GOOD MORNING, COLOSSUS ___A Project Presented to The

GOOD MORNING, COLOSSUS

______

A Project

Presented

to the Faculty of

California State University, Chico

______

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts

English

______

Fall 2012

GOOD MORNING, COLOSSUS

A Project

Matthew A. Zellmer

Fall 2012

APPROVED BY THE DEAN OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND VICE PROVOST FOR RESEARCH:

______Eun K. Park, Ph.D.

APPROVED BY THE GRADUATE ADVISORY COMMITTEE:

______Jeanne E. Clark, Ph.D., Chair

______Robert G. Davidson, Ph.D. PUBLICATION RIGHTS

No portion of this project may be reprinted or reproduced in any manner unacceptable to the usual copyright restrictions without the written permission of the author.

iii

DEDICATION

This project is dedicated to my beautiful wife, my mother, my father, those who wonder, those who wander, and those on whose shoulders I will forever stand.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing certainly feels like a solitary act as it commences, and it is far too convenient to attribute one’s successes entirely to the self during those brief moments of brilliance. Ego is rather monstrous in that way, but it is very clear to me that my time as a student in Chico State’s undergraduate and graduate programs in English has been decidedly collaborative.

First and foremost, I must acknowledge and extend my absolute gratitude toward the chair of my creative project, Jeanne Clark. Her patience with my outsized personality in a grand total of three workshop classes, one teaching internship, and the following project should be heralded. She has watched my poems stumble into being, and has been both tremendously supportive and endlessly helpful in the shaping of my ambition as writer. Thank you for your commitment to the craft, Jeanne. You are plate armor in a hailstorm. I am a markedly better poet today because of you, and for that I will always be grateful.

I must also acknowledge Robert Davidson, my second reader and great oracle of all things related to graduate studies in English, without whom my journey as a graduate student would have been immeasurably more difficult. Thank you for your time and your effort on my behalf, Rob. It never went without notice.

I would also like to acknowledge professors Matt Brown, Geoff Baker, and Kim

Jaxon, all of whom offered up the kind of hallway encounters and worthy advice that any

v student is both in need of and actively seeking. Your gestures, both large and small, made all the difference. With the utmost sincerity, thank you.

I would like to acknowledge my peers during my time in Chico State’s English department. There are too many to list, but Chase, Sabrina, Jarret, Caitlin, Vincent,

Bianca, Carey, Tara, you were truly the highest caliber of trench mates. I am very glad to say that I shared in the experience with you all.

And, as odd as it sounds, I would next like to acknowledge the former Taylor

Hall, for whom many like myself carved out a little home on campus. It was not the prettiest of buildings, but it was ours. May its eventual successor be as well-regarded by staff and students alike.

I would like to acknowledge my dear friend Brian Helvick, whose mentoring and support of my creative pursuits over the years has been a ceaseless supply of encouragement. Thank you for helping me to be a better man. It has, indeed, made me a better writer.

I would also like to acknowledge Tazuo Yamaguchi, master of haiku, steward of slam, and archivist of the spoken word. He would probably hate to see his name attached to such a formal undertaking, but, our philosophical disagreements aside, his wisdom, guidance, and acceptance of my strangeness helped me to find my footing during the most formative moments of my life as a poet.

I would next like to acknowledge my parents, Richard and Mary Zellmer, who have lived through every shiver, every anxiety, and every tangible frustration to watch

vi their son grow fully into himself. Look, Ma!! No hands!! Thank you for bearing with my stumblings into the unknown.

Lastly, this goes out to my wife, Ashley Zellmer, whose tireless love, support, and understanding across two-and-a-half years of my graduate education was the greatest act of compassion I’ve yet encountered. We scraped. We clawed. And we made it. Together.

Thank you for your patience with me, love. Thank you for your love. And from the bottom of my every awkward heartbeat, I love you.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

Publication Rights ...... iii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments...... v

Abstract ...... x

PART ...... 1

I. A Critical Introduction ...... 2

Flockprinting ...... 4

Tadpoles ...... 8

Come Alive ...... 16

Fox Hunting ...... 24

II. Good Morning, Colossus ...... 34

Asterisk ...... 35

♦ ...... 37

Giving Birth to Bombs ...... 38

St. Apollonia ...... 41

Nebraska ...... 42

♦ ...... 45

viii

Good Morning, Colossus ...... 46

♦ ...... 51

The Flat World ...... 52

Fox Hunt ...... 53

Silence, Pt. 1 ...... 55

Hammerlung ...... 56

Overgrowth ...... 58

♦ ...... 59

Man About to Die (An Exercise in Mythmaking) ...... 60

♦ ...... 64

Plague ...... 65

Static ...... 68

♦ ...... 69

Float ...... 70

Brick Threw a Window (or The Things You’ll Never Truly Know) . 73

♦ ...... 75

Tight Rope ...... 76

Baptism ...... 79

♦ ...... 80

Zelda ...... 81

Silence, Pt. 2 ...... 84

Works Cited ...... 85

ABSTRACT

GOOD MORNING, COLOSSUS

Master of Arts in English

California State University, Chico

Fall 2012

Good Morning, Colossus is a circus train wreck through the freight cars of my mind. It represents my daily journey as a writer to do battle with myself, to chisel away at my anxiety until I arrive at something I can call a poem. Many of the poems in this collection closely explore issues of longing, fear, loneliness, and regret. Other poems find concern in relationships and the dissolution thereof, while others approach identity reconciliation and a thirst for redemption. Others still have nothing to do with my subject position, as I attempt to craft interesting personas from which to tell stories I would otherwise be unable to tell. Ultimately, I desire that there might be a great variety of subjects within my creative reach, but what keeps the poems in this collection tethered to each other is my impulse towards breath, to realize a physicality on behalf of my poetry, to grant it a third dimension. That said, the majority of my work is written from within a tradition of the spoken word. This project frames that tradition around the centerpiece of

Walt Whitman, whom I position as the unrecognized godfather of contemporary spoken word poetry. x

PART I

A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

I have seldom found it effortless to approach the blankness of the page. That textured emptiness is a hulking thing, a colossus worthy of my challenge. And its cousin, the bright white screen, is often just as damning in its enormity. With each tick of the blinking cursor functioning like a visual metronome—or perhaps more like a countdown, a meltdown of sorts, a persistently wayward time bomb—I’ve often considered what it took to summon enough creative worth in me to regurgitate something that resembles poetry. How much wondering and wandering did I accomplish before arriving at a writerly disposition? Raised in the middle-class suburbs of Sacramento, life could have dealt me any number of perfectly acceptable if altogether unspectacular outcomes. But apparently the marriage of a no-nonsense accountant from Southern California and a spirited banker from Northern California—both raised Roman Catholic—yields a relentlessly individualistic and unabashedly off-kilter poetman. It was not writ in the heavens, though. It was not fate. I’ve never believed in destiny. It took effort to get here, and this project represents a culmination of that work, as well as a modest personal victory.

While they were made for each other in the most classic of ways, the pen is not instinctively attracted to the page. It requires a boldness to instigate that action.

Sometimes it takes ferocity. There is not much room for hesitance. Whatever details I’ve observed while overfilling the blank void of the page have led me across a truly worthwhile excursion of self. But it should be noted that I was christened a timid writer. I

3 took to poetry rather delicately as a senior in high school. Like many young writers, I had an English teacher compassionate enough to encourage my creativity. However, my poems came with padlocks. I was fond of swallowing the keys. I rarely lingered with anything I had written long enough to share again with myself, much less the rabid eyes of others. In “Asterisk,” I return to those formative moments of creative anxiety:

My first poem was published inside of a bathroom stall. It read like Saturday morning cartoon smiles: a little too big to be honest, a bit too thin to be balanced, like building gallows humor from used toothpicks.

There was a monstrosity that stood between me and my actualization as a poet. It would take several years for me to put a name to those anxieties: Good Morning,

Colossus is then a circus train wreck through the freight cars of my mind. Its title represents my daily journey as a writer to do battle with myself, to chisel away at my anxiety until I arrive at something I can call a poem. The collection that follows this introduction begins with “Asterisk,” a rather self-conscious choice. It is one of my most recent works, written in the summer of 2012, and it is also the first true ars poetica I’ve crafted for myself. It, and many of the other poems in this collection, closely explores longing, fear, loneliness, and regret. “Hammerlung” is a close relative of “Asterisk” in this manner. Often I reach at the notion of God, turn away, get stuck, escape, and retreat again, as in “Nebraska” and “Apollonia.” Other pieces find concern in relationships and the dissolution thereof, as in “Giving Birth to Bombs.” There is a thrust towards identity reconciliation and a thirst for redemption, as in the title piece of this collection, “Good

Morning, Colossus.” Then there’s my more recent inclination towards adopting alternative personas, as in “Man About to Die (An Exercise in Mythmaking),” “Fox

Hunt,” “The Flat World,” “Baptism,” “Nebraska,” and “Zelda.” My work is also not beyond attempts at celebration. “Overgrowth” is a dedication to dear friends of mine upon their marriage. “Tight Rope” was written for my wife, a muse of endless abundance. Ultimately, I desire that there might be a great variety of subjects within my creative reach, but what keeps the poems in this collection tethered to each other is my impulse towards breath, to realize a physicality on behalf of my poetry, to grant it a third dimension. The majority of my work is written from within a tradition of the spoken word.

Flockprinting

Flockprinting is an aggressive electrostatic action using severe heat to force finely chopped fibers onto patterns of fabric ultimately resulting in soft touch. – Buddy Wakefield (30).

It is safe to say that Buddy Wakefield’s “Flockprinter” was my entry point into the oral art of contemporary spoken word poetry. I had been scribbling privately in notebooks for a couple of years, but had never given thought to shifting my poems into a public sphere. I found video footage of Wakefield performing this poem online. On the surface, Wakefield’s unrelenting energy was certainly attractive to my high strung, neurotic 19-year-old self. But, beneath the sheen of the spoken word scene is a poem very concerned with rising above the noise:

Flockprinter You have been a long time comin’ And the clouds have rolled You in slowly. But I ain’t mad at the upshot sky.

Rain, it’s my lucky number. It’s the author of release. It taught me monsters are easy to come by so I went out and found the beast before we met when the assignment was to incomplete myself with sad songs and recycled insults, when I was spun out, eyes bagged teeth fist-first in lust and considering Jesus. You were there. You have been the whole journey. And I ain’t got nothin’ against goin’ home to You, Flockprinter.

