Ode to not knowing what comes next
2:30 in the morning and I want
a really big cock, like a garden hose
to unroll and flop over the edge
so I can pee without getting out of bed.
I'm warm and comfortable and hate
my bladder so much I'm thinking
of sending it back to high school.
I get up to pee, come back to bed,
fall asleep and dream
I'm on the roof of the Tate Modern
eating a bag of Ruffles.
I'm surprised they taste the same
on top of all that art. A man
sitting beside me with a legal pad
and pencil is drawing the Thames
and the drawing flows. I give him a Ruffle
and he smiles like a horse
must feel when it runs.
The next time I look at the clock
it's 5:30 and I need to pee again
with my slightly-above-average-size cock
so I get up and paw at the sky
for the sun, but without claws
that can rip the dark away,
I'm screwed, so I make coffee
in the dark and wonder if my soul
is like the milk I stir in, something
that cuts the bitterness.
Now I'm writing this poem
and telling you
I'm writing this poem
in front of a picture of two arches
on the Brooklyn Bridge, which I've crossed
with and without Whitman, with
and without a desire to jump off,
and with and with and with
the hope that the heart's
the right organ to celebrate,
the right organ to bang on
until that sucker sings. Are we there yet
I keep asking the Earth
but it speaks a language
people don't seem to understand. On
and on, we go on and on, above
and beyond, and under the below.
And I apologize
for the product placement
earlier in this poem and promise
I'm not a spokes-poet for Ruffles
or the soul. I can prove it:
The soul is the whisper of fog
to a leaf; the soul is a Zippo
that can light a cigarette
underwater; the soul is a dream
of our nipples and spleens, a matter
of matter hoping it matters
that petunias and clouds and gymnasts
exist. See how wrong I am
about everything I say
but how I say it
as if leaping off a cliff
into the arms of the air?
That's how you know I'm a poet.
Wanted to, wanted to, wanted to, didn't run
I've imagined a rainbow being raped
without knowing what evil I'm really afraid of.
Let's say all of it. Let's say every person
is an iceberg, with most of who they are
or what they want obscured from view,
and the ship that runs into that iceberg,
and the cries of people trying not to drown,
and the unlistening stars. Now let's consider
a different notion to sing against this theory.
Every person is a piano being tuned
by a deaf woman who hears with her fingers,
who loves the honesty of wood, who gives half
her bologna sandwich to her dog. It's not
that I love you, since we don't know each other,
I say to myself every day in the mirror.
But I want to love you. I can't remember
at what age I realized the jobs
I was most qualified for — "introverted
fuck up", "metaphorical thumb sucker" —
didn't exist, but when I moved on
to "really good napkin folder" and "player
of drums under water", I started to see myself
as a viable weather system
or a coordinated thrashing of grass
by wind. Do you know the sound
of hundreds of birds taking off
at the same time, like the sky's
drawing in air after holding its breath
for a century? Neither do I
but I'm determined to be that sound.
The definition of insanity
Wednesday and once again
I've not brought peace to the Middle East.
I'm not even trying, other than swearing
at the TV and calling politicians idiots.
I have gathered twenty dead bees
in a jam jar, an interesting alternative
to potpourri, and dusted the deer skull
on the mantel. But as far as settling
ancient conflicts, nothing. How do you think
of history? As something in a book? A thing
you said on a bridge once
about the water flowing past
while holding the hand of someone you loved
and all of it gone now, the bridge, the river,
the hand? When I think of the Middle East,
I see a bear that's eating a lion
that's eating a wolf, see people
trying to murder murders
that have already happened,
as if to kill a way back to the dead.
The desire for blood is the desire for life
and how do we put an end to that?
With missiles and guns? Rape?
And what problem is solved
by bombing a hospital?
Only the problem of not having enough evil
that needs to be avenged. I don't think the dead
need more neighbors and friends.
We could make life out of their deaths,
write books about their jump shots
and overbites, use their old shoes
to carry moonlight out of the house
and into the garden where it belongs,
form a choir of our crying. War
should be fought by people brave enough
to listen, men and women trained
to stand naked under white flags
in the wind and rain, to argue
and dream of more humane ways
to be human. This is only a fantasy
if it never happens.
