The Poetry Marathon

It was a quirky house,

a little problematic.

By the time we left,

The furnace was dead.

The dishwasher hadn’t worked in years.

Windows wouldn’t stay open of their own accord.

The wooded ridge behind blocked half the day’s sun.

After we left it idle,

Nature decided what to do,

And set about erasing a house,

A home, such as it was.

The gravel driveway became grass, knee high,

Where a basketball hoop still stood,

Thinking of two-on-two games long gone.

The roof shingles, on which we lay stargazing upon many a summer’s midnight,

Belong to the mosses now, and the gutters to the grass,

The hedges are trying their best to become trees.

Eventually, yes eventually, there will be nothing here but forest.

Has anyone seen Dorothy?

Anyone at all?

She stood a height of five foot one to five foot four inches tall.

Her eyes were grey or blue, her hair a dark, dark brown.

She was last seen all dressed in blue in old Manhattan Town.

She’d been writing and sending out manuscripts,

She’d been meeting her love in secret,

She wished to move out and be independent,

But Daddy wouldn’t hear of it.

Has anyone seen Dorothy?

She came from a gilded life,

But perhaps her soul, a writer’s soul,

Only knew the internal strife.

She was twenty-five years old

On December 12, 1910,

So all hope is truly lost

Of seeing her alive again.

Perhaps a lapis earring

Will be found under floorboards one day

But will anyone know it was Dorothy’s?

Is anyone left to say?

Dorothy never came home for Christmas,

Nor Easter in the spring,

Dorothy never came home at anytime,

And that’s the saddest thing.

Do you have a spare breastbone?

Mine was shattered,

By the light of the moon,

Under a canopy of stars.

I drove my Jeep

To the far end of the lake

Looking for you,

Tasting the glory I would know

When our lips met.

Was it panic that set in,

When I saw you outlined in silver?

We’ll have to use it, because no other word has been invented

To describe that flying apart.

I was once a soldier,

Disciplined and honorable.

But nothing prepared anyone for Viet Nam.

Now I stand all night, all day

On Massachusetts Avenue

Growling and hissing unintelligibly

At college students who think of me

As a frightening curiosity

As they make their way to coffee shops

And Urban Outfitters.

They cross the street to avoid me.

And I am trapped behind these eyes,

Seeing through the lenses of a cracked and twisted mind.

I am a used up resource for the War Machine,

And the strangest thing these eighteen-year-olds have ever seen.

Music,

Holy miracle of miracles,

How do you exist?

How does sound coalesce

And accrete

Into galaxies

Laden with meaning

And emotion

And all that makes our existence

Worth the effort

Of being alive?

It’s a long drop down,

(Is it long enough?)

And gravity would let me.

Wouldn’t ask if I was sure,

But would let me.

The gesture lives inside me

And I hunger for it,

For that tragic almost-flight.

Let me grow wings instead,

For I cannot leave the twisted aftermath

Of a wingless flight.

I am waiting, eternity upon eternity,
For signs of your remorse.
It has to dawn on you eventually,
Because we are all expanding in our empathy.

For signs of your remorse
I grow impatient, and hate-filled.
Because we are all expanding in our empathy,
I cut you some slack, turning again to compassion.

I grow impatient, and hate-filled.
I am waiting, eternity upon eternity,
I cut you some slack, turning again to compassion.
It has to dawn on you eventually.

I was somehow afraid

That I’d blow their minds,

(Wide, WIDE!)

And they’d never recover,

If I let them see.

So I hid favorite parts of myself,

Masking truth to keep them comfortable

In what they thought they knew,

All the while, knowing I was selling myself out

By hiding my tattoos.

We wandered, stopping at a playful stream rich with minerals, and in the near distance, an ocean, grey and serious, knowing the predicament we were in. Knowing, and saying nothing. Feeling no obligation to make any warning. After all, the ocean doesn’t tell sailors when they are going to wreck and drown. So playful stream joined somber ocean, and was lost to salt water, as was I.

Salt water took her,

Turning over, she saw sun,

And sank to the depths.

Give me earth on hands,

Streaked on faces,

Give me soot from a cooking fire,

Give me stitching what’s been torn.

Let me move the elements of the Earth,

Which still make up this body.

We are fading away into the virtual.

Why ever would we seek to lose the caressing of the air on our skin,

Sweat breaking there,

Why ever would we choose to wipe our minds clean,

Like old hard drives,

Of ancient knowledge earned at such a cost?