You look good in your tidal wave. (Wakefield 31)

Wakefield’s introduction of “the beast” is appealing as a general metaphor for that which we must overcome. We’ve called “it” evil, we’ve named “it” Devil, but no matter what “it” is, confrontation with it is unavoidable. This recasting of familiar tropes in new ways was terribly appealing to me at the time. Defamiliarization is something I have since latched onto very tightly in my own work. But, early on, “Flockprinter” became an anthem for me as I began considering stepping out into the realm of the spoken word poem. To this day, I am unable to grasp the fullness of its meaning, yet the character of the flockprinter manages to stand in for so much of what I look for in poetry. Indefinable though it may be, it comes between me and the beast. It’s a steward, a guardsman, a bouncer keeping the colossus at bay. “Flockprinter” gave me a reason to believe that I could do something, anything with my poems. It gave me courage, and I owe a great debt to Buddy Wakefield for embracing the fullness of his voice so that I, and others, might find our own.

After encountering this particular spoken word poem, I became a disciple of sound. I started writing poems that I could read out loud without feeling as though I should apologize for my desire to be heard, a sentiment introduced to me by a popular poetic form. The contemporary tradition of spoken word poetry has its roots in slam poetry, a competitive format, complete with randomly selected judges, that is intended to encourage audience participation as poets perform their poems aloud. Born in the early

1990s, the poetry slam can be considered a uniquely American construction with its own set of boundaries, and because of the limitations it presents as an art form, many “slam poets” have since parted ways with the format in order to pursue their own ends. Having actively taken part in many poetry slams, I find myself at such a crossroads as a writer, no longer fully committed to the form of “slam poetry,” yet indebted to its vibrancy, urgency, and encouragement to turn poetry into a performative art. I now refrain from referring to my work as “slam poetry,” opting instead to generically categorize it as

“spoken word poetry,” or the presentation of poetry as a physical performance.

As I’ve struggled to find a creative home somewhere between the page and the stage, internal rhyme has become something of a home for my anxiety as a poet, a flockprinter of sorts that I find great pleasure in returning to. I obsess over sound connections between lines and across stanzas. I credit my childhood love for Lego blocks and puzzle pieces, for connecting the dots, for constellations and finding pictures in the clouds. My present devotion to all-things-assonance must appeal to that side of my mind, as I weave complex tapestries of slant-rhyme across a manic flood of image clusters.

“Apollonia” is one of my most recent poems, and I still have not strayed from a formula I

7 love so dearly, though I am proud of the new directions I am taking within the sturdy framework I’ve established:

she is gin1 and

tectonic2, straining3 against a punchdrunk 4earthquake3 of a smirk4. Aftershocks2 ripple1 like 1hymnals aimed3 at the holes in 5heaven.

The sky6 is 5red-faced3 and 5pregnant. Her voice never7 remembers7 the rain3. When a piano clangs3 itself dry6,

chordless and somewhere just south of sober, she can feel winter 8dancing a 8panic across the white6 flag

of her skirt4.

The rudimentary numbering system above should give considerable insight into the complexity I pursue in sonic design. Slant-rhyming the first half of “earthquake” with

“smirk” is just one example of my obsessively detail-oriented thought process. I often look for internal rhyme potential in portions of words, so that the sound connections read like firecrackers. I want them to pop successively, incessantly, and propulsively. This strategy creates movement of sound, as well as memorable moments in the ears of the listener. And each listener will attach themselves to different aspects of the pacing in a poem tightly-packed with internal rhymes and half-rhymes. But my poems must also breathe, so the reader will also notice moments that are slight in these sound connections, or absent of them altogether, as in the fourth presented stanza from “Apollonia” above.

This draws attention to a place in a poem that slows down, or where I want the images to ring out more strongly than the sounds. I find that pursuing a balance between sound and image is among my greatest successes as a poet. It is my hope that, by entertaining a lust

8 for sound, by using sonic devices to underpin the strength of my images, I might achieve something democratic in my poetry; my poems should invite the listener to explore delight and meaning in ways that are perhaps unfamiliar to them. An audience’s active participation in the process of shaping a poem is necessary in granting my poems the life they deserve off the page.

Tadpoles

A tadpole doesn’t know it’s gonna grow bigger. It just swims, and figures limbs are for frogs.

People don’t know the power they hold. They just sing hymns, and figure saving is for god. – Andrea Gibson (29).

I spent a healthy portion of my youth in church. Having been raised Catholic, it also means that I spent a healthy portion of my youth on my knees. I’m convinced that there are scars on each. I’ve long since left the hymnal books behind with the hope of finding something more personally fulfilling. I’ve made a home in poetry. And the above is a very democratizing move on Andrea Gibson’s part, particularly as she draws attention to the fact that “People don’t know / the power they hold” so that they might instead seek their own empowerment. It is a move of solidarity, an important feature in achieving a democratic ideal in her poetry. Gibson invites the audience’s participation into the poem so that she might receive a response in return, any response at all. There is an element of provocation in such a move, as Gibson grapples with the notion of God.

With that shared bit of history informing both Gibson’s writing and my own, “Tadpoles” strikes me as all-impact. It craters me at my center. It is clarity like I’ve rarely found from within the walls of a church. This particular brand of self-empowerment and solidarity is certainly not a new tradition in American poetry, though. Its lineage can be traced all the way back to the 1850s, to the great poet of democracy himself. Walt Whitman is, in my estimation, the very first American spoken word poet. His presence as one of the finest poets in our country’s brief history penetrates to the very core of whatever definition an

“American poet” might attempt to craft for his or herself, but I find that Uncle Walt should be casting an even larger shadow across the venues that house the contemporary spoken word poets of America. His fixation with the spoken word should not be overlooked. In “A Song of Joys,” Whitman celebrates the delight of oration:

O the orator’s joys! To inflate the chest, to roll the thunder of the voice out from the ribs and throat, To make the people rage, weep, hate, desire, with yourself, To lead America—to quell America with a great tongue. (327)

The poem itself is titled as a “song,” as are many throughout Whitman’s masterwork, Leaves of Grass. This designation imbues in the poem an aural intent that can hardly be ignored. Perhaps the reader does a disservice to Whitman’s poetry by attempting to divine its purpose solely on the page. Whitman nearly demands that his poetry be read aloud, and there are very clear markers that suggest as much. For example, the repeated invocation of “O!” throughout “A Song of Joys,” and throughout many of the poems contained within Leaves of Grass, signals an affinity for the spoken word. It is a chant. It is a spoken acknowledgment. It is a democratic invitation. Silence is not a

10 preferred mode for Whitman, so he grants his readers the opportunity to freely speak his poems aloud, to own his poems, and to own the democratic ideal. Of course, Whitman’s sense of the democratic was shaped by very particular social and political circumstances, as America itself was birthing the very questions that I am now hoping to answer in my poetry, and perhaps very differently than Whitman sought to answer them. Where we share a direct lineage, however, is in the spirit of invitation by way of the spoken word. It is these oral poetics of democracy that are most important to my project as a poet. By welcoming a physical audience into the spoken life of a poem, the poet can create a dialogue without boundary. The page is a container. It can become bondage. To imbue a poem with life off the page is to remove those bonds and invite possibility where there might have been none previously. In my poem, “Giving Birth to Bombs,” I consider breathlessness in an age of so-much-to-say:

My words give birth to bombs. My doubts give way to easy targets. I swallowed all of Atlantis so I could chase it with depth charges, marchin’ ten-thousand leagues under my breath, where you’ll find me, searching for what it means to come up for air.

Oxygen is salvation. Without it, we cannot live. Without it, we cannot grow. We will “figure limbs are for frogs,” as Andrea Gibson says. There is a distinct relation between form and content in the above sequence from “Giving Birth to Bombs,” a metaphor in the oxygen of words, in the physical spaces between them, at their most quiet, and at their most cacophonous. The very act of coming up for air has a physical voice. When performing this poem, I speak that line as if I were actually coming up for air, as if the breaths I take between each line might be my last. It is a reminder that my

11 body must be connected to my poetry. In The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as

Reciprocal Creation, poet Pattiann Rogers gives over great consideration to this notion:

When writing, I respect the body and pay close attention to

all that it knows, in what directions it leads me, to what it

responds quickly and forcefully, to the music and cadences

that entice it. The body and its sensuality are the only

forces that can truly fill and quicken the otherwise inert

framework of words and sentences on the page. (69)

I very much appreciate her grasp of the body’s importance to our understanding of poetry as physical interpretation. I have not been able to separate myself from the body since I began writing spoken word poetry. A fellow spoken word poet once told me that my poems are most heavily populated by spines and ribcages. Upon hearing this, I retreated from self-consciousness and thrust myself even further into my exploration of the body as the foundational element of spoken word poetry. Pattiann Rogers’ consideration of that body appears to me to be rooted in a rather Whitman-esque sentiment, and it is one that deeply informs my experience as a writer of the spoken word.

In “Overgrowth,” I tie the human body back to the earth as an exercise in physical, elemental language:

She will follow your bones back to their sapling state. The moss will fall away, uncovering smiles you can forever cast in cedar glaze.

