"I am offering this poem to you, since I have nothing else to give." ~Jimmy Santiago Baca
I don’t want eventual,
I want soon.
It’s 5 a.m. It’s noon.
It’s dusk falling to dark.
I listen to music.
I eat up a few wild poems
while time creeps along
as though it’s got all day.
This is what I have.
The dull hangover of waiting,
the blush of my heart on the damp grass,
the flower-faced moon.
A gull broods on the shore
where a moment ago there were two.
Softly my right hand fondles my left hand
as though it were you.
~ Mary Oliver, Blue Horses
A man walks into a bar. You think that’s some kind of joke?
Actually he runs in, to get out of the freezing weather.
Who cares, you say. Nobody you know.
You’ve got your own troubles, could use a drink yourself.
You get your coat, a long scarf. You trudge
to the corner over the scraped sidewalk, slip and fall down hard
on the ice. Actually a banana peel, but who’s looking?
Only a priest, a rabbi, and a lawyer you vaguely recognize—
didn’t she help with the divorce? Never mind, the marriage
is over, good riddance. You’re thinking now
you’d better have a double. You get up, holding your hip,
and limp towards the neon martini glass.
Anyway a man goes into a bar, just like you do.
He’s tired of life, tired of being alone. No one
takes him seriously; at work he’s the butt of jokes,
the foreman calls him Moron all day long. It’s true
he’s not too bright. He wants to kill himself,
but doesn’t know how to. He orders drink after drink,
cursing the angel who passed out brains.
You take the stool next to him. In half an hour
you’re pals—two losers getting shitfaced.
You start to tell each other riddles. What’s big and red
and eats rocks; what do you get when you cross a penis
with a potato? Why is there something rather than nothing?
If God is good, how is it that the weed of evil
takes root everywhere, and what is there to keep us
from murdering each other in despair? Why is pleasure always
a prelude to pain? The bartender takes your glasses, tells you
it’s time to get out. You stumble through the door,
and there you are in the cold and the wind and a little snow
that’s started to fall. Two losers stand on a corner.
One turns to the other and says, Why did our love end?
The other can’t answer. Why do they torment me? he says.
The snowstorm begins in earnest but still they stand there,
determined to stay put until they finally get it.
How can it be that someone with so many any ones
can feel so isolated and abandoned
You know they can see you,
but more a ghost of you–
like something inside of you,
the essence of you,
is invisible to your many any ones
The deep down of you is misunderstood
or worse, simply unknown
and you’ve become nothing more than a phantom
of yourself and only exist as
what you’ve been deemed to be
by your many any ones
How can it be that someone with so many any ones
can feel like a ghost haunting their own life
An inanimate being drifting
in drafts
and between cracks of thoughts of how
you are seen through the eyes of your many any ones
And you wonder how it came to this,
how you became this ghost in the photograph
where you don’t recognize your own face
Yet it must be you because she wears your smile
and has your eyes but
somehow it is not you and you know it’s not
but they demand it is who you are
Yet your soul screams and your heart bleeds the truth
How can it be that someone with so many any ones
can feel so isolated, abandoned
with dusty dreams
that the many any ones don’t even know exist
And when you grow out of the ghost of
all you’re expected to be to become what you should
always have been–
how can it be the many any ones seem so shocked,
dismayed, that you’re not content within
your determined role in their life
And sometimes,
at two a.m.,
when you’re less alone then
when you’re surrounded by your many any ones
you have to wonder how you lost everything
you were. Where this hole in you came from
Sometimes at two a.m. you have to admit
you made yourself a ghost,
you thought it was best to shell yourself out
remove what may not be for the best of the many
any ones
And you have to question,
how you thought haunting your own life
could be best for any one
How can it be that I, with so many any ones
could isolate and abandon myself
and still claim I loved my many any ones
with everything I had,
gave everything I could
when the best parts were buried away
and a ghost took my place within
photographs and
memories
~ Jennie Hope Meres, via The Voices Project
“You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.”
– John Green, The Fault in Our Stars
Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was—
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved.
“First Memory” from Ararat by Louise Glück. Copyright © 1990.
Words ... for the Time Being 