The Poetry Marathon

Oh arachnid, I bear you or your arthropod phylum no ill will.
You weave your webs of tales told, widows and recluses,
Daddy long legs of venomous myth, lies that weaklings tell.

Nature’s thugs, built for brutality, ghastly and creeping stalker,
(Like a few Homo sapiens I’ve dated), I’ve seen the hour glass.
Time ticking for the feeble, sick, old, young, and unsuspecting.

In Hawaii, your island hoppers take a running start and jump
Clinging to a pant leg or arm, terrorizing victims resisting a ride.
I give you this: your infinite array and your wily traps stabilize.

The ecosystem won’t eco without you, no Librium in equilibrium.
So here’s to you my eight-legged, fanged, funky frenemies galore,
Peace and abidance: I’ll ignore your dark watch; you do the same.

You always joked at your own expense: fat, ugly, high school dropout. We
Never questioned your self-debasement, your children, who would Never
Believe you’d lie, leading us astray, you, who we trusted just had to Know
Everything—you taught us the world, what it looked like and meant. How
Were we, your daughters and son, to foresee despite your chains, how High
You’d soar with crippled vision and mountainous, inherited neglect. We
witnessed the endless dig and grind, dig and grind, as you broke ground. Are
You as proud still, your skin-prick wit gone dry as your withered brain? Till
I stare death down, I’ll imagine the grin, your grip, the rolled diploma, as We,
your fans, stood on folding chairs, hands clapping above our heads. Are
You awake, Mom? A random sound among the quivers and quakes. I Asked
Your skeletal frame this morning, hoping to hear the familiar sharp reply To
An ever-child, “Do I look awake?” Follow your heavenward stares, Mom. Rise.

We Never Know How High We Are
Emily Dickinson

It’s dark in here.
Turn on the light.
I can’t see.
It’s wet and warm
I touch slime,
Viscous rubber,
Throbbing hum.

My eyes closed,
No they’re open
What’s wrong?
Am I blind?
Muted pours,
Flowing chutes
Chug like clocks,
Syncing me.

I’m floating,
Still, vibrating.
My legs kick
Weighty slugs
Miming a jog
As bionic man
In a slo-mo shot.

My arms too,
Tossing sludge
Through fingers
Spread wide open
To grasp the idea
Where am I now?
Which way is up?

I’m not drowning
But I can’t breathe,
Don’t breathe.
Don’t gasp,
No air
Yet, no worry,
I’m here still.

No push no pull,
Motionless now,
The light dawning,
I’m not inside.
There’s nothing here.
I’m outside—and in,
Above and below
I’m all there is.

Time is neither enemy nor friend, false or true.
She’s what we came for and left behind, all at once.
But once is twice, and three becomes four more.

I don’t believe her, arrows, lines, trajectories, and horizons,
Exes and why’s, yesterdays and good byes, marital vows
All time passers and lies to the one true word, the eternal wink.
I’ve felt her fancy inside my third eye, my one true love’s belly.

Yet here I sit, fingers to screen, turning make believe dials,
Flipping numbers like pancakes to the sky that never return,
These ones and zeroes of the minds far greater than mine.
I count words and seconds as if, although, and despite it all.
The continuum tires of our tedious accountings and ledgers.

It was behind St. Joseph’s, across an open field, hay and earth,
The last traces of green gone, poised toward the vernal equinox.

We jumped the fence, lugging a six-pack of Schmidts and a pipe,
A small bag with something, maybe hash or Thai Sticks or the like.

My heavy coat and construction boots (the original Doc Martens)
Made the climb arduous, my frosty breath smoking the fence links.

Once inside, we padded hard earth silently beckoning the woods
But we stopped short of the line of its entry, dark and foreboding.

There we found a rock or a wooden crate I imagine 40 years later;
We were only 15 and 17 but our imaginations were medieval, dark.

Our laughter echoed midway between the shadows of forest and
Tombstones, an open field bordering pine trees and the cemetery.

In our inebriation, we told stories and giggled tirelessly, of Mordar
And the one true ring, borne by a stranger and thief; we spoke Elf.

When the laughter turned fear, our hilarity distorted into wild flame
Of lying youth, blood pumping black hash and cheap beer illusion.

We fled like bandits past Gollum and ghosts, teen-age and death,
Flung over metal chains clanging on that chill, October night’s end.

The 31st, in fact, all Hollow’s Eve, we, two time leapers in flight,
Memorized the words emblazoned on our half-baked wild minds.

Like wind we inscribed air with our fright, leaping child over adult,
We two, Puerto Rican-Mexican-Irish and Russian-Rumanian-Jew.

Though you stayed in New York, and I moved across the nation,      our frozen fingers touch in dreamless daymares of loss and time.