As a spoken word poet, I want my physical body to be seen as rooted to the earth on which I stand. It is a way of restating Pattiann Rogers’ declaration that the “body and

12 its sensuality are the only forces that can truly fill and quicken the otherwise inert framework of words and sentences on the page” (69). And it is a rather forceful declaration, that the human body can motivate the dedication of an entire poem. As I see it, it is an American ideal of poetry, though not uniquely so. In returning to Walt

Whitman, the relationship between poetry and the physical, and the elemental should always be very clear. Whitman knew that to speak aloud is to move—both oneself and others. He recognized that the simple act of impassioned speech, represented within the presentation of a physical body amongst other human bodies, was often enough to reach those who might otherwise seem unreachable. His poetry is a legacy of the spoken word, regardless of how it has been studied on the page. Leaves of Grass is, in both content and form, a roadmap for American poets to follow. And follow they have. I am but one in a beehive of activity from within the realm of the spoken word. The legacy of Uncle Walt may not be openly acknowledged in this particular community, but I see it as the tether that roots the new spoken word poetry movement firmly to American soil. It is us. We are all giving birth to bombs in some sense or another, and a poem like Anis Mojgani’s

“Come Closer” seeks to pull America in so that he might whisper the tiniest of explosions directly into our ears, as Whitman did:

There is joy in how your mouth dances with your teeth, your smile is a sign of how sacred your life actually is. Come into it. Come closer. (Mojgani 0:43)

Like Whitman, Mojgani celebrates the “body electric.” His performance is a physical act, and his poetry finds a home in the physicality of the human body. He continues:

There are birds beating their wings beneath your breastplate, gentle sparrows who are aching to sing, come aching hearts, come soldiers of joy, doormen of truth, my heart is too big for my body so I let it go.” (1:24)

Mojgani lets it go. He gives it over to his audience. He asks for them to do the same in return. This is the reciprocity of democracy that I am seeking both to find in the works of others and to accomplish within my own. An invitation must be accepted by the reader or listener. Mojgani continues:

Your hearts are like my hands; Some days all they do is tremble. I am like you. I, too, at times, am filled with fear, filled with fear but like a hallway. Let’s find the strength to walk through. Walk through this with me. (2:24)

There is no hierarchy here. The inclusivity is not rehearsed. As Whitman’s poetics were unencumbered by exclusivity, Mojgani’s poem is likewise universal and colloquial, features important to inviting a great number of individuals into the life of a poem.

“Come Closer” may be memorized by Mojgani, and clearly practiced, but there remains a spontaneity in his delivery. There is an authentic sense of uniqueness in this performance, as if the poem will not be spoken in the same way ever again. In his essay “Walt

Whitman’s Concept of the Oratorical Ideal,” Roy Arzanoff quotes directly from

Whitman’s personal notes on oratory while illuminating Whitman’s belief that “Delivery, composed of vocal quality, gesture, and language, has to be natural and not studied or artificial. For an orator’s eloquence comes from the ‘spontaneous results of his mind being fully occupied with his subject’” (Arzanoff 171). This is the charge of the contemporary American spoken word poet; to be a genuine presence, and a pathway to human connection.

A great many of the spoken word poems that I’ve composed in the first person address an unspecified “you.” As I write them, I understand that “you” represents either a singular presence in my life, or a multitude of presences that I’ve cobbled together under one roof, so to speak. But the listener or the reader is going to interpret and connect with that “you” very differently. Such connections are, in and of themselves, expressions of the democratic. It is that ideal that I was hoping to achieve in “Float.” The poem opens:

There are thousands of gallons of gasoline Dedicated to how quickly I can burn a bridge. I’m beginning to crawl my way out of that wreckage. You’ll find me sifting through what’s left of my inner child, Trying to untie the knots in my trust.

“Float” addresses an ex-lover, or the “you” in the poem, as it were. And while that should become apparent to the listener as the poem continues, in the context of spoken word, the connection between speaker and listener is augmented by the presence of both in the same physical space. There is a body and a voice accompanying the “I” of the poem as it is being spoken (or, more accurately, performed), therefore a physical presence must embody the “you.” It is then not uncommon for the performer to lock eyes with individuals in the audience during performative moments such as these. The listener now stands in place of the subject that the poem is addressing, becomes the “you,” in effect. This, of course, runs the very real risk of being accusatory or alienating to the listener. The listener certainly does not want to feel assaulted, and while confrontation is an unavoidable feature of spoken word poetry, it is not the position of the spoken word poet to blitz the listener. However, these risks are often outweighed by the earnestness of

15 the poet, and by the poet’s ability to negotiate across a broad emotional spectrum with the listener. Contrast the opening lines of “Float” with its closing lines:

I’m grateful, Like a park bench in winter, When the cold outside drives the need back into us. Would you sit with me awhile? We could wait for the apocalypse. We don’t even need to speak. There are no words for this.

Many of my longer spoken word pieces move in this manner. They open in a relatively neutral position, escalate in their barrage of images and hefty internal rhyme schemes, and slowly descend to a moment of afterglow. They are cushioned very purposefully, in an attempt to connect with the listener in a dynamic way. On the subject,

Susan B. Somers-Willett writes, “Audiences, on the whole, expect [spoken word] poets to deliver a more authentic brand of expression than traditional verse, one that promises a sense of connection…[and] conviction” (37). Composing a work of poetry that will be performed is not unlike composing a song. The author is striving for peaks and valleys, for emotional high notes and low notes, and everything in between. That’s not to say that

“traditional verse” does not have the same potential of dynamism, but the far-reaching democratic values of contemporary spoken word poetry offer a non-traditional experience not unlike the aural bombast that was Leaves of Grass when it was first published.

Perhaps there is worth in returning to those roots, those inclinations towards the oral. To speak poetry is not simply to read poetry. To speak poetry is to engage in a larger social project. Arzanoff states that Whitman’s “interest in oratory…stemmed in large measure from his desire to communicate his message of social democracy through whatever media were available. He viewed an ideal orator, like an ideal poet, as a man on

16 a mission” (Arzanoff 172). Whitman smoothly operated in both spheres. As poet and orator, Whitman was on a very clear mission. He created something new; though it was not referred to as such, he invented the American spoken word poet, who is seeing a revival in contemporary venues. These poets are echoing Whitman’s familiar democratic ideals in new and uniquely American ways.

Come Alive

When I first heard the nurse cough I thought that she wasn’t very good at her job.

The second thing I thought was that I don’t trust bartenders who don’t drink. – Derrick C. Brown (25).

And I don’t trust poets who don’t write. Writing, of course, is not the simple exercise of placing pen to paper, or pushing fingers to keyboard. Writing happens not in the blankness of the page or in the persistence of the blinking cursor. It is intentional. It is alive. While there is a wit at work in Brown’s poem above, there is also an ars poetica of sorts, and at the heart of it is the notion of voice, a largely indefinable quality in poetry, yet perhaps one of the most important. It does not correspond to niche, of course, so

“spoken word poetry,” as a community, cannot account for the many unique voices that comprise its rather loosely-defined membership. Derrick Brown is, without question, among the most unique and provocative voices in that community. But he is also a democratizing force in that community, having started an independent publishing company that publishes the work of spoken word poets, an echo of the collectivity he practices in his own work. “Come Alive,” another poem by Brown, imagines a scenario

17 in which he runs for mayor of a newly-imagined Narnia. In this poem, he delivers campaign promises to the “citizens of Narnia” that express the very same American democratic ideals that Walt Whitman first expressed in Leaves of Grass:

I will declare a day for dipping our hands in butter so we can practice letting go of what we were and watch our hands emerge as telephones so we can know our true calling.

Brrrrrng. It’s the future! It’s for you! (Brown 0:54)

Brown creates an image that very poignantly captures the act of removing the bonds of the past in order to accept the call of the future. It is a directive. In “Come

Alive,” Brown is the sieve through which a transformation can occur. Similar to

Whitman, Brown fashions an oral persona that stands in for democracy. He speaks to a constituency of Americans who could accept a future in which such a poetry, and such an

America, can exist. As “Come Alive” continues,” Brown raises the stakes further:

I declare a day for talking to the trees. What are they saying? They’re saying “Climb me, carve your future lover’s initials into my spine, sacrifice me for your books. Every book, every page is my blood. I give this to you. If it’s a war for the lands of imagination, I am ready to die.” (1:24)

As previously in Anis Mojgani’s “Come Closer,” the notion of transfer is important to this poem, and to democracy. It is not owned by any one person. Brown details a Narnia of sacrifice, in which our values are transmitted to each other through books. Derrick C. Brown is validating his role as the poet by highlighting the importance of imagination by way of the written and spoken word. This is a matter of the content of a

18 poem being reflected in its form, and vice versa. It is also, rather importantly, uniquely

Derrick Brown. His voice is unmistakable, both as a physical entity but also as a representation of his poetic aims. His work is crafted. It is poetry of a singular kind. Of the many spoken word poets whose work I have come to love and admire, Brown’s always manages to ring out the loudest. Though I celebrate his work, mine does not adhere very closely to Brown’s poetics. While it is one of my more recent pieces, “Good

Morning, Colossus” seems as good an entry point as any into a discussion of the way image has helped me to craft a unique voice in my own poetry. The image of the insurmountable, in particular, has roots in the classical literature of the Greeks and

Romans. Sylvia Plath’s “The Colossus” approaches the antiquity of the insurmountable in a very contemporary fashion:

It would take more than a lightning-stroke To create such a ruin. Nights, I squat in the cornucopia Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-color. The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. My hours are married to shadow. No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel On the blank stones of the landing. (21)

This poem was introduced to me by the same English teacher who helped me penguin-waddle in the direction of poetry in the first place. It is among the first poems I fell in love with, both because of its imagery and its obliqueness. Plath’s cobbling together of loosely-affiliated images in “The Colossus” has always placed her amongst my forebears. She writes, “Nights, I squat in the cornucopia / Of your left ear” (21). I admire how boldly Plath situates the bright image of a cornucopia alongside the more

19 cold, stony images of the poem. It is a boldness I have long tried to emulate, binding together word combinations and image clusters that would otherwise have no business sharing a space. Likewise, Plath wields her images to describe the same kind of identity reconciliation that is at the center of my project as a writer. The colossus is Plath’s to slay, as it is every writer’s journey to overcome that great obstacle or dead end. Plath writes, “The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue” (21). Whether the poem is biographically about her father, metaphorically a creative obstruction, or something else altogether, there is a clear imagining of the colossus as an inescapable presence, yet the final two lines reach in the direction of redemption, as she writes, “No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel / On the blank stones of the landing” (21). It is wonderfully declarative, but I am most taken with the fact that Plath has not attempted to remove the colossus from the reader’s perception. It is still there. It can still be heard. By the poem’s end, the speaker acknowledges the presence of the colossus, but has simply chosen to ignore that presence.

Having meditated on Sylvia Plath’s “The Colossus” for many years into my writing career, it struck me that I needed to return to my own formative moments, and slay those monstrosities that I had not yet so boldly approached in my own poetry. “Good

Morning, Colossus” was the result, clearly owing much to Plath’s “The Colossus,” but offering a whole new dimension of bombardment:

I’ve dragged polish and a rag with me to a time-worn memorial more often than I’ve got sins to forgive at its feet. It feels a bit like buffing the kneelers in a confessional booth.

As is often my predisposition, I open with an image of the church, that menace of emotional toil. But I saddle my most familiar subject onto the rich tradition of Greek and

Roman maximalism. I tried to keep my images and metaphors as confined to culturally- appropriate language as possible, a difficult task for a writer as manic as myself:

there are no martyrs stashed inside your hollows.

