Tragedy Times: Poems
constellation #3
This is collection of pandemic-time poems I wrote throughout 2020 and into early 2021.
Tragedy Times
Too soon summer,
tragedy times;
in this nightmare,
I had a dream.
Careless wishes,
comedy hour;
in a panic,
a laugh from a scream.
Simulate it,
intelligence on high;
in a whisper
my skeptical muse.
All my friends feel
they have moved in to die.
Who will come
to save them from the news?
Trees scrape sky,
heat rash gold,
move west, start again
in a bedroom in the cold.
Shaking nation,
begging for a dime,
clocks in towers,
lie about the time.
Hands like leather,
tearing at the seams,
blood in water,
cuts from guitar strings.
Spring is never,
tragedy, these times,
in this nightmare,
broken by design.
In the Wake of the Warning
In the wake of the warning,
I’m left shivering.
I’ve never been less sure
I am where I should be.
Sing to me.
Really see the best of me,
if there is any left to see
in the wake of the warning.
What is there to prove?
Box your ears with your palms
like a child at the fireworks show.
Independence day
from six feet away.
You’ll watch the world catch fire
but you won’t hear the booms.
You are lying to me.
It’s cold on the bleachers
and the sparks fall angry on our heads.
I want to catch one on my tongue,
but, at the end of the day,
I don’t really want to die.
In the wake of the warning,
the grand finale will shatter the sky
and you will continue to lie.
Sing to me.
Really see the best in me.
I’ve never been less sure.
I’m shivering.
Box your ears,
fill your angry head,
leave the wreck to the rest of us.
I don’t really want to die.
I want to make it through to morning
in the wake of the warning.
American Ego
It’s the last day of life as we know it;
Americana never shot so bleak.
We crashed our van into the sign
for that motel on 76th St.
Stripes right through our stomachs
and we’re all seeing stars.
This is Ego Death
in hypnocolor,
this is blood in our coats,
in our beds,
and I can’t tell where it ends,
and I can’t tell which pill spilled it.
Revelation/Realization
Don’t talk about things
you know nothing about.
I chose a revelation
and got a realization.
We don’t have the power
to change it
and it kills us,
and it kills them.
I don’t think
we ever had it
like they claimed we did.
I still thought we had it
when I sat, crisscrossed,
on my bed that night,
sticker on my jacket pocket,
like a badge, like wings.
The T.V. on my wall
blinked against the window,
like a film reel
clattering in the corner.
Maybe I was younger that night
than I’d ever been before.
Maybe there was hope
in every bone in my body.
Maybe I was even alive.
I think I was.
And that night, roses
all over the place
were stomped into
the ground.
How dare we
claim to know
about the ways
those men
pretend to love us?
I don’t know
where I am anymore.
They read me stories
of a glowing, golden
land of light,
which I have never been to.
They told me that I
was the best of them all.
I never was,
but don’t look at me
and think I wanted this.
I chose a revelation.
Breakdown Year
It’s the year of the breakdown,
you know it.
You can feel it in your bones,
and, on the way out,
every one of us is going under.
Swallow it or spit it out,
the taste stays on your tongue;
feelings from the night before,
memories of the last time
you felt warm.
No one is above the ruin
of a year in collapse.
Take the jump from
this height with me,
this air is cold enough
to shock you back to life.
You’re numb to it,
or you bleed out
all over the sky.
Either way,
you’re
breaking down.
You know it,
you can feel it,
something inside of you,
that pines for you,
watches you from across the room,
waits for a glance in it’s direction.
It’s been writing to you,
letters, like a lover,
whispering the answers
to those questions you hide
under floorboards in the attic.
The secrets that you keep
in the spaces between your bones
are breathing now,
and whatever they are,
they know all about
how you’ve been dying for a while.
Swallow it and let it have you,
spit it out and scream it’s name.
It’s the year of the breakdown,
you know it.
Cough it up,
you’ll never be the same.
You Heard it on the Radio
You found out
that what you always thought was true
was not and never was
through the crackle of the speaker,
in the pop and fuzz.
You told your father what you heard
over synth waves and static,
and he asked how you’d know that.
You told him you heard it on the radio
and he pried the stereo out of your car
with a screwdriver.
Yesterday is Bleeding
Yesterday is bleeding all over my hands,
and the day before is rusting under my fingernails,
but today is kind of white, kind of gauzy,
kind of stretching into something that I knew once in a dream.
I turn my palms toward the sky and hear it speak —
someday time will be all stitched up again,
and someday life won’t be all glitched up again,
and someday you’ll wash all the blood
from the space between days.
But today
yesterday bleeds,
and tomorrow
today runs away.
Somewhere there is Snow
Sometimes I comfort myself with the thought
that somewhere there is snow.
The sky blows smoke in our mouths,
shotgunned disaster,
as though breathing wasn’t hard enough before.
Treetops burn,
but somewhere there is snow.
It’s been four years
since I watched my
color-by-number nightmare
broadcast live on cable,
some autumn night,
dark, electrified,
on the TV in the
corner of the room.
I remember a man
speaking in tongues.
I remember a map in flames,
and all quiet in the house.
I don’t live there anymore,
moved south,
felt the heat like a weight on my back,
wrong, new, forced out
by mistakes of people bigger than me.
And still I feel like nothing ever changes.
Somewhere,
someone is cold.
Treetops burn,
there are people who will never learn
to think of each other as dreamers
instead of dominoes.
