by James Welsh
warm front to hold back her screams.
I know she wants to pull out
her hair like the strands are vipers,
simply breeding a new pain to
drench the old, shoveling another
foot of dirt on the lover’s tomb
until her hands blister and bruise.
And still, she smiles.
Even though I know it’s fake,
I also know it’s the masques
we craft that gild us into
who we are. And as you
smile that crowd of raised
fists, I can only wish I made
the same decision, crafting
myself the way you are.
Shrink
My clothes are ill-fitting, whishing around me
like a cold. I’m a syncope of me from
before, back in a moment when I was
muscle – as chicken lean as that was. A product
of years spent running away from myself.
But now, I’ve given up the hunt, strutting
back in clothes that stick as well as tents,
faintly bending where the elbows and knees should fit.
This, this is not the way
it’s supposed to feel.
I’m supposed
to grow up like ladders, but
instead I’m melting in, learning how to bend
my arms and legs to fit myself within this
Houdini box – amaze the crowd, make them
ask “How can he live like that and not
suffocate?”
It’s simple really – I just try and not think about it.
It’s true…I weigh lighter than memory –
you’ll have to look down in the
floorboards in order to find me.
Even then, you reel me in like
a stick in the waters – nothing
but shadow-puppets and glances.
Something you might as well
have never remembered.
This is how someone fades
to a whisper, as faint as a yesterday
kiss – perhaps even fainter.
April 10, 2010
Shuttle Launch at Evening
The runs of light make
their highways through
a countryside of dark, like
raindrops washing windows,
like pebbles skipping
ponds, playing their
summer hopscotch.
But even with this flurry, this feat –
graceful like a swan unfurling its
wings like a flag – the light is only
felt if it is seen. We stand within
an arm’s reach, and you stand with
your eyes struck open, letting the light
shave your face colder than any blade.
You said it curled every hair and nerve,
but that you never felt warmer.
I kept my eyes closed, though –
I felt nothing but your breath snatched away.
August 25, 2011
Sibylline
The overhead lights stretched
out the wrinkles in his face,
adding river valleys
sloshed with their slow age.
We’re both young – true –
but only from different angles.
You seem to have strangled
so many more birthday
candles in your time, all
with the licking hunger
of an exile back to home.
You grow – village elder –
into a deep shrink, the breath
squeezed out, the balloon
settling down into a nice home,
complete with leftover beef
for the pound dog and an
edge of crisp picket fences
(although if I may say so –
mind you, simply as a
friend – I don’t know why that
always needs to be the case).
April 15, 2010
Slow As Possible
I watch the family leave
behind their picnic trash:
the hollow cans with
drips of cola, the mask of
a potato-chip bag,
the napkins crumbled like a
poet’s secondhand work.
I only sit there for
a few minutes, watching,
and I already see
the magic of the plastic
vanishing. They say
it can take thousands
of years for plastic
to break up, but
here I am, seeing plastic
wash away as if
a magician wiped it with
the wand of a tree branch.
The plastic composes
into the grass, composing
the sheet music for a
song that’ll be beautiful
deeper than its skin,
but one that I won’t live
long enough to hear.
September 9, 2011
Spectator’s Sport
Our hair’s still greyed with ash,
the cloud of withered drywall’s
still stalled, and only
now the dust is raining
where we sit. We can only
wish those wintered
showers back into the house,
hoping that it could put the fire out.
The fire itself? It lioned its way
from the oven and – when it
got too hot in the kitchen – headed
for the living room, coloring in
the carpet with felt-tip pens.
The smoke choked us out of the house
while the melted house slipped
back into itself, and – unlike when
it was built – it did so now
without our help.
The neighborhood’s
gathered, warming their chattered
mouths with the cold, fooling
no one but themselves about
fires being a spectator’s sport.
March 28, 2010
Sunrise Sea
Your grin floats like sunshine polish
on the waters –a mirror that
bends without a radio crackle. Your grin
spreads its wings like butter and tosses a
pebble upwards. The rock curls the
water, casting off a thousand broken
yous in squints of light like shipwrecked bottles.
They say it’ll take a thousand years
for that broken-tooth smile to
sail around the world until the
freight-train currents see it home.
But what they don’t say is that a
thousand years from now there will
be someone else looking
out at that same sunrise sea,
desperate for something but not sure what.
November 2, 2010
Swings of Fists
When I was just another child, the only
times I never cast a shadow of iron
was when I was swinging on my swing-set.
I was a pendulum of glass
and metal in those accelerations,
throwing a reflection of light like
diamonds and diamonds like
a baseball, underhanded.
My glasses were as large and thick
as the tyrants who broke them – yet
somehow, the sunshine still filled
the glasses, brimming, until the
afternoon sloshed over the edges.
And the glistens of light washed
through my braces, an engine of
metals and wires – in the end,
the light was either clean or sterile.
Collected, it was all a silhouette
with precio
us stones sewn in, and
I would toss it, watch as it
wrinkled in the soil. The swing
would pull me back in those
moments – I watched as the world
took away from me my years
of machinery. I felt natural and
cracked again – a man among gods.
Then, the swing pushed me forward.
Then, I watched the world rush towards
me, my metals in its hands.
March 9, 2012
Tea Kettle Rinse
We rinse off
our “sickness” in the
tea kettle in the kitchen,
fishing our trembled hands
out of the sterile,
boiled water,
spoiled from our panic
and slaughter of
sense and good order –
bordered with misunderstood
whispers and rumors –
this flu’s a ghosted
tumor heavy
enough to drag
us to the drug store
for tissues, soap, and dust masks flanked
on all sides
by magazine issues
hawking front page ads
that rank with the taste of bitter cigars,
each ad charred
with that slow, early evening burn.