I would not follow them either way. I don’t trust what I cannot carve into your spine, and you’re blind to miss the bronze in your rivets foretelling a future communion with rust.

This poem will end in ruins. And that’s the point: every chisel chip and sledgehammer blow is a contributor in a very protracted process, and I wanted to keep the misfires to a minimum, though not every image pulls through with equally-measured vigor. “Good Morning, Colossus” is then an unintentional epic, as clumsy as its author, but triumphant over something that once seemed insurmountable. And what is that, specifically, the reader may ask? It’s a compilation of neuroses and damages that I’ve long hesitated to make public. Again, my goal is often to be a democratizing force as a poet, and I kept a death grip on obscurity in this poem, instead allowing the images to do all of the heavy lifting. And there was much heavy lifting to be done.

While “Good Morning, Colossus” represents my wordiest pursuits, I’ve recently been writing a great many shorter poems in an effort to broaden the scope of my project, which is composed primarily of lengthy, ambitious spoken word pieces. Apart from haiku, which are, for me, a disciplinary exercise in form, my more compact pieces have received some criticism in the workshop environment for being a bit too oblique, which I

21 find fancifully ironic given the maximalism I ordinarily practice. Regardless, the point is well taken, though I find that the ambiguity of these interludes is tremendously important to my project. As I construct chapbooks for self-publication, and as I prepare a book- length manuscript to submit to Write Bloody Publishing, among other independent publishers, I am thinking very actively about the movement of my poems in collected form, how I might section them in order to heighten their existence on the page. It is, of course, the great handicap of being a spoken word poet, to grapple with the best way to present a single spoken word poem on the page, as well as a collection of spoken word poems on the page. In light of this struggle, I’ve turned to Jim Harrison’s Songs of

Unreason for insight. Harrison’s is a relatively unique strategy, in which he presents a short poem—an interlude—on the left page of a pair of two, and what might be considered a “full length” poem on the right page of that pair. It is a fascinating way to collect his work in Songs of Unreason, because it prompts the reader to make connections between two separate poems on two separate pages. The very structure of the collection is an invitation for the imagination to go to work. In an interlude, Harrison writes, “She told me in white tennis shorts / that when you think you can’t / take it anymore you’re just getting started. / No pieces can be put back together” (34). Opposite that interlude is a poem titled “Mary the Drug Addict,” in which Harrison writes, “To understand Mary we have to descend into the cellar, the foundation of our being, the animal bodies we largely ignore” (35). There’s something elemental in these lines, something connected to the earth. The poem is about an aging English cocker spaniel, and, once read, it alters the way the reader approaches the untitled interlude on the opposite page, and vice versa. The line “No pieces can be put back together” from that interlude rings out very strongly in

22 light of the poem that follows it. Decay is unavoidable, and Harrison’s organizational principles help to reinforce this notion across those two pages.

While I am not interested in adopting Harrison’s strategy in Songs of Unreason verbatim, it did force me to think very actively about how to construct Good Morning,

Colossus. At our present moment in time, culture is so effortlessly disposable. If an individual enjoys a song, for example, they might purchase it digitally, listen to it once or twice, forget about it altogether, and then move onto the next one. I refuse to consider my poetry in a similar vein. I want my work to stay with the reader, to linger. It is an age of consumption rather than delight, and I am attempting to construct very intentional collections that might delight the reader with their multitudes. Good Morning, Colossus was then organized as an EKG. It is meant to peak and valley, to shift dramatically, to inhale its bombast, and exhale its interludes. That said, I think of my shorter pieces in two distinct ways. First, they act as a chaser, meant to help choke down the lengthier, more exhausting pieces, which can, admittedly, be a bit overbearing to read or listen to in succession. But secondly, and perhaps most importantly, my shorter poems serve the purpose of creating a sense of disorientation when placed in a larger context. I want the reader to feel something as they read those poems, without actually knowing exactly why the poem is conjuring up those feelings. I want many of my short poems to suggest something just outside of reach, like passing a stranger in the night and exchanging glances, all the while unsure if the other smiled or winked in your direction. In this way, as the reader moves from a shorter piece to a longer and more well-defined piece, they feel a sense of wonder, of intrigue, of uncertainty, but are still able to find something that resembles solid ground. I find it to be a useful effect, as in “Silence, Pt. 1”:

My footsteps are careful to remind me that I’ve always been a disciple of sound.

I’m saddled to those echoes, trying to break their habit of stifling against the strain

in my vocal cords. They get caught in the reigns. I get lost in the stirrups. Too many days stacked

up at the neck of my words. I braced myself for silence. I brought nothing back.

This is one of my shortest poems. I was not entirely sure what it meant when I wrote it. I’m still not entirely sure, and I definitely wasn’t sure that it was a “complete” work when I “finished” it. I had great difficulty resisting the temptation to write my way further into the poem to mine something more readily available, more obvious, more grand from it. More often than not, I find that it is acceptable to be uncertain. In “Silence,

Pt. 1,” meaning feels just out of reach. It is a wisp of fog. But the poem is not altogether inaccessible. There is clearly an issue of words and wordlessness. There is a relationship between the physicality of voice and the significance of voice. It is a poem that appears to me to be about my struggle between the breath of my voice as an uttered thing and the worth of my voice as a written thing. It is a moment un-captured, if there is any resonance in such a notion. There is newfound pleasure for me in painting with small, delicate, strokes, without completely defining an image or an idea. Anis Mojgani’s “Long

After January Had Passed,” from his most recent collection The Feather Room, manages the same:

From the side of the highway I notice how the rain this winter has pulled so much out of the Texas wildflowers. They bleed so many colors. (Mojgani 66)

Mojgani has a way of rendering big images in small ways. Culturally, Texas has a reputation for being unsubtle. But I really appreciate how Mojgani manages to zoom in on a delicate moment, without being too precious or final, without attempting to say all that could be said “from the side of the highway.” It is not even clear to me what exactly he is attempting to “say” in “Long After January Had Passed,” if anything at all. It is this that I admire in writing poetry of a shorter form. There is a freedom in swinging the bug net in the direction of a moment but coming up empty. I’m finding that there’s more to be learned in the motion of swinging, rather than the capture and interrogation of a subject.

Too often have I tried to dredge meaning up from the most ambiguous, most inexplicable of life’s experiences. It is with great urgency and impatience that I’ve tried to scribble my way into understanding, only to later discover that the pen beckons me back towards the very subject I thought I’d achieved some amount of closure on. Early on in my writing, it was Mojgani’s, or Wakefield’s, or Brown’s ambitious, larger-than-life spoken word pieces that gripped me. But they were isolated experiences, divorced from context. After diving nose-first into their collected works on the page, I began to better appreciate the importance of movement, the impermanence of meaning.

Fox Hunting

I am a long-legged martini. I am feeding olives to the bull inside you. I am decorating your labyrinth, tacking up snapshots of all the people who’ve gotten lost

in your corridors. – Jeffrey McDaniel

The final lines of Jeffrey McDaniel’s “Compulsively Allergic to the Truth” sing very loudly to me at night. Every night. I think about every labyrinth I’ve managed to lose myself in. I think about the faces I’ve possessed, the people I’ve been. At one time, poetry was absolute necessity in my life. It was salve. It was medicine. It was panacea. I required its prescription to push myself past the personal dead ends I persisted in meeting. But while there is something redemptive in channeling creativity to achieve release, like anything, it is but a temporary solution. In the spirit of holding back, suffice it to say that, after overhauling my worldview a fair amount and acquiring something that resembled emotional balance, I was left with a new and exciting question: now that poetry was less an emotional requirement and more a frontier for which the horizon refused to dissipate, what was I to do with this gift of language that I had spent a considerable amount of time refining? It felt horrifying to consider deserting my craft altogether. It felt equally as intolerable to carry on in my craft as I had been. I would not abandon the voice that I felt so at home inside of, but it seemed time to augment that voice, to discover further boundaries beyond my neatly-manicured poetic niche.

Having served as an intern in a Beginning Creative Writing class, with the goal of creating lesson plans and crafting a well-composed syllabus, I found great pleasure investigating a poetic avenue I had not previously considered for myself. Enter the persona. The lesson plan I constructed revolved around several poems written in persona, including R.T. Smith’s “Sheriff Matt Whitlock Confesses to a Lesson in Zen After

Hours.” The title of the poem is quite the giveaway as to its dramatic thrust:

I get paid to protect what the county commission declares holy— the park with its petting zoo, the rebel sentry on the square, and all the highway signs— and here’s all indications that some felon has no respect, some felon who can shoot. (R.T. Smith, “Sheriff…”)

I like Matt Whitlock. I liked him immediately. He was a character easy to appreciate and identify with—hard-working, duty-bound, unappreciated, modest. I was really taken in by the strong, singular voice in this piece, as well as the deliberate pacing.

It reads slow, almost lazy, as if the speaker himself is just moseying on down the street as he confesses to his lesson in zen. The poem’s folksy demeanor and deliberate regionalism of language struck me as authentic, though it was not necessarily written by R.T. Smith from personal experience. He’s not Matt Whitlock. It’s not even clear to me if Matt

Whitlock actually exists. It’s irrelevant either way. Honestly, I was dazzled by “Sheriff

Matt Whitlock.” It was gold sifted from silt. I was in desperate need of creative defibrillation, and, oddly enough, the opportunity to teach others about a subject of which

I knew very little was an exercise in teaching myself the value in that subject.

The following day, I had begun writing a persona poem that would eventually evolve into “Man About to Die (An Exercise in Mythmaking).” I began with the same raw materials found in “Sheriff Matt Whitlock”: period, place, detail, dialect. I even stuck with a similar motif, writing of old west shootouts. But it had no definition. It did not feel authentic. I struggled. Matt Whitlock was a well-defined character. He was vibrant and lively. My character was nondescript. Then I acquired a copy of a biography titled Doc

Holliday: The Life and Legend at a used bookstore, and became fascinated with the biographer’s difficulty in reconciling his research with the myth of a man oft-depicted in

27 fiction and film. All of a sudden I had a name and a face to put to the character of my fledgling persona piece, and I knew precisely how to give him the definition he richly deserved. I proceeded to scribble furiously deep into a wine-soaked night. What I ended up with is my longest piece to date, and one of the most narrative works I’ve yet managed to construct. It also happens to be the poem that I am the most proud of.