Somehow we will see it through to someday;
somewhere there is snow.
The Seven Month Summer
It was some grim holiday for a while,
with the hammocks and the back porch,
and the sewing machine on the table.
I wrote about roses.
I wrote about too soon sun.
We learned a new language
and spoke it not to be alone,
spoke it to make people
laugh on the internet.
We burned newspaper
over the bonfire.
We faked holidays,
and watched them pass.
We kept telling ourselves
there are still beautiful things,
waiting months for something
they made up to soothe us,
like children hearing stories,
like doomsdayers in the bunker
at the end of the world.
I think we all thought
the seven month summer
might linger longer.
I think we all thought
the seven month summer
might go on and on
and never end.
Triumph
Triumph, yes,
but tragedy tinged.
Too late we fell to our knees.
Give us this one, please.
I used to hear things in the wind,
and I don’t know
what’s changed since then,
but all is still up on the hill
and I can’t hear a thing.
Maybe it’s me.
Listen — it lies,
a fire storm across the sky,
it grasps,
to possess, commodify
all the ways that she tells you she is free.
Don’t bother,
the things she does aren’t yours
to turn over in your hands,
to sip, to taste,
don’t make that face.
She sit’s bitter on your tongue for a reason —
she isn’t for you.
Triumph, yes,
but troubled times.
Get up,
shaken hands on skinned up knees.
It is going to take everything we’ve got.
Peace and Consequence
Still a little discontented,
still a little sweet,
still a little hopeful someone,
somewhere’s having dreams about me.
Still another thing gone wrong,
some wise man’s might-have-been.
Still another question of
what kind of game they think this is.
Rhythm is fun for a while,
so is rhyme,
but all things fall apart,
once we come to really know them.
(I think there are things I will never tell anyone)
All day I do nothing:
read, and watch, and wander the house.
(at least if I were a ghost, no one would be able to see)
Productivity feels an impossibility,
and somehow like surrender.
I watch from my window.
Treetops hiss all around,
and the telephone wire goes down,
and I swear at the sun
if it dares come out.
(for a while there I was embracing the day)
I tell everyone that I’m biding my time
and hope they stop asking.
I need to get back.
Years ago I thought it might be thrilling
to live in a time of consequence.
(I should have wished for peace instead)
Once you realize
that all time is of consequence,
peace will never come again.
(there are so many things I will never tell anyone)
Speaking of Unity
Speaking of Unity,
my mother cried this morning
and the curtains behind her
billowed like wings.
The catharsis,
angelic,
of our mothers,
the angels,
we can’t feel it.
Do you remember when you found out
not everyone agrees
on the shape of life?
Now, a hand reached out,
but in the shadow of the capital,
words are a wall of protectors
with half-a-heart to lie down.
Symbols lose their meanings
in a vacuum,
and these years cleaned up,
swept the floor with our youth.
I know that these are the speeches
they’ll talk about
down the line
as the words that changed a nation,
maybe saved a nation,
but we all know that won’t be what does it.
Maybe those speakers
are better than I,
if better means gracious,
if better means forgiving.
Maybe I’m jaded now,
maybe I’m worldworn,
but it’s a happy day for me too.
They’ve all got daydreams of peace
waving above their heads,
daydreams of the way it was,
ballparks and mega malls.
In my imagination
sits a man,
all alone in a room,
knowing he did
what he set out to do,
and still,
still
feeling empty.
So I smile with everyone else,
and I know,
I know
that this is good,
if good means healing,
if good means stasis.
I think that my mother
would call me a pessimist,
yet my ideals
are more lofty than her’s.
There is a difference between
cynicism and skepticism,
between negative and underwhelmed.
I don’t care what they think;
I have a wild, wild hope.
Speaking of Unity,
it is not yet;
this is just a changing of days,
just one more midnight.
Speaking of Unity,
I will believe it
when I see it.
This Light Too Will Go Out
The temporary things,
they will go,
but the violent light
spills all over the parts of ourselves
we never wanted to see.
We are blinding in the mirror,
we are ugly,
and we have grown too big
for our bruising, old boots.
Our eyes
are full of dust,
of rust —
they haven’t held tears
in years.
Press a hand to the mirror
to feel,
to make real.
See your fingers almost touch,
find that little, nothing space,
and drag your hand down,
watch it smear on the glass;
we are bloody.
We’ve been killing in our sleep.
We are guilty,
numb. We are hurt,
hurting. We have seen.
The temporary things,
they will go,
and this light too will go out.
The violent light,
it pours.
Look into the glass,
and understand,
and remember what you saw there.
In the Going Away
And in the going away
I think there was
a freedom from
the semantics of society,
like the grid was lifted
from it’s hover overhead,
and all the little people
went scrambling outside the lines.
Suddenly, they had the leverage
to live under their own rhythms.
Finally, some space to breathe.
Finally, some time to sleep,
but only because
the crowds were chased away,
too afraid of death to trust the air.
Terrible and soft we were,
like silence before terrific noise,
terrifying and cold.
It was a cut-your-own-hair kind of freedom
in the middle of a massacre,
a think-your-own-thoughts kind of space
in the decade’s bloody morning.
It’s all war and creation.
A rift and then a mass motion
inward like the tips of sunbeams
reflecting back in toward the source,
burning, burning, burning through the sky.
And in the going away there was dark
and light,
not enough to see us through,
not enough to wake
the cities up again,
but there was,
light,
even in this night,
even in the going away.
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