We chuckle yet, our minds’ eyes gleaming with the thrill of it then
As we dream the deceit of a linear past; I know you’re with me still.

It was time to read our lines, and the tipsy one went first.
And when she was through the class gave round applause,
While I scratched my head in wonderment and confusion.
Her poem was all rhyme and hickory dickory dock and goo.

The teacher gushed, “How profound!” her eyes wide wet,
As if she’d seen Jesus kiss Mary right on the publican steps.
But looking around me, eyes stared starry, dazed, stunned,
While I scratched my head in wonderment and confusion.

Her poem was all rhyme and hickory dickory dock and goo.
Who could manage this? Couldn’t they see it right through?
She’s smoking (don’t know what) and mirroring us hypnotic,
While our leader bubbled frantic praise so not to miss a drop.

And when she was through the class gave round applause,
For she too was awesome and fearless and saying her truth.
But to me, the joke was too cruel, the penalty unfit the crime.
Unwittingly, I wandered through the doors of alt poetry 101.

Laser my heart, you brimming song,
Pulverize first pause into submission.

Burn aortic passage with smokey din
Blind heat of pebbled words in, in, in.

Singe my valves, drum my beat, pain
Right where I live, not gut, not brain.

Don’t say your gun’s misfired, lie me
To sleep in one fell shot of jet stream.

Penetrate the skin of resistance there
At center stage you tore tongue, hair.

Ready, aim, spin a flame ray smashed
True to its target, seared into my flesh.

Be my one true spacey love, dream bot,
Cold chips, cybernetic hips, lover’s knot.

You asked me for my why, and I wrote it down all at once
It took me a minute or two to scratch out the stuff of it.
But then you asked me, “Why this why? Why is it this?”
And I sat down another day and wrote it all down again,
With other words, other thoughts, other dreamful reasons.

And once more you asked me to find it, find my why, dig.
I shook my head to another day and slept on it some more,
My night terrorized by questions and visions born in sweat.
Tackling the demons once more, I penned papers on papers,
I tore at ink and line and wrote my why and why not plus ten.

“Look, “ I said, “How much can I rip from my guts? How deep?”
She asked me why I ask, why not tell, why not the whole truth.
So I laid it down, tore it up, scratched it out, pored hungry art
And spoke it to an empty screen with nothing on it but me.
I stuttered and blinked, twitched it out to those who’d hear it.

Then I pressed play and watched it, me speaking my story.
And my why tensed between my teeth, flexed in my arms,
Trapped in my shoulders and neck, eked out in strained tones,
Like a trumpeter’s taut lips finding the sweet spot of wept wind
Forced air, struggling to the notes, hit them at the right pitch.

“No, no, no, noooo! That’s not it at all!” I screamed at myself,
My own image on the screen, speaking to no one at all,
Inside my head, looking at me, at her, the one tossing words
Carelessly, aimlessly, trying so hard, not trying at all, not enough.
You, I, we held back, kept it to ourselves, and gave up too little.

So I went back to my pen and cursed the notebook’s sheets,
Clean lined and beckoning, and with tensile fingers curled,
Anticipation clawing at my bloodied brain, I wrote and wrote,
The beginnings, hunger, anger, stubbornness, sorrowing quest
And tripping time’s prison, my why written, I locked it up, keyless.

Heated room, the fan blowing hell’s fire to the four corners,
Her sword’s aimed, blazing to the sun’s lost rays.

Morning.

She’s got sky ambitions for an earthbound beauty, rosetted
Corsage sewn to her wrist in blood.

Afternoon

Swilling tear drop infusions in a China cup, the afternoon pour,
A sick, oppressive humidity sinks her inside the sofa,

Evening

Chill in her spine, the night crawls upon her like witches’ wind,
Dragon’s breath in her hair.

Night.

No relief in sight, charred words will crumble onto cyber pages
Til rheumy dawn casts the garland crown.

When FDR declared the nation had only fear to fear,
He never had a gun to his head,
Ballistaphobia
never had a cobra hood opened at his bare legs
Ophidiaphobia
or strolled past the body of a jumper from a Manhattan 32 story high rise,
Necrophobia
the thump of the fall nearly lifting his feet off the ground.

But it wasn’t then that acrophobia hit.
No, it was the carefree days of carnivals and Ferris wheels,
free from regulations and safety straps, not even for seats
that turned upside down with the slow-turning wheel.

I was five and my car mates were nine and ten, measurably
larger, taller than I so that the metal bar kept them in as
the wheel spun us upside down and then right side up,
me clutching with all my strength to keep myself inside.

Thanatophobia. I had never heard the word in my five years,
but I lived my way through it many times since, perched on a ledge      peering down thirty floors into a postage stamp courtyard, pondering the weighty sum of a life’s body at its impact against the immovable.