—NO ONE WANTS TO BE LONELY, NO ONE WANTS TO SING THE BLUES
Teenage Intermezzo / Sliding Doors
In the dream
I’m marking X’s
looking for a patch
to score my soul
the wind singing
something Hispanic
the lake a taunt
a lonely flirt
one last regret
Each rock asks
Who can possibly
be this sad?
Yet there’s no one
over my shoulder
that car never stops
and life goes on
killing me in time
as it should have
all along
—IT’S HARD TO SLEEP WHEN THE BEDSHEETS FIGHT
EVERYTHING MUST GO!!
the day dad drinks tuesday morning under the table and strangles dawn for the thousandth time mother drives into town her hairnet looking like a jagged crossword or cobweb smoke roaming the car’s dash like marauders intent on plunder nails clicking out frenetic code on the chicklet dial buttons while willie sings elvis’ suspicious minds and not even an hour later on the filthy pawnshop window she’s taped a sign of things to come and those to go and i know not to cry or ask a question as the crowd lines up like soup kitchen inmates getting paroled bags and pillow cases spread wide open hoping to steal a bargain or find a slice of hope to re-sell
—I’M HAVING IT OUT WITH THE COUNTERTOP CAUSE IT DOESN’T BELIEVE I CAN TURN IT OFF
pathetic
sure you may have been joking and of course it might have been snowing in Belize or elsewhere but at the time it sounded like you meant it and why wouldn’t you after all spontaneity is simply the b-side of bravery a song some of us have heard while the rest merely shrink with our arms too thin to hold the rain
—I’M SLEEPING, LATER EVERY DAY
It Doesn’t Always Look Like Darkness
by Lesle Honore for tWitch
Disheveled
Discombobulated
Sometimes it looks like dance
Like joy
Like syncopated rhythms
Like grace
Like choreography channeling
Ancestor’s dreams
Powerful
Successful
Enviable
Sometimes we get so good
At the act
At the entertainment
At wearing the mask
That we can fool ourselves
A little bit
Long enough for the public
To believe
That we
Have it all together
That the airbrush portrait
Is real
The Instagram smile
Is permanent
That the steps aren’t automatic
That happiness 24/7 isn’t toxic
But the truth is
Living is hard
Lonely is real
Grief is too heavy to hold
People don’t check
On the strong friends
The smiling friends
The dancing friends
The friends who look like
They are on top of the world
Looks are often liars
Hopelessness can grow
Like weeds in the most beautiful
Garden
It doesn’t always look like
Darkness
And it’s so hard to say the words
Out loud
“I need help
This is too much
I don’t want to try anymore”
Because we clap for stunning
Clap for the performance
And ignore those in pain
It doesn’t always look like darkness
Sometimes it just looks like
Our reflection
In the Mirror
Sometimes it’s just too hard
To stay in the light
If life feels like it is too much
to take one more step
let someone hold your hand while you walk
You aren’t alone
You aren’t the only one
I’ve had those thoughts too
You are not alone
I promise
National Suicide prevention life line 1-800-273-TALK
—THE MOON WON’T EVER TELL THE SUN THAT IT CAN’T RISE
Elastic
I write thousands of words
a dribble of consonants and syllables
that spill like virgin blood
but they’re never enough
The crane still sits on the dock
pondering the flattened waves
The moon hangs loose as a tooth
in a sky that doesn’t want it back
The morning says I need you I want you
You are my all and everything
while my notebook catches fire
sparks rising up like too-proud balloons
that were never meant to be held
or even filled with air
—BUT THESE STORIES DON’T MEAN ANYTHING, IF YOU’VE GOT NO ONE TO TELL THEM TO
…Hey, Monday, you’ve been giving me the cold shoulder.
…It’s been snowing here, off and on, for two days now, with more to come, and the internet has been out all day until just now. But that’s what happens when you chose to live in the hinterlands.
…I’ve been known to become obsessed with singers, bands, and currently it’s a tossup between Brittany Howard and Brandi Carlile.
I’ve known the latter for a long time. She is revelatory. I’m so, so happy she’s being esteemed finally
She can teach us a lot.