“Man About to Die” is, of course, written in the whiskey-addled voice of John

Henry “Doc” Holliday, notorious old west gambler and gunslinger. I liked how inconclusive his biography ultimately turned out to be. The reader gets a few worthy scraps of information to chew on regarding Holliday’s upbringing, education, dental apprenticeship, contraction of tuberculosis, and subsequent descent into alcoholism, but, when it comes to the exploits that Holliday is famous for, most accounts are conflicting and exaggerated. There really is not an accessible foothold into knowing the dentist- turned-gambler that fired his pistols alongside of Wyatt Earp. Doc reads like a true

American myth, one constructed not from fact, but from belief in that which is presented as fact. This notion is so compelling to me, and it presented itself as the perfect opportunity to submerge myself completely in persona. With Matt Whitlock in the back of my mind, The Life and Legend on my nightstand, and with my love for Val Kilmer’s portrayal of Doc Holliday in the 1993 film Tombstone, a poem that began as a struggle very easily found its shape. While I have a great admiration for Kilmer’s giddy and nobly restrained performance, the film surrounding that performance—admittedly minor in scope—comes up well short of greatness. I felt I could do better with less. I placed the magnifying glass over Doc’s final lines in Tombstone. From his death bed, and to his dearest friend, Wyatt Earp, Holliday says, “There’s no normal life, Wyatt. There’s just

28 life. Now get on with it.” From there, I sculpted a very believable persona, but one that also uniquely manages to retain some semblance of my own poetic voice. It is a straddling that I am tremendously satisfied with.

“Man About to Die” weaves regret deeply into Doc’s story in an attempt to humanize an otherwise familiar figure of American myth. From initial draft to the present form of “Man About to Die,” I was not interested in the “real” Doc Holliday as much as I was interested in the very nature and process of mythmaking. My casting of Doc

Holliday is no less romanticized than any other. He just aches a little bit more. And this was of great importance to me, to bring Doc to life in a relatable way, to refrain from judgment, instead giving the reader the opportunity to judge him as they may. I returned to Whitman’s affinity for the spoken word, his desire to be as democratic about the craft of poetry as possible, and, in whittling my version of Doc Holliday out of that tradition, I revealed a guilt-ridden man grappling with his loyalties, his legacy, staring down a death he knows he can’t outrun:

Too long has the world rotated without explaining the sins in its dirt. Obliquity must be for our own good, right Wyatt?

Doc cannot resolve himself to a world that won’t give up the answers. And that’s not a terribly ambitious aim, right, to get some straight answers? It shouldn’t be out of reach, but it’s something that unites us all. We all come up short of the answers. Doc’s grasping and groping in the dark because he can’t help it. That is where he and I intersect as the speaker of this poem. We’re both knowledge junkies. We use every resource available. In “Man About to Die,” Doc feels out his old friend, Wyatt, for some sort of

29 affirmation. But what does a sheriff know except the law? Doc has never had much use for law. As a man “about to die,” the law is a useless construct meant to be circumvented.

But Doc is not on a suicide mission. He’s clearly a thoughtful individual, and fanciful, to boot:

I buried a peacemaker inside of a piano bench. It’s an odd way to hide one, to be sure. After all, I can’t murder the Wurlitzer, or trade in its eighty-eights for a place in line at the Pearly Gates.

In this stanza, the future of my project finds a home. The issue of god is still present, the uncertainty is rabid, the images are lively, the metaphors are accessible, and the sonic palette is colorful. I consider “Man About to Die” to be one of my greatest creative successes, in that I stepped rather far outside of myself to write it. I didn’t want it to stop there. The notion of persona seemed too abyssal to abandon. I just needed another story to tell. As I poured over further opportunities in persona, I stumbled upon Patricia

Smith’s spoken word poem, “Skinhead.” Her performance of that poem is truly something to behold as she, an African American woman, adopts the stance of a white racist, injured on the job and without work, cursing America for its progress:

I’ve got my own beauty. It’s in my steel-toed boots, in the hard corners of my shaved head. I look in the mirror, and I hold up my mangled hand, only the baby finger left. I know it’s the wrong finger but fuck you all anyway. I am riding the top rung of the perfect race, my face scraped pink and brilliant. I’m your baby, America. Your boy. (P. Smith 2:38)

The conviction with which she delivers those lines, her ability to sell the listener on the persona she has crafted, regardless of her skin color and gender, is masterful. Her every detail is so well-placed, particularly the snarl with which she considers her character’s disfigurement. If the listener can’t locate the shivers in their spine while exposed to “Skinhead,” then Smith hasn’t done her job. But it is hard to imagine that poem not hitting the listener right in the gut. Amazed by the way Smith managed to inhabit her character so fully, I went searching for a persona I might also live inside of as deeply as possible. While I did not boldly pursue a racially-charged avenue as Smith did,

I managed to find a compelling persona in a nod from the future, oddly enough. A few months before he passed away, I decided to reread Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a novel I’ve long had great admiration for. The opening sentence of the novel reads, “It was a pleasure to burn” (3), and I was struck by its immediacy. I realized that Guy

Montag’s story could very easily inform some sort of basis for a new persona poem. With

Montag in mind, I scribbled what would become the first three lines of my poem, “Fox

Hunt”:

I wake to a hand full of wet matches and whiskey breath strong enough to inspire the blowtorch in me.

Though there is clearly a shared DNA in the lines above and the dramatic thrust of Fahrenheit 451, it was not my intent to rewrite Bradbury’s novel in poem form, and I took great pains to craft what I hope reads like an original story. Though, upon hearing news of Ray Bradbury’s passing, it occurred to me that “Fox Hunt” must immortalize itself as a dedication to Bradbury and his tremendous imagination. With Bradbury’s name

31 emblazoned atop the poem in epigraph, it became even more necessary to create enough crowbar separation between “Fox Hunt” and Fahrenheit 451 that the reader didn’t lose sight of the poem beneath the specter of a science fiction master. I looked to one of my favorite films, Ridley Scott’s 1982 science-fiction masterpiece, Blade Runner, to help me establish the tone of “Fox Hunt.” The film opens with a view of what the filmmakers refer to as the “Hades landscape,” an industrial sector of high rises and blinking lights, eternally rain-slicked and night-fallen. Coupled with Vangelis’ futuristic film score, the early scenes of Blade Runner really helped me to create a tonal and visual backdrop for the poem:

Nobody sleeps when they’re trapped beneath a searchlight. Instead, I fight against taxi traffic, hoping to get lost in that airborne ocean of yellow.

But there’s an air horn with my name bent into its bellow, a siren sutured to whatever traces of me I might leave behind for the rats to feed on.

Towards the end of Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer’s character, Roy Batty, delivers what amounts to a rather moving soliloquy, as he says, “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe: attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” I’ve always been captivated by those lines. They are distinct and human in their regret, but they are also otherworldly, without veering too far in the direction of sci-fi- speak. In “Fox Hunt,” I reached for the same careful balancing act:

There is a drum roll overhead. The sky is scorched by a beehive’s worth of fury. I count thirty vessels burning with security,

Full of the shackled and the shutdown and the sheriffs that found them.

I very much wanted the reader to envision a night sky turned red by the activity of prison ships ferrying prisoners to some unwelcome fate or another. I am not entirely convinced that I was successful in my attempts, and, on the whole, I am not completely satisfied with “Fox Hunt.” I’d like to revise it further in the spirit of balancing its otherworldly sensibility with its sense of earth-bound paranoia. That said, I am proud of the work I’ve accomplished thus far in “Fox Hunt.” It is the tenth poem in Good

Morning, Colossus, and falls near the middle of the collection. This allows it to act as a pivot of sorts, a point from which the rest of my poems can find new clarity. As with

“Man About to Die,” many of the issues at the center of my non-persona poems still manage to find a home in persona. To repeat myself verbatim, but now with respect to

“Fox Hunt,” the issue of god is still present, the uncertainty is rabid, the images are lively, the metaphors are accessible, and the sonic palette is colorful. Dare I say that I am having more fun writing poetry now than ever before? Persona has afforded me with the kind of creative license I was never certain that I deserved. It has expanded the scope of my project, and turned me into a joyful writer that need not plumb his every waking anxiety in order to press pen to paper. “Fox Hunt,” while imperfect in its current form, is the kind of breakthrough I was hoping for on the heels of “Man About to Die.” And, having since written a poem from the perspective of Link, the silent hero in the Zelda video game series, I can honestly say that I am still content to dabble in persona awhile longer, to write with less of me, to sprint towards the furthest boundaries of my

33 imagination until I find the next dead-end, to which I’ll say good morning, I’ve got a sledgehammer waiting.

PART II

GOOD MORNING, COLOSSUS

Asterisk

I remember childhood summers like they were propaganda films for boredom. The sun was too high from my spot on the sidewalk, as I chalked silhouettes for an entire cult of shadows cast against the asphalt.

I clung to my outline until the eighth grade, didn’t know how to outrun my shape. Gangly and in grayscale, I spent my days tetherball pole dancing to the patron saint of evasion.

Spacing out was my favorite sport. In 1999, I set the record for keeping track of time. The clock always struck me as the most sincere face in the room, so I counted 4,200,000 ticks that year, brain spinning like a pirouetting asterisk.

At sixteen I became detached at the hips. It was flail-ure of a burned out sort. Too tangled up in mangrove, I deforested my Lord of the Flies until I could memorize the sky for what it said about the clouds:

“Now comes the flood.”

My bones were once sap-filled and weather-proofed. I always knew how to keep my crossed arms from rusting. With an extra coat of wax, the water rolled right off all the “not for sale” signs.

I was dead-end real estate, manicuring a mine field for a lawn, contrapposto like a crack in a Roman column. My jaw would unhinge itself at the sight of passer-bys refusing to slalom between the tent poles of my mind.

So I juggled a beehive in my mouth to try And outgrow the monotony. My tongue regrets nothing, but for the week that I could not speak, I wrote a dedication to my teeth for grinding the enamel off what was left of my caution.

My first poem was published inside a bathroom stall. It read like Saturday morning cartoon smiles: a little too big to be honest, a bit too thin to be balanced, like building gallows humor from used toothpicks.

It couldn’t possibly have held together, but I hung my boredom there until its feet two-stepped their way back to the sun.

