Filed under: poems | Tags: books, capitalism, Cartesian dualism, Fahrenheit 451, Guy Montag, Laplace, mechanism, philosophy, positivism, psychiatry, psychology, Ray Bradbury, the ghost in the machine, vitalism
Lasting contributions of our fathers
to mankind:
iPods,
and high definition flatscreen
televisions;
Bluetooth headsets
and hybrid gas & electric
automobiles;
iPhone apps,
and dual-core computer
processors…
As if we would die
were our fingers to stop;
as if the world were
a list of tasks to be ticked
or a stack of papers
waiting to be filed.
As if to deny Descartes
we need replace the ghost
in the machine
with another machine
and the mind with
Faber’s silver needle
to guide us,
toward logic.
As if the darkling plain
were something inside us waiting
for the incinerator
of science to illuminate it;
as if the heart
is a void to be filled
like a display at a
grocery store.
As if poetry
were a danger
and safety just the staccato babble
of Mildred’s ‘family’ on Montag’s walls.
As if anyone
was home.
As if the house
wasn’t on fire.
As if Clara crying
was little more than a passing humor,
to be diagnosed
and fixed like
a bad internet connection.
As if it didn’t happen.
As if we don’t remember
anything at all.
Filed under: poems | Tags: AJB, birth, books, fiction, fingers, genesis, Mallarmé, media, paint, physiology, semiotics, truth
Your skin is a transmission;
a message speaking of days spent
at the easel and loves
that touched you. A small
silhouette sits on the cover
of your bookish back. I
can read your name in the notches
of your spine and the signs spoken
by the movements
of your impure hair.
In my mind I see you turn towards
me, stepping gently in kinetic verses
punctuated by the grammar of your flesh
and your verbose hands. I
think of you as a story some have
read but none
understood; only I know the tale
told by your body when it was first formed
in the womb. That first fold was
the closing of a book.
Your skin is a message
emanating from your hips;
a broadcast in code your lungs
sent me and which the fine hairs
carry still down the small of your back. I
pore over the cleft of your
breasts, my fingers finding Braille in
your freckles. The medium enfolds
me like a story I’ve only begun to
understand but have read many times.
Literary legs draw me fast into this best
and last fiction.
Filed under: poems | Tags: airplanes, books, death, dust, fear, leaves, secrets
Many secrets,
many books,
many souls trapped
in loose leaves
with no spines
that fall to the floor.
Fold them up into
paper airplanes
and let them go.
They dust our eyes
while we sleep below
them.
Many souls trapped
in loose leaves
with no spines
will kill the unborn fears
growing in our stomachs.
Many secrets,
many books,
and all only the whimsy
of spies stationed at
writing desks
or in the grave.
Heroes are born
and vanquished
cover
to cover.
Filed under: poems | Tags: the ocean, God, books, the sun, the stars, my mother, trees, traffic, His pipesmoke, airplanes, cliffs, Thomas Pynchon, the Old Testament, anachronism, films, AJB
I can depend on my mother’s charity
and the stupidity of mankind…
Relying on the tides to rise and recede
and the birds to chirp
and the squirrels to nibble noisily on things
sitting in the branches of some tree
is infrequently rewarded with the opposite.
Even counting on the improbable
to occur
is safest, sometimes;
and most things tried are true;
and most lying words do
nothing but strike at reality’s flint
in futility and are doused by their own
unshakable impossibility.
Traffic will always mean dominoes of flaring taillights,
muttered curses and blaring horns
like kites of weathered strings and polymers
that carry the fumes and the din
and any doubts as to Man’s lot
up into the maw of the sky,
to float alongside God’s pipesmoke
and be returned to the earth
by great silver birds
that can be expected to land
but never on time.
These are things I can predict;
causes and effects with no affection
for quantum physics.
The short straw will always poke its head out above the others for us.
First breaths shall have their last breaths,
and good things their ends,
and millions of tiny absurdities shall assert their common nature
and shall certainly nibble noisily on certainties
dangling from our ears like great silver talismans
that can be expected to land at our feet
but only when least expected to.
I know that footsteps
can only lead to a corpse or a cliff
if they are followed to their good ends,
and I can tell you that if a screaming comes across the sky
it’s unlikely we’ll hear the sound when its great silver tip parts our skulls
like the Red Sea.
These are things I can safely predict
because I have read about them in books,
because I have watched them,
because I have induced them into forming patterns,
and made them into sensible accounts, and dependable things,
kites on strings
and great silver wings
and the years of a tree
spelled out in rings
and plain on the face of a tenth-generation squirrel
nibbling noisily on some things he stole off the abacus
I use to count off the animals I’ve seen on the backs of clouds,
the probabilities,
things I expect that never arrive on time,
the good endings of movies, the cliffhangers,
all our short straws,
all the patterns picked out from amongst storms of uncertainties,
and all the things I hate but know to be true.
And I count here on these fingers what I’m sure of:
the sun,
the stars,
and you.
Filed under: poems | Tags: books, crowns, dust, fingers, hands, heraldry, mutilation, sand, thirst, writing
I’ll smash these fingers to pieces
and saw these hands off my arms.
They are petty jewels of an unworn and undeserved crown.
They are the vestiges of a lost name.
They are vestigial.
They have proven themselves redundant,
they have been dominated by a decreasing art
and slackened by sliding skill.
If I have need of them now, they certainly don’t tell me,
and seem contented to resign themselves to the fate
not that they had chosen, but through a refusal to choose, chose -
an aching ruinous crumbling,
as though they were made of dry sand, of red dust,
bled near to smacking their lips in dumbfounded and final thirst.
I’d rather not know them
when the day comes that they fail me.
It would be easier to live with stumps, with castration,
than to stare at these fully formed phalanges
shriveled, inactive, and shuddering from underuse.
If they are to be destroyed, either way,
in sloth or activity,
I should rather they be removed
to a home for old hands
than for me to spend
another minute looking at their knobby, knuckled backsides,
squeezing what little life I can from their tendons and tips,
staring at the imposing white expanses that separate me from the world
and knowing only my fingers can navigate,
like they do the passage from pale, veiny thigh
to the great fold at the spine, at the center.
These pumping cylinders of flesh and bone and gold and nail.
These fair painters.
These graceful, ungrateful little pencils.
There could be no greater pleasure
than to run them down to the eraser.
