Submissions

Her Submission                            His Submission

Who does he think                            Who does she think

He is, anyway?                            She is, anyway?

Why does he keep                            To ask him to

Telling her what to                            Account for his

Do every morning,                            Whereabouts, every

Like she doesn't                            Minute of every day

Understand the directions:            And just stand for it.

How to make                                    A man could stand up

Toast, for pity's sake?                    A man could just walk away

To call his mother,                            A man could wander out and

(Like she's ever been                    Never come back.

Anything but nice                            When he leaves here,

To the cranky old thing)                    He wants a strict policy of

As if her love for                            Don't ask, don't tell,

Him could be boiled                    And then he could relax.

Down to "Love me,                            Relax enough to come home

Do what I tell you to do" or            And report the

"Love me, be how                            Headlines, if not

I want you to be."                            Every bead in between

Isn't the point that she                    He's here, isn't he?

Loves him?                                    If she could just wait

That she doesn't always                    One goddamned minute

Do what he says, but                    Until he brings it up

Stays here to hear him                    Himself,

Ask again.                                    He'd tell her.

The Sunny Side of the Street

I've been walking my whole life on this side

The sunny side

I can see you on the other side, our head

Hanging down, muttering to yourself.

I'm waving to you

Don't you see me?

Can't you see me waving to you?

Hoping for your company on this side of the street

I'm trying to get your attention

Not because I need you to look at me

To understand my own existence. No.

You look interesting to me, your mutterings

Chime in my ears like music--I'd like to hear more.

But my arms are getting tired, I'm still waving

And you're still ignoring me.

I come over to your side.

It's beautiful here. The snow drifts are necessarily

Higher, the shadows cast arcane patterns in blue

It's lovely and perplexing.

I see why you want to puzzle out its meaning

But I'm telling you, the patterns are easier to decode

From the sunny side.

Come on over, I beg of you

I don't want to leave you here

But I can not stay too long

I issue my invitation to come across the street

With me. From there, we can laugh about how

Dark and mysterious this shadowed side is,

Without being pulled further into its grip.

Drifts become ruts, become trenches,

Then you're lost.

If I pull on your arm and drag you across

The street, will you be mad at me?

You say you can't help it, it's chemical

You think I don't understand how it feels.

But you are the one who lets bad habits

And chemistry take the blame for your own misery.

I understand that if I love you and I want you

To cross over with me and you won't come, and

I leave you here on your own, you'll blame me:

I clearly didn't love you enough to sacrifice 

My own happiness on the altar of your pain.

So I cross back to the sunny side

I'm watching you from here

I'm waving from time to time, come on over,

I miss you

No, I can't come back to your side. I'm sorry.

Here

I don't know about your house, Acrylic, adjunct

But ours is filled with words. Bereft, breakfast

Words on papers                                                Cobbled up, coin

Papers in piles,                                                   Distal, deviltry

Piles piled on piles, splayed fanwise. Eggplant, ego

Words in books,                                                 Fanlight, filter

Books on shelves,                                              Gorgon, gesso

Shelves against every wall. Half a lump, heifer

"It's a library in here!" a visitor said. Indigent, indigo

But those are just the trapped words Juniper, jostled

The pinned down words                                     Kick the can, kola nut

The words we use to start the                                  Liberate, lemonade

Living flow of new words,

"Did you read this? What'd you think?" Mango, mutton chop

A blizzard in here some days. Nightshade--the deadly kind

A swirling braiding river                                    Oboe, oval, Ouagadougou

A river that leads down to the coast Pancake, pestilence

A place on the coast not shown on maps, Quisling, quarknet

A place, no matter how you spell it Ratcheting, rivals

That means just one thing: Sadly, sawing
                                                                 All those Tinker Toys

If you don't know what that is, Unusual uvulas

Go back and listen again, more Veering vapidly

Carefully this time                                              Why? Where? What?

Look it up in the OED Xenophobia

Under L.                                                            Yellowing, yammering

                                                                         zzzzzzzz--huh?--zzzzzzzzzzz

Clear Memory

I've lived in your world long enough,

Heard your version of events--

Tried my hardest to countenance

Them, and failed.

I saw what you meant,

That you meant what you said

To be self-evident, to have one

Possible meaning only.

That your values, as you call them,

Leave no room for any of my

Talents, or efforts, constantly narrowing

The ledge I'm allowed to stand on.

You want the world to be your world,

To stay static on that day you

Understood everything and fixed it in

Your mind.

But it has not stopped still,

It has left you behind.

You want me to remain here with you

As the world goes on, leaves you in

Its wake. I see your loneliness.

You've never been without me.

But I have had to swim away into

The ocean currents on my own,

Paddle away from the ledge you've

Claimed, all the while you've called me

Back: Don't go, you've said, don't

Leave me here.

But I must.

The ledge is gone.

In Memory of Heath Ledger

What was acting and what were his real feelings,

Even he was losing hold of his little

Peach pit of self

That allowed him to do extraordinary things

With his face and body.

Jack Nicholson warned him

Nothing he could tell Heath about how to ply his craft,

But what he could tell Heath was

There's a switch

A switch inside you have to learn to flip

Flip on: act

Flip off: live

Heath, his gift so raw and new and outsized

Couldn't find that switch in time

He didn't want to be the Joker any more but

The mask had grown over his face,

Hardened.

This is the soul danger for all actors.

When you stop pretending and really act

You're in big trouble.

Heath's face in Brokeback:

The moment he pulls Jake by the vest into the outdoor stairwell

And buries it, that Rock of Gibraltar, into Jake's.