♦ ♦ ♦

Dry paintbrush with bristles tough enough to scrape a canvas clean

♦ ♦ ♦

Giving Birth to Bombs

I inherited the need to declare war on every boundary ever placed around me.

See, I was raised with a ghost town mentality. I made an enemy out of the mirror. I traded my allies for blank pages, but there’s never been enough ink in this world to save me from the way I see myself.

Then I see you out there on the front lines, dancing like it’s the eve of the apocalypse. Your shotgun grin collides with my insides, and I can’t hide from the crosshairs bearing down on the lies in my confidence.

I’m holstered by the missile crisis of your eyes. I’ve been locked in your gaze for what passes for days. Bunker busters couldn’t break my concentration.

Ancient civilizations crumble more easily than this. So I lifted what’s left of Rome onto my back and watched the shivers climb up my spinal column, like Time, like the whip’s crack, like grenade pins in a haystack packed tightly enough to hide the Hiroshima in my carelessness. I wear explosions on my sleeve. There’s never been enough shelter in my dreams to save me from the fallout.

I swear, I was there on the day the dogs were cut loose.

I’ve shoved dynamite sticks into my ribcage, just to see who would light the fuse.

I’ve been forced to watch my own dams burst. I’ve been first in line for the reckoning. I’ve finished last in races towards your heart. I’ve pried my knuckles apart like rivalries.

There’s nothing more violent than a memory. There’s nothing more patient than a chambered round.

I found you lying next to me, alive in a pile of bullseyes. Why are there silencers fitted onto my screams? Why are their landmines scattered inside of your smile? I guess we never learned how to pass lightly over the soft spots.

Meet me at the dreadnoughts in my stomach like it’s high noon, and we’re two gunslingers who refuse to draw against each other.

Our standoff might last through the night, but I’ll fight off the lynch mob in pursuit of that place where we can retrace our steps and erase the chalk outlines that separate us like trust is the blanket we clutch to quiet the shaking.

It’s panic that’s kept me backpedaling in the direction of my fists.

I wish I was the only one.

I’ve witnessed an artist crawl out of a slit wrist. She said, “This… is war.” I’ve listened to a coffee shop prophet hung with his own microphone cord. I’ve heard of entire gospel choirs crucified by silence, treble clefs hammered into their hands and feet, lyric sheets pinned to their backs like makeshift angel wings.

And these are not demons in my head. They’re just the lonely reflections of people I’ve met,

40 vigilantes in a shanty town with fingers pointed at the mirror, like, “You talkin’ to me… yet?”

I’d never place a bet on the wrong jockey, big shock, seein’ me comin’ up quickly in the rearview, like all the king’s men in suits don’t even know who to root for.

They can lead this hoarse voice to water, but they can’t make me drink from the well they pretended to bless while trying to pry a confession from the fear in me.

Don’t trust the appearance of “me.” I am not a bomb to diffuse. I am not an excuse to run. I am not the smoking gun.

I am a butterfly knife you can treat like a balance beam.

Step towards me, if you don’t mind the shaking. Put your arms around me, if you can embrace my jagged boundaries. Kiss me, if your lips need more than broken seams to weave together tightly like I might be even more than what you’re looking for.

This… is not a war. It’s just a dance floor littered with tripwires. We can work our way to higher ground.

If you meet me on the roof tonight, under the moonlight we might discover that your heart is fully armored, and my smile is bulletproof.

St. Apollonia

There are songs she memorizes like the pulling of teeth, gutting their melodies down to a stutter, defective like God dressed up for the morning after. Drenched in an alien scent, something on the fringes of juniper, she is gin and tectonic, straining against a punchdrunk earthquake of a smirk. Aftershocks ripple like hymnals aimed at the holes in heaven.

The sky is red-faced and pregnant. Her voice never remembers the rain. When a piano clangs itself dry, chordless and somewhere just south of sober, she can feel winter dancing a panic across the white flag of her skirt. Winter is a grudge fuck, leatherclad and zipper-teethed. It is a church pew tithing at the wood chipper.

She carries mercy between her knees, buries a lake bed in her breath just to watch it freeze. Ice picks have since mined the detritus from her mouth. Silence would have sent a crack down her spine if she was not so well-mortared.

Each of her ribs is a tuning fork, still pitch-perfect, like bourbon-soaked prayers. If God answers, He’ll have to fight static on her frequency.

Nebraska

I guess there’s just a meanness in this world. ~Bruce Springsteen, “Nebraska”

lately your hair hangs dripping like pistol grips at your sides you call it guilt you said the world has turned on us i said i know

‘cause it left me tied here sometime after the moment you appeared to me in a dream that hasn’t quite learned how to blur itself yet and i just fucked a memory one too many times in my head again you said you don’t believe in ghosts i said i’m still not sure i believe in god but maybe god is hiding in the parts of me i don’t understand i hope my inability to speak his language is a correctable defect there are only question marks under my skin so i look for him in the pieces of me i leave behind rummaging through the dust i kick up while running from time but all i find are blind corners and yellow-spined books i’m quickly discovering that i have to

43 slooooooow down if i ever want to see god i wish i could hide on the roof of my mouth when my words fall short of complete i never learned how to climb up there where the storm clouds know how to cover up easy targets sometimes they get so large they unfold like bruises and i can feel the thunderclaps get heavy all the way from uncorked pill bottles in fuck-if-i-know nebraska clearly i have never been to nebraska i wonder if god has i wonder if he tips his halo when he visits such flat conditions see there are no mountains in nebraska to punch through the truth or oceans to drown it in there’s just these big empty spaces to stretch it out like rusted torture devices no one can remember how to use nebraska seems like it would be a terrible place to wait out the rapture there’s just too much distance there’s too much to hold against a horizon line that never ever ends i was born in california i grew up out-of-breath i stuffed scars into my knuckles

‘cause i thought god was resting again and i didn’t know how else to get his attention but then again god never could fit into that nebraska-sized box i tried to think outside of i wonder if he hates tightspaces as much as i do i wonder if he regrets the sound of vacant roads see a day ago i was walkin’ down one and i met a man an Honest Man who told me a lonely story that probably could have occurred somewhere in nebraska i’ve still never been there but it won’t be hard to believe in ghosts tonight

♦ ♦ ♦

Born fist-deep in the belly of a blossom tree sap bleeds a slow dance

♦ ♦ ♦

Good Morning, Colossus

I’ve dragged polish and a rag with me to a time-worn memorial more often than I’ve got sins to forgive at its feet. It feels a bit like buffing the kneelers in a confessional booth.

I’m used to gazing upward, but I could no longer see your face from my place in the corner.

So I formed a scaffold around your waist, to frame the faint praise I could stand to abandon your way.

By the time I left your edifice for dead, you had already followed me home, put me in check with flecks of bone in your stucco. I was bucked off my horse in your chessboard intrusion.

It was a waste to assume I could just pray myself out from under the weight in this room.

In every room, there are shadows born too soon to name after Greek or Roman gods.

They’re prematurely cast by past promises from non-fathers, and odds are that we have met here before.

Now I stand at your pedestal,

47 chalking its octagonal outline in the memory of too many sycophants vying for space at your side, prostrate like parables you might find in Aesop’s Fables.

I’m able to poke holes in the locomotive smoke that covers up your weaknesses. “DO NOT CROSS” does not mean much today, as you straddle the tracks, caution-taped to a toss-up.

Good morning, Colossus.

I will not drop this atlas stone that fell from your Byzantine lips.

Not when I can spit it BACK.

It’s no pearl of wisdom, and you are at the forked tips of every tongue that never meant to invest its best building blocks in the structure of something so distracting.

You stare past me like you’re strapped to the mast without the back-lashing. But there are no martyrs stashed inside your hollows.

I would not follow them either way.

I don’t trust what I can’t carve into your spine, and you’re blind to miss the bronze in your rivets foretelling a future communion with rust.

Can you tell dust from busted seams?

Ten years of labor ain’t worth your upkeep.

I climbed a rope ladder to your shoulders, stood there for a moment, counted the X-marks-the-spots dotting your rotting plaster, now spackled enough to craft a patchwork apology for existing in the first place.

You offer flowers in exchange for mercy.

But you need to know that I keep a chisel under my pillow, and a hammer on my nightstand. Thank whatever God you’re modeled on that I forgot the box cutter.

There are no more wrists here to hold under house arrest. I won’t pardon you in my dreams about dismantling your every failing tempest:

My fists. Your bricks.

I’ve witnessed your towering fits of terror alerts and false starts like your parts were being packed, shipped, and bound for Auschwitz. Maybe I’ll salvage the pit in your stomach, so burned out by past attempts at jailbreak.

But not before I recast your plaque in cyanide typeface:

“Mason who could not brace himself.” “Arsonist pinned against the furnace.” “Marksman teething on the bullet.”

“Preacher missing at the pulpit.”

You were pullin’ a pied piper behind you with an empty assembly line of ripe disciples, all sworn in like bibles were in short supply. Now I’ll give eulogy a try:

“Here lies a red-handed matador, who went to war with a bullhorn lodged in his throat, a goat in wolf’s skin. I’ve been selling you too high, you brokerage house of horrors, you butcher of the sutures I stitched to bind you together whenever you threatened to crumble without even a flower to deliver me in the free-fall.”

I used to prune those roses daily, thinking about the long crawl from my place against the wall to any room that might disguise or deface this curbside view of you.

I’ve just dug up my box cutter. It was covered by a failure to find a piano box large enough to bury you inside of, with none of its strings attached, no swan song for the pillars you didn’t think to reinforce beneath my fear of getting away from the outstretched arms of your shadow.

You’ve cracked open. Your fault lines are no longer a Labyrinth. Your judgment is no Vatican.

Nickname me Galileo-with-a-Grudge.

Don’t budge.

I’ll cut the cord gently, and I promise, you will make no tourist of me at the feet of your ruins.

♦ ♦ ♦

Bombshells at port storms at starboard anatomy of a sinking ship

♦ ♦ ♦

The Flat World

I took seventeen steps outside of my house today. Eighteen felt like too much, what, with the sky as drunk as it looked, no chaser here to deal with that caterwaul of clouds crawling too close to the ground. The horizon has abandoned me. I’ve never seen the moon, but I still hear the howling, so I turned around to start up the path, counted cobblestones instead on the way back, smooth… and vacant like walking along the edge of the flat world.

Fox Hunt

For Ray Bradbury, R.I.P. (1920-2012)

I wake to a hand full of wet matches and whiskey breath strong enough to inspire the blowtorch in me.

