--I’M AN UGLY MAN WHEN YOU’RE NOT AROUND

…Hey Monday, what have you got going on tonight?

 …The thing about fall is you can feel it in your toes, especially if you go barefoot.  And the shroud of darkness that closes around each day so early.  And the messy cedar shavings all over the driveway and road.  Other than that, I’m fine with fall.

 …I’ve been getting a lot of poetry rejections of late.  I wonder if I suck at poetry.  I wonder if I’m not even a poet at all.

I’ll keep writing poems, but you tell me:

Sublimation

The needle’s loaded and

I am looking for a new vein,

one that hasn’t collapsed

or wormed away.

The room downstairs is where I hide,

in a corner as shadows stripe my chest

with air the width of rice paper.

I am filling my gun with minutes

and layers of leftover skin,

linking one moment to the next

with regret and remorse

while butterflies go roller skating outside the house

and two stray fawns do the tango on the lawn.

No one believes me anymore

and that’s okay.

No one believes in me anymore

and that’s why I’m jogging in place

underwater,

shielding myself from the hot foot of the sun

that wants to tamp me out

as if I’m a well-spent cigarette.

I am slipping through the seams

of a new house

abandoned by former lovers.

Down the hall

in the last room on the left

on the duvet

there is a note which says

Welcome Home.

Plath

I keep dreaming of Sylvia

Plath

and in the morning on my pillow case

the word

Ariel is stamped on the cloth

inside a braid of bumble bees that someone has sketched.

Can you tell another living soul of such things,

that a strong voice from the past has grabbed your heart

and throat?

No one understands,

not my wife or daughter mother neighbor.

Even the chairs are mute

as the oven stares me in the eye.

1969

I am a half-formed boy/man

waiting for the sun to bloom inside me

while a V of geese fly by,

honking miserably and energetically overhead,

skimming the belly of gray-white clouds.

My older, fully-formed brother

skips stones across dark water,

him as sullen as a dead tree.

In the trailer near the campsite the war drags on

and I imagine the word Marriage written in barbwire,

the tips of metal tinted crimson.

Without thinking I strip and dive into the lake.

I can’t see the other side

but I aim for it anyway.

Tree Storms

The way the trees bend down

tells me they have something important to say,

flapping their arms madly in the wind,

not a bird or squirrel in sight,

just these hysterical tress.

They have seen so much—

births and beauty,

destruction and death.

The shortest of them whispers my name like a snake

with a bad case of cottonmouth.

He says, “Stand on your tiptoes if you have to, Boy.”

He asks, “Are you afraid?”

One of them landed on my father once, years ago,

somewhere around here,

when I was just an infant.

“What’s in your hands?” another tree asks,

but I’m not here for small talk.

I spritz gasoline on the bed of pine needles,

take a lighter from my pocket,

shout Dad’s name and release

the jagged flame.

The Yellow Sparrow

The yellow sparrow

tells me:

There are no more tragedies to write.

All of the love songs have already been taken.

Every hero is someone else’s enemy.

Time dances like the wind is on fire.

Put on a flak jacket

and make something of yourself