Turn bird flu in its grave;
we got a new fear on the way.
At least, that’s what the reporters
and TV doctors all say.
The Art of Reading
I shake, rattle, and roar my way
across each page
and count my years in verses read
and prose once said by
men who walked the gardens
and talked thoughts for a living –
that was when you could buy
food simply off
what you were thinking.
Food for thought,
thought for food.
And though my stutter
is coming back and I lash my words
with tongue in hand, I drink
the words that run the page, I
drink the wine out of their shells
and leave these words
as no more than
husked, burnt
rice in the winter’s swell
as the snow drums up against
the walls of my frozen home.
The moment I learned to read,
I evolved as I was no longer an
island flung out across the world
as I then found hopscotch
to hop upon, every square a word.
The Diamondlands
I remember the blizzards there being
more than splashes of cream. The
flakes would scrub the ink out of
the asphalt, and the roads would again be clean pages,
waiting to be written.
The snow would dig deeper than
a heartbeat and plant its garden.
For a few minutes in the morning,
a fog would hang over the packed snow.
Counting the helicopters of clouds
overhead, you could say there were
three shades of white on those mornings.
Welcome to the diamondlands,
where your feet could never tell the
snow from jewelry dropped into
the seams of the pavement.
We could never tell the difference,
and we never cared. Everything’s
meant to crunch. A million pairs
of new boots breaking new ice,
the walking falling into the lakes at the street corners.
But somehow through the blankness,
there was still a cinema of moving light,
the beams scattered like the roaches,
but they were still there like the roaches.
The traffic lights sent out signals
to each other, and so did the doors
when the doormen opened and closed them.
There were a million lighthouses
reaching out in the dark whiteness,
blind but still reaching.
In those moments, that city wasn’t
the hottest place in the universe – but
it certainly was the warmest.
April 17, 2012
The Funeral Home Library
The coffins stared back at me
in the living room, their eyes
as empty as they still
will be after they’re stuffed with
bodies. The guys stood to the side,
gnawing on cigarettes, the
ends in a glow. Each inhaled
slow, dragging the light
down deeper – until it looked like
they were chewing on the sun,
trying to usher in an evening,
and all before there should be one.
“Let’s see this library of yours,”
I said. I was already forgetting
how to breathe, thinking of how
bells were once built into coffins,
remembering the stories about
people waking up underground.
Some say that doesn’t happen
often, but even that is too much.
I turned my back on those final
rasps petrified in wood.
Instead I buried myself into
the library in the other room.
Those books too were dreamed
from wood – but those trees
were slashed down
for a much better good.
March 29, 2010
The Hand that Moves (The Stranger)
You are the hand that moves me –
you are the hand that moves me to move my right hand,
to move my right hand to write hard,
to write hard on a piece of paper –
ah, the peace of paper –
the piece of paper that I fold,
that I fold into a paper airplane –
a paper airplane whose destination is you –
you whose left hand moves me,
you whose left hand moves me to move my own,
to move my own right hand to write and
fold the paper into a glider,
a glider for and to you –
you who guide my hand
with your own, and it is
at those times that you
have another right hand
and I have another left,
and though we keep each other
company, at the same time we are alone.
The Heart Buried at the Tower
Every time you see that tower, the first
thing you think of is death. You say
it’s because of the tower’s colors, how it
looks like a bucket rusted over, tossed away
like garbage in this deserted desert. And
of course, red means death, although red
means blood, and blood means life.
Red is the cream in the kiss.
Red is the pump in the veins.
Me? What do I think? I think the
mystery ends with its name. Everyone
in the village has called it The Tower.
They think there used to be a castle there
centuries ago, but decay grew up the brick
like moss, and so the walls fell down
like curtains at the stage. Some archduke’s
plot of land, turned into a cemetery plot,
a conspiracy of artisans and masonry.
Don’t you see? That’s the thing: when
a creature dies, the heart’s the first to go –
it’s a drum stretched tight to rip.
And when the heart goes, so does the
blood, that hot spatter of grease. Some
people think that when som
ething
stops moving, death is nearby. But
I think that when a creature dries,
only then does that creature die.
But this tower – this tower is different.
Its skin of walls and moats and parapets
has long since vanished, but that heart
in the tower is still standing,
still breathing, still beating.
Maybe it’s the years of the afternoon sun –
hanging over like a ceiling fan – that have
baked the tower’s clay tougher than work even.
Do you really want to know what it
is? I think that as long as that
tower never sinks, that heart forever lives.
August 26, 2011
The Midnight Sings
Floor me with your
metaphors while we
walk these civilized
garden with
their flowers bowing
to one another,
laughing away
the hours on
the dizzy clock
towering over the
greenhouse green. We talk
as we walk, watching the
moon's glance getting
cut and broken
up in the silhouettes of plants –
we notice this and
so we string
the leaves, making
them waltz on
the floor of the
midnight hollow.
The stars
see this and
they follow, until
the sky's full with
lightning bugs –
the dew sees this
and it follows.
The plants see this
and sing their
love and raise their leaves –
this time without
us holding the strings.
And at that, the midnight sings.
The Night and Moon as Water Colors
As a boy, I used to watch old movies
and be amazed at how the world
used to be the black-and-white of
my pencil digging trenches in paper –
and I remember being saddened
as I looked away from the TV
and saw a world painted over with
too many coats of color, a world
