stalks to the back of the truck

to get another beer. Remembering the way the sun
stripped everything from the land at noon but shadow

and how he stripped naked to be more like that lake,
collecting in the sky. The way he says that eyes work.

Later I find him staring over the canyon’s rim,
down to the stream’s distant tongue of stars. Says

That’s the texture of death. That’s what that hawk
sees in wind
. Talks for hours about the way sand lifts off

the canyon’s walls, like a brush rising from a canvas,
and how he wants to just lie down here, among

these toadstool rocks, the sage and wind-black junipers,
though he’s afraid of being swallowed in at dawn,

says he knows that he’ll be washed, chased down
into this porous rock by the freakish rain of light and sky.

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

COUNTRY WESTERN

The old joke goes like this,
if you play the song backwards
you get the blind dog back, you get back the Chevy,
its grill hanging from its mouth like a set of bad teeth,
the gear shift bucking back into your scarred hand.
You get the bottle shattering silver inside the cab
and your shirt sleeve wet with love and anger.
The desert sun dripping, apocalyptic and red,
across the windshield. Even the neighbor's fence
of rotten saplings, which you drove through
maniacal and twisting, rises from the earth
whole again as you reverse through truth and redemption.
You get your wife back and you get her footsteps,
the way she drops her heels down hard
against the linoleum as she approaches you.
You don't even have to see her. You can close
your eyes and the let the book fall from your hands,
and let the music drift over your bald skull
as she removes her black blouse and bra,
swinging them like a set of circus knives,
tossing them aside, her tongue
climbing your neck, unbuckling every swollen
memory, the holiness of skin, the scent of collarbone,
her hips bruising yours one last time.

TO GET FOLKS TO WRITE POETRY DAMMIT

alright here's the shtick... dumb name i know...but hopefully this will inspire some of us to get active and write some decent poems
BANANA MAN