Their connection is as deep and physical as the Marianas Trench

And just as articulate.

Heath pulls away and in less than ten seconds he gives us Ennis' fear of discovery

Regret, desire, pent-up need, his delight that his love is still reciprocated. 

He pats, he pulls away, he brushes Jake's hands away, his forehead rubs Jake's,

Like a horse would, he stumbles away tucking in his shirt and volumes have been spoken

In their language.

How hard it must be to live at that peak

All day, every day

To have thousands, millions even,

Desiring that look from you, at them

How glorious for us, his audience

How exhausting for Heath

He could make us feel anything

It made him want to stop feeling.

Where is that switch, Jack?

I need to find it, too.

Ode to Emergent Properties

Let us talk about life.

There will be plenty of time

The other side of the event horizon

To discuss the implications of crossing

That border.

How can we live knowing we will die?

Try asking a rock, a boulder, a mountain

How the other possibility feels.

It takes us so long, chasing after answers to the

Wrong questions, to finally formulate

Right ones. We then have little time

Left to contemplate the wording.

We are lizards so long, sunning ourselves to get

Our body temperature up. Then squirrels, running and

Chattering and fighting to store the most acorns. Then

Building and worshipping and caressing the past, or

Illusions, or Beauty.

Beauty is an emergent property. An unanswerable one.

The peculiarly delicate antennae needed to perceive it--

Also an emergent property.

We do not yet know what else will emerge

From the sum total of all our emergent properties.

But think exponential, not linear.

We know how to do so many things that we choose

Not to do.

It is so easy to love

This life.

It is so hard to spurn

Each other. So costly to punish others for not doing

What you are not doing either.

Listen. Witness. Share the story, which spreads the pain so thin that it can

Break, like a film of ice over a muddy puddle.

Listen again.

Repeat.

Howl II

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,

unhinged by rote repetitions of market economy truisms,

waylaid by synthetic psychoactive chemicals from pursuing linear thought,

felled by genetic predispositions to various addictions, proclivities,

brought to a full stop by auto-immune disorders.

Was ours the last generation to cower in the closet? Or the first to recognize

how ambiguous the either/or of sexual identity?

Great God Mammon stole many, consumed their youth and optimism

like so many yards of red Twizzler into the gullets of near-anorexics.

LSATs, law school, bar exams: meat grinders parsing the difference between

heroes and zeroes.

Our time became the time when even to ask the question: "What is all this for?"

was to be flung into utter irrelevance.

We jogged ourselves jointless, treadmilled our way to early aneurysms,

all in the name of fitness.

Unprecedented prosperity led many of our finest down fruitless garden paths of

pointless competitive connoisseurship: as if the best cigar, the best Bordeaux,

the freshest oyster, the smokiest Scotch, the highest concentrations of anti-oxidants

in the most organic, non-genetically modified heirloom tomato could save their souls.

As if worshipping at the temple of their own bodies, the ensuing survival of the

self-righteous could prove to the self-selected elite anything other than:

they weren't dead yet.

It seems a matter of luck, not the finely ground fear of middle class prudence, but

I'm not dead yet.

The Restaurant Villanelle

Shall we be reasonable, my dear?

No need to order more than we can eat.

Tomorrow is another day, I fear.

It's true the oysters beckon, and the beer,

And what's a meal without a hunk of meat--

Shall we be reasonable then, my dear?

Oh--bouillabaisse! the choice is clear

But what about the rack of lamb complete

Tomorrow is another day, I fear.

You know those crispy little French fries they make here?

They stop your heart, then really make it beat,

Shall we be reasonable then, my dear?

Oh, what the hell--let's order half a steer

I guess we could take home what we don't eat.

Tomorrow is another day, I fear.

I'll pop a notch if I bend a bit too near,

That pot de creme was rich, perhaps effete--

Shall we be reasonable tomorrow then, my dear?

Tomorrow's challenge is the same, I fear.

Annunciation

Have you seen this painting I'm thinking of? Italian, 15th century, no angel. It is just a young woman, one hand raised, certain that the air has changed around her, an unseen event has occurred, a decision not her own will now guide her life. She will no longer be herself or an individual or anything she can recognize as the girl she was even one minute ago. She is now and will ever be a tunnel, a conduit, a sheath that held something miraculous and then, at another moment, no longer did. She is a means, not an end. She is a pathway, not a goal. Her very self will be flattened to let the goal be what it is and she, whether willing or unwilling, will now be that flattened thing.

And her will? What has will to do with this life as she is living it? Will, as she sees it construed by men, is illusion. She holds herself ready; then it begins, then the unsheathing leaves her flattened. Only then is she free to be an individual, a self. But not to the unsheathed one. To that baby, she is a god, then an embarrassment, then an annoyance, then a shore left behind long ago.

Back to the Dawn

Wake up early every morning

It's back to the dawn.

Leave the house in darkness

Walk the many blocks

Between the nest and the wide world

With my back to the dawn.

Deposit my most precious cargo

In the think-tank,

The sink-or-swim popularity factory

And then go on my way

Back to the dawn.

But today I go the other way

Scarlet sunburn behind

Tangled black roots

That are oaks without leaves in December

Trunks in blood

Twig tips in muted rose

I'm no longer

Back to the dawn

But full frontal

Face to face with the searing red evidence of the

Embarrassment the universe feels

For our petty aims and well-laid plans

And my own gory pump

Bangs around in my chest

Electrified and glory-filled

Happy to witness color drained of content

I'm back to the dawn.