Wolfie’s Note: silence echoes indeed
“I have nothing to say”
in reality means
I have a universe
of sentiments
held under my breath.
So I give you my silence
without any regrets
for sometimes
the words we utter
mean less than
what our minds
refuse to regress.
(I don’t miss him.
I miss our what-would’ve-beens, the
future I don’t get to have. The shoebox
apartment in Asheville, a tiny book-record-coffeshop-club beneath,
sitting on the drumset during a concert, kisses
between songs, the snow melting
between his blonde eyelashes, his nose nestled into the
crook of my neck while we lay,
entangled, on the hardwood floor in
only our socks. The lakehouse
in New York, morning serenades on a wooden dock
with black coffee, him taking Auden out on a little
canoe with his guitar. Three children.
Mountains and valleys and
making them toys and never not having a hand to hold
and fucking in the bathroom of that amusement park,
and crying into his salty shoulder and
him plucking the stars out of the sky for me.
Is it possible to miss
a life I never
lived?)
A semi driver in training
has become the average suburban housewife
texting behind tinted windows and spray painted lenses,
unable to notice what her section of street
truly is.If my monthly salary for just one of her rims
seems excessive, then leather interior screams
luxury like a front-running presidential candidate.
Warmed seat winters tracked by navigational systems
help to forget one actually has to livein a discomforting environment
where change-swallowing sectional couches
feast on bodies for entrees
while your sports car quaffs gasoline
like I chug cheap beer.
You disgust me.
Give us a little piece
of good, black earth
warm in the dark green fens
where our wiry roots
can dig down and take hold.
Our clenched and knotted fingers relax,
unfurled
to the rafters of a vaulted sky—
a place where we can thrive!
Not just survive.
Love is a brittle, brittle beast
within our means to kill
Love is the dead one at the end of the
shakespeare
snuff film
with a brain like Lear
a gentile, dressed in rags.
Every page has two sides
and every bird has two tones
and to every tone, a pitch
Bones crack and air is wasted
Lavinia; Desdemona
Love is fair and cruel
the asp of youth, of beauty
and of apples that fall not far just to
roll away
Sugar is too often doomed to be wasted
and poison is it’s loveliest
when married to the sharp
and hereto used,
forming the last words of a prince
slaying
the birttle, brittle beast.
The blood we draw
and do not use
The tears we show
but do not savor
Inside the broken jaw
of a man
what red pools in his ears
Love is the sound that went unheard
love is the broken toy
love is matter
matter is common and easy to replace.
Sit with me
or better yet, drink with me
For I am lost in the labyrinth
I’ve been arbitrarily calling God a con man,
A puppeteer
I call myself a maudlin
He knows perhaps,
Perhaps he knows
what it’s like to be a
sad dark river, a disoriented dandelion seed
Drink with me
or better yet, dance with me
For I am a lifeless ocean
hungry for anchors and drunk with stars
We can rummage the night
and disappear in the moonlight
No one is a better dancer
than a drunk man
Dance with me
or better yet, sing with me
For I am a lonely cactus in a far flung desert
I sing with the wan moon
and dance with the sands
I’ve known the landscape of loneliness
for too long
And perhaps you’ll learn that
No one can ever understand a nomad
in this colossal world than a nomad himself
So sing with me
or better yet, die with me
Let’s die within the absurdities of lines
in our poetry
Let’s die in the haunting music
heard by the galaxies
and they gyrate, they make no sound
We can be like them,
We can be like stars,
Stars die beautifully in their solitude
They burst, we see the lights
and we never hear them whimper
They die and yet they don’t really die
Who can ever tell which one is dead or alive
So let’s die,
Let’s die in the meadows
of emancipated dandelion seeds,
while God is awake
and the world is in dreaming
Who knows the difference
between sleep and death,
reality and dream
This is unappealing as the yesterday’s snow gone grey,
Camouflaging the gravestones in his quiet yard -
Where bones long forgotten lay, and him
Where he died with the secrets of my past.Ironic then, how white ice falls as if the powder
That whirlwinded us above to meet the Gods -
They expected him, we turned the hands of the clock
Forward, we hallucinated it all out, we went against the odds.His arms were something of the night sky, moonless -
Drawing in with their infinite blue, with needle holes
Where little crimson stars shone through, countless
Compared to mine cloudy veins, embarrassed I hid under clothes.Look, this is not meant to be a perfect expression of any kind,
Of the life we lived without sparing a minute for the sober soul-
This was our love, this was our psychedelic wisdom that died,
And fuck, without him, I just cannot get that close… to it again.And everybody I know on this rock is grateful for this tragedy,
Without him, the hand of the clock itself stands as if dead, still -
Prolonging the hour I dive into the fabled flames, he’ll wait
To ruin the weakness in me, to outsmart the Big Bastard again.
I can feel it when I’m away from you,
separated by this island’s length. I can
see you in my dreams and yet when I
reach out my hand, it swipes through
thin air. I hear you laugh or someone
will call your name and I’ll react. Such
a blatant move to see if you are stood
behind me somewhere in the crowd… but
you never are. You are still miles away
and out of reach. Come back and heal me.
I’ve had enough of this sickness, I need
to find home. Find where you are.
Walking over
A weary field
Of old landmines
I knew one had my name on it
The spring clicked, propelling
Steel shrapnel into my chest
Fragmented metal
Attempting to infest
What I had left
as i look at the cherry blossoms
an image of you is painted before me-
your veins wrap around sturdy branches,
spiralling off into bouquets
& i see in the flowers the same compassionate pink
of your cheeks, framed by dimples that
i always try to summon with a joke.
but all the same, your smile, that sweet mellow smile,
it seems now so far away?
so two dimensional? so cardboard?
your aroma manufactured and your spirit
stifled. you are so beautiful
and yet so inhuman. instead of eyes you have
revolving doors.
i suppose this is all i could hope for
when the cherry blossoms i gaze upon
are mere pixels on my
13inch LCD screen.
Natalie’s note: A startling mix of the old-fashioned and the postmodern.