I cannot stay here.

This foxhole is christened a quick fix, baptized in butane. I’m leaving with nothing more than band-aid bluster, so I dust off a meal at the dumpster, and doggy-bag up my counting sheep.

Nobody sleeps when they’re trapped beneath a searchlight. Instead, I fight against taxi traffic, hoping to get lost in that airborne ocean of yellow.

But there’s an air horn with my name bent into its bellow, a siren sutured to whatever traces of me I might leave behind for the rats to feed on.

This howling wants me gone.

These hounds have meteor showers clipped to their belts, supernovas forming in their knuckles.

Come knock down these doors. Buckle me at my hinges. Bore the chip into my wrist. Fox hunt me down the river like you don’t believe in innocence.

Ditched the drones at midnight.

I found a church pew to fake my guilty plea, this building now half-emptied of light. Everything feels pixelated in this place.

I am rank with unrest.

Every dog I’ve met smells it on me, barks a guard tower of Babel into existence, baiting a failure to communicate out of a[n un]suspect[ing victim].

“Set intimidation factor to stun.”

There is a drum roll overhead. The sky is scorched by a beehive’s worth of fury. I count thirty vessels burning with security, Full of the shackled and the shutdown and the sheriffs that found them.

“Apprehended while exiting church.”

I would make an unfortunate soundbyte. My sobriety was birthed in neon buzz. Headaches can’t be shrugged off at the shock collar, and it’s a long walk to the docking bay when you’re huddled under a bear trap’s clarity.

The glare of these high rises cannot spare an ounce of pity. I listened to a billboard roar at me with prophecy, vibrating its gospel in a rain puddle:

“YOUR GOD DOES NOT LIVE HERE.”

My eyes have seen more fear in their closing than these drones can comprehend, but there’s no fleet or friend to save me from the blackout.

My judgment has been mapped out, narrated by a constellation of exit signs immortalizing this failed escape.

I am slow dancing with a prayer, staring deep into space. Home is burning, but the howling is not quite as loud as I had imagined.

Silence, Pt. 1

My footsteps are careful to remind me that I’ve always been a disciple of sound.

I’m saddled to those echoes, trying to break their habit of stifling against the strain in my vocal cords. They get caught in the reigns. I get lost in the stirrups. Too many days stacked up at the neck of my words. I braced myself for silence. I brought nothing back.

Hammerlung

I woke up this morning to the smell of yellowed books and aged turpentine.

I was a fly on the paint-chipped walls of a factory that used to produce mosquito repellent.

I am becoming more aware of the ironic in this trash compactor of an era like I might be able to swat at the worst of my waste. Instead, I just watched the world peel itself away from us like an automatic weapon recoiling in the hands of a child soldier, tattooed at the neck with pictures of the man he thought he might grow up to be.

He writes letters to that hallucination, introducing himself as a birthmark living inside a sawed-off heartbeat.

I wave to him with gunpowder burns for fingertips and a stomach set to hunger freeze. It’s not easy pretending to breathe through tempered nostrils. I’m soldered to my self-diagnosis: call it “hammerlung.”

There is a window sill I’ve often clung to when the clouds confess their forecast.

There is a chimney chute

I use to send distress signals home to my parents.

I’ve already convinced myself to forget where I was raised.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever remember my name.

Overgrowth

For Brian & McKenzie

You know something of shade at the sprout-end of summer. The wind writes messages in pollen, scattering shafts of sunlight at a speed instantly recognizable to your feet.

Let these seeds beneath them become an overgrowth. Take root at the base of a willow tree. He will always share the water.

Store it up beside the marrow. Thrust out your branches, Make room for a sparrow.

She will follow your bones back to their sapling state. The moss will fall away, uncovering smiles you can forever cast in cedar glaze.

Lay your leaves to rest next to a monument of birdsong. Resurrect the longest day of the year with a dance of chrysanthemum, planted from beyond the autumn you’ve held deep inside your breath.

Dry the rest between sheets of papyrus. You’ve not yet forgotten what winter takes with it. Give some back.

Draft a love letter to the new growth, your stems climbing higher like a pair of hydrangeas searching for spring.

♦ ♦ ♦

Iron cocoon blooms into bullet with butterfly wings

♦ ♦ ♦

Man About to Die (An Exercise in Mythmaking)

There’s no normal life, Wyatt. There’s just life. Now get on with it. ~Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday, Tombstone

I got into town this mornin’, without a horse for the hitchin’ post you were leanin’ against when I finally made my entrance.

There is no shame in arriving with nothin’ but a poker face to my name. The train I rode to get here did not blame me for where I came from, some place with blood in its troughs.

I may be coughin’ up a long list of penitence, but I’ll dispense with the lockjawed courtesies in order to speak plainly:

“I do not trust your law, Sheriff.”

I am saddled to the flask I stashed up my sleeve like an ace of spades I just can’t wait to play in the wrong kind of saloon. Give me a full moon to show you what a wolf can do when it’s made a home in a bottle.

See, sometimes the whiskey helps me keep the safeties on. Occasionally it means I’ve got a burial to consider.

Too long has the world rotated without explainin’ the sins in its dirt. Obliquity must be for our own good, right Wyatt?

I’ve not even begun to defile myself. There is no prescription to write

61 for a man who’d shootout his pride. I chewed my typewriter keys down to nubs, wonderin’ where the spittoon was hidin’.

“Deputize me!!”

Booze has not yet compromised my aim. I am ready to lose no sleep over risk of injury or death. I’ll hold my breath with street howitzer in hand, just to rouse the ghost of Curly Bill Brocius.

Last night I toasted to the memory of Johnny Ringo. I keep a single cutout from The Tombstone Epitaph: “Wyatt Earp stood up and fired in rapid succession, as cool as a cucumber, and was not hit.”

Hopped on a horse, pulled back on the bit. We never got to that sunset, did we?

Nowhere to ride but East of all this impetuous West, spurs dug into the switchbacks like we was blessed immortal, slingin’ a badge as a moral victory, but color me in a hypocritical shade. “United States Marshall” does not pair well with my other titles:

“I’m your Hucklebearer,” pale-faced coffin preparer, disgraced tooth taker with a claim staked out on my fair share of last chances.

They call me loose-lipped lunger, high-strung and deadweight, goddamned grifter by nature, shift-eyed gambler by stature, half-cocked hammer junkie, punchdrunk and huntin’ for a waltz

62 to chase down this whiskey.

I buried a peacemaker inside a piano bench. It’s an odd way to hide one, to be sure. After all, I can’t murder the Wurlitzer, or trade in its eighty-eights for a place in line at the Pearly Gates.

There is a layer of uninterrupted dust spread across the fallboard. Gabriel could not wipe my slate clean when every outlaw I see reminds me of mirrors I’ve neglected to stare into.

I’m pinned to the poker table, contemplatin’ the difference between aces and the remaining face cards. But to my surprise, Wyatt, I can no longer calculate the pace of my own disease.

It is too fast for me. It is shotgun math, the O.K. Corral a memory penned with gunsmoke typeset. I’ve since bet every last nickel on you, old friend.

I am not a man with nothin’ to lose. My lungs knew this in Tombstone.

“Barkeep!!”

A single shot of whiskey, and a double of kerosene. I’ve got a mean streak to fire Brand alongside of my guilt, without the gilding or gloss.

In vino veritas, so I will consider the number of combustions

63 it takes to forsake the phrase engraved on these sandalwood grips:

“Semper homo periturus.” That’s Latin once again, dear Wyatt, means “always a man about to die.” It never really bothered me before.

Bury me with my holsters. I’ve ignored them long enough. There’s just been too many high noons notched into my belt, too many bad hands dealt from stacked decks for me to exist without pistol whip written into my headstone.

Where is your law now, Wyatt? It only took us so far. We are not made of myth, but I’m glad to meet my maker from a seat at the bar.

I’m dyin’. There’s no stall for it. So please take my revolver, empty every last one of its chambers. Let the wind blow through them long enough that you might smell the lack in my testament.

Watch the sun set behind a cypress tree. Wyatt, I am not ridin’ in that direction, but if I were a bettin’ man…

(and goddammit, I am) there will certainly be a train waiting to deliver me back to the blood on my tracks.

And the whiskey? Well, it does not answer back anymore.

♦ ♦ ♦

Somewhere, there is an insomniac taking baby steps in his dreams

♦ ♦ ♦

Plague

Yesterday I placed a magic eight-ball in a basket and sent it downstream after reading a fortune I did not want to see:

“It is certain.”

Those words now feel weightless like ghosts in my mouth. I’m playing host to a plague too opaque to contain.

It ate right through the best of our laughter, so I ransack a generation’s worth of memories from the dust that has settled, greasy fingertips returning messages in windshield speak:

“Clean me.” I’m made filthy by one too many X’s etched across the hexes in a calendar week.

My countdown ends with a trap door. There’s no folklore beneath the floorboards, no legend of me to hedge into a Polaroid fiction.

Just scrawl my eulogy across the wall in thick-skin Sharpie. Time-stamp me in Technicolor. Dress me up in some other man’s suit. I can’t wear my own expiration date. Bury me in duct tape. It might just fit tight enough to hide the nervous tics in my toc.

We often talk backwards like old family photos, nostalgic enough to hide whatever lived behind the glow of our red eyes.

Now I understand the value of antique stores. We only mark up the past after it’s left us. File it away like understudies for the moments we might have bought back, given the chance. Call them Grandmother Clocks.

Truth is, there’s nothing in this world that does not look like a ghost when it’s shone under the light.

Teach me how to accept what I see. It was less than a year ago that I woke up from a recurring dream in which I am no longer scared of the dark.

Some monsters are very real. So I whisper prayers at the entrance of a lair tucked under my covers, hoping to be spared by whatever beast lies in wait for me.

I can’t stare down this bedroom Medusa, or fight back my desk chair Chimera. I’m tied up by Hydra heads, and Cerberus is fortressed in the corner with a jealous set of jaws for each of the flaws in my logic:

I don’t know why I thought it would be so easy to cheat the unchecked Hades in me, with only a mouthful of undigested pomegranate seeds to test the boundaries of such a plague.

I’ve stopped begging at the throne. There is no Persephone sitting next to me.

I could not bottle your light. I could not siphon from your well when it threatened to dry. My eyes have finally adjusted.

