He actually said it. Out loud.

I should make a note that not having a poem inspired by a person doesn't mean anything; I've tried a million times to write a poem about Shannon, which, theoretically, should be super easy; she's amazing and has ridiculous stories. But it doesn't happen.

This is a long one. Probably won't read well on blogger, but what can I do?


Love Superstitions, or Why Doesn't It Come Out Better?

Phill
says
he thinks
girls
fart rainbows and butterflies.
And I've swallowed
a lot of superstitions
and Skittles coated in artificially colored hydrogenated vegetable oil,
but I never once farted anything that
clouded, consolidated, and, when cut up and steeped
for nine minutes in boiling salted lemon-water, made a non-toxic tonic
that saved my lovers and friends from
bad haircuts
or cavities
or insincerity
or tattoos that spell it D-E-T-R-I-O-T instead of D-E-T-R-O-I-T
or mind-numbing desk jobs
or arch-flattening factory lines
or girls that say yes then but no later
or boys that hear yes now when told no, later
or snowstorms
or cars
or trees
or four times recurrent breast cancer that eventually finds the liver and the lungs and makes cotton the beautiful, beautiful brain
or alcoholic uncles that can't forget the sound of Army issue fatigues through rice paddies and can't remember you are not an enemy
or stray bullets at the Citgo on West Center Street
or ex-husbands that would rather spend their lives in MCF-Oak Park Heights than lose the kids and the house and the shitty row boat in the divorce that was their fault anyway because they couldn't keep their hands off 18 year-old secretaries.

Maybe that makes it okay
that I only stumble upon him
every couple of months. Maybe that makes it better
that the list of girls who want to love the shit out of him
is too long to include my name.

Or maybe we both need to cleanse our colons of the myths
we ate up out of necessity,
out of curiosity.
What if girls did pass rainbows and butterflies? Belched
unicorns? Sweat
emeralds and amber?

Or maybe
it is just me.
My myth
getting me
nowhere.
I think I need
to get the gum
I swallowed in second grade
out of my intestines, get it through
the twenty-some feet of brain in my belly,
that wishes upon shooting stars
are prayers made on the back of debris
before it dies.
An itchy nose is just an impending sinus infection
or allergic reaction to the neighbors' new cat that everyday
is faux-reprimanded
with a scold
of, oh Beepers, not on the couch
again, with a tone of
I-can't-reinforce-rules-I-make-and-I-will-
always-clean-up-and-wash-up-whatever-
and-wherever-you-wish-to-piss-upon.
Ringing in the ears, just tinnitus
or Meniere's
or an ear infection
or trauma
or side effects from my chronic NSAIDs use for my chronic neck pain
or the symptom that doctors will herald me as my own hero for noticing, for getting self into the office before the aneurysm ruptured and left me right-drooped, using right-palsied hand to draw clocks with letters instead of numbers marking time, waiting for D o'clock when the handsome man-nurse comes to tell me stories in Morse code instructing long and short squeezes on the tennis ball it took me two months of inpatient rehab to finally pick up.

But what if I'm not believing
hard enough?
And what will I say when I meet
Phill's girl,
the one
who makes
those fairytales from the shit we all pass
as 4th grade humor? Makes him
understand
his soul
is not black like bloody knives
thrown in dumpsters
after the fact
or wrists and ankles
after the Haldol starts working and they unstrap
the four-point restraints before closing the door
on one of the loneliest cells in Cook County.
But black like the father's fingers
picking those strings
from the bayou up to Michigan Avenue.
Black like the son's hands scratching that vinyl
four
five
six times before letting it spin.
Black like the ghosts' four part
harmony uhh ahhing straight
out of the choir balcony.

Amen?

New and Old

This is the first stage of revision of the poem below it. And it will be revised more because I'm pretty sure I've already written this exact poem before and that parallel isn't hidden enough to be acceptable. To me :)

(Titleless right now; come on, I just finished it)

Sister Sponsa stands at the lectern
praising Saint Maud
wanting us to tell her how God daily,
daily shows His majesty to our
sin-lensed teenage eyes, and I,
I want to stand up just to fall
to my knees
fall
to my hands
fall
out of favor with my peers
fall
into grace with the angels and saints,
tell them I heard Abdiel last night
in the empty apartment upstairs
the voice of a man singing
then screaming
then stamping his heels on the hardwood floor
then punching his fists against brick walls
keeping time
keeping time
to the incantation
indecipherable
incomprehensible
to the English ear
but wholly articulate to the guilty Catholic heart,
my own beating
in time
blaring
in my ears
last night. What was going on upstairs
last night? I want to ask,
to tell
that I knew nothing
but felt everything
in those beats. I want to ask if this is God and if this is faith
and if yes then what am I believing?
But in the classroom
under Sister Sponsa's dare to believe more than the patron saint
of disappointing children, Lucifer wins and the bell sounds
and I go to stand on the school steps of St Clare's with Mary Margaret
and Catherine Ann, rolling waistbands of our plaid skirts,
loosening top buttons of white uniform shirts, not saying, but saying
we don't believe, tobacco paper burning toward our sacrificial lips.






'original'

This is the New Covenant in My Blood, Shed

Standing on the steps of St Clare's after class
we roll waistbands of our plaid skirts, loosen
top buttons of white uniform shirts, saying we

don't believe, with tobacco paper burning toward
our sacrificial lips. But something in this heart
I proclaimed pagan shifts my eyes side to side,

from Mary Margaret to Catherine Anne, searching
for dissent of the after-school rebellion, hoping
they too have specters in their attics whose apologies

and pleas test their heathen faith, appeal to what
is left of the child in the adolescent, the willingness
to believe in that woman upstairs, that woman whom

the landlady says has not lived there in months, that
woman
upstairs
writhing on the mattress
pulled to the middle
of the floor
a mess of tears and sheets
on the mattress
too big for her shrinking frame
warped nightly with terrors and sweat
staining the pillowcases
I'll believe
I believe
please
just bring him back
on the mattress
the heavy silver band slips
from her thumb
rolls across the hardwood floor
from the mattress
she fights her way out
of the suffocating cocoon
of damp cotton and hears
the goodbye of smooth metal
against rusted heating vent
and is mesmerized to paralysis
from the last smile
a glint of the ring catching and throwing
the entire world from one stray beam
of light from the streetlamp
before dropping and clanging
through the apartment building
heating ducts
before she screams an unearthly sound
that leaves even Beezlebub on knees
bleeding out disbelief
if only God bent to petition
if only blood could bring her him back.