I don’t mind the floorboards anymore. I’m feeling around for a sturdier pair of footprints. Though yours were not shaped like mine, they scaled a much steeper trail to find holy water.

Static

Quiet the static in your heart. Buy back your pulse from whomever jumpstarts the pace of your bloodflow. Uncork a volume knob and throw it in a wishing well. Don’t sell your spare parts when you haven’t been appraised yet. Bet on nothing but tomorrow, then borrow a collection of skipping stones just to know better what it takes to walk on water.

♦ ♦ ♦

After Dali

I smashed a clock against a brick wall time is mortar

♦ ♦ ♦

Float

There are thousands of gallons of gasoline dedicated to how quickly I can burn a bridge. I’m beginning to crawl my way out of that wreckage. You’ll find me sifting through what’s left of my inner child, trying to untie the knots in my trust.

There’s a Leviathan just over the horizon. I jumped ship the moment it brushed up against my contradictions. Now I’m stuck with hand-stitched goodbye kisses for floating devices and uncertainties the size of a young boy who wears the same exact scars as me.

I held a halo gently by the wrist, ran my fingers over its fissures, wondered if the marks there were from carrying too many years like war cries.

I can’t remember the constellations, so I decide to redistrict the entire sky until the lines connecting the stars are shaped like your shoulder blades: angular, and able to cut through to the compass inside of my ribcage.

I pried open my chest today. All the ways I lie to myself were piled inside of it like benediction. That desert island is populated by the bastard children of one too many pawn shop owners, who only peddle Post-It Note affirmations like, “Your heart is not a vacancy sign!!”

But I still feel shark fins up my spine. I’ve got shark teeth on my mind. We are all sharks swimming inside tanks too small to hide the overbite in our nervous tics.

I’ve bitten off more than I can stomach. The ulcers here have burned through too many days

71 without seeing your face. I need your voice like a tidal wave. I’d slam my head against that hurricane over and over again until my brain bleeds sea foam. Please, show me the way to go home.

My psychosis is shaped more like a hook than a halo. I’d hope to snare your heart on the way back in, but I pinned that wish to a collapsing star. I know I can’t cast myself far enough to get caught in your arms. You’ve dressed them up in miles, and there are too many bridges in this world to cross just so I can meet you in between them.

Instead, I’ll swim underneath them if it means these deep breaths won’t burn so much when I surface.

Shock me awake from this paralysis.

Even if I’m a little bit scared you’ll see me shaking afterwards, when all of my favorite blankets have been dipped in the kerosene kiss of your memory, and too much of me is still on fire like my scorched earth policy expiring at the bottom of a lake I’ve been dragging for months to find the exact place I drowned my courage.

I’ve already considered my last words. They visited me in a dream, where all I could see down miles of beach were sand castles constructed to look like your smile, each with a footnote that claimed, “There are no words for this.”

But I still write everything down like an overflow. My favorite high is getting caught in your tide pool. The undertow spools me in then reels me out again. I’d dance around the bend in that river if it meant the waterfall at the end of it didn’t exist.

My persistence is a schizophrenic Vesuvius. The short fuse in my amusement is like a gas mask, and I only laugh to keep myself from smashing everything I see.

I have not yet learned how to let some things go.

I’m on a non-drowsy dosage of “No surrender, no retreat,” still fighting to swim upstream with arms that never seem to work right, and a heart that feels inanimate like, “God dammit would you just speed these things up!”

But your voice works better than a blood thinner. Your laughter is an afterglow. The days you smiled at me are coin returns from a wishing well that never costs anything.

I’m grateful like a park bench in winter, when the cold outside drives the need back into us. Would you sit with me awhile? We could wait for the apocalypse. We don’t even need to speak. There are no words for this.

Brick Threw a Window (or The Things You’ll Never Truly Know)

In another life, R.J. Pendleton used to write for a company that produced fortune cookies.

It was strange work, to be plain, scrawling mundane messages across the tiniest of manuscripts:

“Your gifts rip off the applause of others.”

R.J. knows nothing of acclaim. He lives in an abandoned subway car in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, strapped-in like a slow motion trainwreck.

He checks in on his neighbor a few rails down every now and again. They’re not really friends, more like liars who appreciate the practice. The guy used to play Minor League Baseball, knows something of accidents:

“Do not make love to a head-on collision.”

R.J. Pendleton now writes “visions” on an old Royal typewriter he found buried beneath the would-be bargains at the top of the neighborhood trash heap:

“You will wake up tomorrow with a misguided sense of purpose.”

He delivers prophecy each morning, imagining he’s the Atari Paperboy, lashing happenstance to bricks carved from brownstone, and sending them home to their rightful owners.

On the doorstep of Mrs. Loner:

“Tomorrow you will meet the ghost of Charles Manson.”

Through the window of Mr. Suspicious:

“Someone you know will sell themselves for a place to sleep.”

R.J. doesn’t think twice. It’s a nice gig, showing people what only he can see, as he shuffles the deck:

“You are cordially invited to a slow motion trainwreck.”

♦ ♦ ♦

Moth believes that he is brave flies too close to flame learns humility

♦ ♦ ♦

Tight Rope

For A.S.Z.

I’ve never enjoyed summertime. I always find ways to miss the rain. So tell me about the winter long after we’ve passed through it.

I melt. even though there’s nothing of ice here. I guess the sun just laughs too hard for snowflakes to form in your absence.

I don’t know much about making angels. I know even less about sleep. But I do know that there is a horizon line I look to with you at the end of it, when I get a little bit scared of mirrors.

You still my shaking reflection.

And now I am steady.

In spite of so many yesterdays spent sneaking across creaking floorboards to find you sleeping inside of a nightmare that… just maybe… only I could figure out how to wake you from.

3:00-in-the-morning’s look so much less empty when you’re lying next to me. I swear you’ve got poems hidden behind your eyes.

It took us five years to realize we were walking the same tight rope, suspended above our highest hopes like we knew what we were doing up there, oceans receding against our backlash.

We played catch with jellyfish, juggling the sting like we were bringing the sparks back into our butane inclinations. We used to obey them in circles, and you’re still too far away sometimes. But I’m not blinded by immediacy.

The future feels like a porch swing ready to carry the energy in our laughter.

We bottled it last autumn, after waiting for the aging process to end.

Now we are vintage, breathed to life from the same barrel, circa March 1987. “Just Like Heaven,” the Cure for speeding through dead ends.

We are earthmovers, forcing a canyon shut with the precision of a religious experience.

God can shift mountains? Shit, we’ve spent countless hours spinning Everest like a top inside of our stomachs.

There are no butterflies here. There are no butterflies here. There are no butterflies here.

It’s just a grove full of four-leaf clovers.

I cut your name from an oak tree and carved a park bench from the leftovers, hoping that someday we might make this place real.

Until then, I’ll be spending my evenings waiting for you on our tight rope, wishing for snow, and praying for an angel who can teach us something about balancing tomorrow.

Baptism

There is a grandfather clock in the antique store of our hope for tomorrow whose pendulum has stopped accurately keeping track of how often my pulse flickers like lightbulbs in dingy apartment hallways.

I watch the sex tape we made when we were twenty-five to recalibrate my sense of passing time, now looping through the most desolate side of my skull like I can actually fuck my mind back into coherence.

I sift out a vocabulary for your disappearance with the lattice of a confessional booth. It is not a clean practice, and the only words that remain when I am through are “holy water.”

This entire room is damp like we baptized it that way on purpose, like the night before is supposed to mortar itself into every resurrected crevice. The spaces between us are too small to navigate.

So I borrowed a brave army of fire ants from the kid next door, and marched them into certain death with strict orders to burn whatever they found on the other side.

♦ ♦ ♦

I skipped a sand dollar across the ocean hoping for some change

♦ ♦ ♦

Zelda

The flow of time is always cruel. Its speed seems different for each person, but no one can change it. A thing that doesn't change with time is a memory of younger days. ~Princess Zelda, The Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time

I was born at the base of a great tree. This year, spring brings with it a song of kindling to overthrow the undergrowth. Time wilts like apple blossoms in our hands.

There are some men who believe themselves to be larger than mountains, who hurl boulders from their cracked lips, who would dwarf the forest below with a curse fit for the least of us.

I met one such shadow in a dream of the desert. As livid as a parched riverbed he sprinted towards oblivion, chewing sand down to its jealousy of much grander beings. Lusting after a holy trinity, he’s had his way with the sun, made love to a blackened sky, stoked the embers in his chest ‘til a tempest boiled itself at the edges of a sacred realm.

Alas!! Flame has made itself my neighbor. The oxygen around me turns to vapor. His face is all I can see through the haze. I want to watch him choke on these ashes. My life, a splintered shield, dashes from the wreckage.

It is so difficult to explain what home set afire looks like to those who claim none. I’ve since memorized that smell:

82 charred chainlinks and singed wings. I left the forest with a leaden heart sunk as far south as my boots.

The great fields of Hyrule are a mirror, green as the modesty I keep wrinkled at the sleeves of my tunic.

Zelda, fill my emptiness with confetti enough to contend with a fate too big for my body. Help me to wield this mastery, plucked so easily from a stone I approached with only mild curiosity. I had not a strength as wide as the crossguard, nor a courage as bottomless as the scabbard. I was just a boy.

At the tip of a sword, you are a collision of contradictions, thick-skinned and tuneful, eyes savaged like a hunter’s moon.

Hark!! Can you hear the howling? Those wolves have chased an infinite ache back to their bones. It is an ache we both know. We’re learning how to live in a world scorched of its luster. I remember the fish of Lake Hylia, the sunset upon the closest I can recollect to a second home.

You may never know how much of me withered just to get here. There is something left to be said before the granite slab of my courage fractures at the return of a blade I could never have lifted by myself. Dearest Zelda, I was just a boy when I met you in a courtyard. We both stopped.

We blank-stared. There was a melody carried on the wind that day, carried on our backs like a link to the past. We might have kissed in the grace of tomorrow, if only we had known where to find it.

Silence, Pt. 2

Can you tell me where you go when the piano keys no longer invite you in?

I’ve been locked out of that sound for years, turned down again at the fallboard.

Chords now seem like sinful things. A savior isn’t faceless, doesn’t live for silence, but I hear nothing above my own whisper in this place.

WORKS CITED

Arzanoff, Roy. “Walt Whitman’s Concept of the Oratorical Ideal.” Quarterly Journal of

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