Here’s a reason you should love her, and if you don’t after hearing that (below), read on….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpNqR-ff_TQ
…My little brother and I, we had the same jobs together our whole lives. We were roofing laborers. We worked at Fred Meyer together. And we’ve always both had just a really tireless work ethic. He is a snow plow driver. And every job that he’s ever taken, or every town he’s ever moved to, it’s like by the time he leaves, he’s the mayor and the top of the job. Because it’s just the family that we come from — we love people. and we love to work. And I am always really moved when I see somebody with a really powerful work ethic. So I’ve kind of chosen my heroes that way: Dolly is like that and Elton is like that. I guess I get a lot of emotional satisfaction out of knowing that I’m working — that the journey is the destination.”
…“I love “Sesame Street.” I would say “Sesame Street” takes more risks than modern, contemporary country music does.”
…“You and Me on the Rock” is important, if you recognize it as an anthem of queer domesticity. It’s about building your house on a foundation that you can be happy in. It’s about the right to not be alone for all of your life. And to those that would kind of dismantle that dream and that inalienable human right, I think that song is a protest song, just in its sweetness.
…“I look at music in a really workman sense, you know what I mean? I got to be employee of the month one time at Fred Meyer when I was 16, and I got a jacket and everything, and I got my picture put up on the wall. It’s like every job has accolades or peer approval, and it gives you a reason to sort of like walk into work as your best self every day, whether you’re an artist or whether you’re doing any other job. So I’ve let go of some of the awards shame [laughs] that I’ve felt over the years. Because when I think back to Fred Meyer… I mean, I have to say, it definitely means more to win a Grammy, but I really did quite like that jacket and having my picture put up on the wall!
…“When I had this thing where I got put in the pop category for the Grammys last year, I don’t know if I would’ve had the same reaction this year. I’ve grown to sort of broaden my perspective about it, But all I could think of at the time was, ‘Well, I don’t belong in pop. That’s not where my people are. That’s not where I’ve done my work. They won’t know me there.’
…“ And so I see that as taking some heat for me. And then specifically just coming out in support of me, and she read my book and said a bunch of nice things about me online and took a whole bunch of heat for it. And of course, I’m a nosy bitch, so I read the comments, so I know that she is challenging people’s boundaries and the parameters of their belief. She’s inviting people to love more freely and to love people that they don’t understand. And we really need more people like Amy Grant as a representation of the Christian faith, whether we want to use that word or not. I don’t love that word. I do love the faith, but I don’t love to use that word, you know? And I think that the fact that she does use that word though, is important, and it helps me, and frankly, it helps evangelicals, and brings us all a little bit closer together where I think we really need to go.
…“I would make that argument — just generally in life — that people should get to be what they say they are.”
…“I remember making “The Story” with T Bone Burnett and being so young. He speaks in sound bites, that guy. He makes you never fucking forget the things that he says, because they just come out with quotes on ‘em. He told me, “If anybody ever asks you what kind of music you play, immediately say rock ‘n’ roll.” And he said, “It’s all-encompassing of the American music experience. Because rock ‘n’ roll is not a genre, it’s a risk that you take.” And I have never forgotten that.”
…“But I guess I want to be tried by a jury of my peers. I want the people in my community to let me know from their perspective whether or not I’m trying hard enough.”
…“The thing I like about being driven, versus being competitive, is that you want to win, and you want the people that you love to win, but you don’t want anybody else to lose.”
Big Boy
The day a firecracker nearly rips my fingers off, the day I catch the same hand in a Greyhound bus door, I meet my dad for the second time ever, and he drives his rusted truck to Bob’s Big Boy.
His hands on the wheel look like kindling stained with axle grease, the moons of his fingernails black as tar. This man, my mother loved briefly, like nightfall, a magician’s curtain, or a sudden storm, everything going dark.
Now the sun is too sharp, too angry and observant. Now a sudden, sleepy jerk of the wheel rebounds us back into the correct lane. Tools in back rattle, like metal bones bouncing.
I am seven and nervous and sore, my voice among other things lost long ago.
Grease is good he says
Wash it down with that there shake
How come you say nuthin’?
—GOT CARDS IN MY HANDS I HATE DEALING
My Mother at 17
This morning with the lake
Rippled like old skin
I see you differently for once
A young woman without weaponry
A black-and-white beauty queen
Tilting your face like
A palm toward the rays
Eager men always loitering near
The hem of your skirt
The future still a too-far star
None of us yet blooming inside you
Just the fingers of youth and brashness
Tapping on your lips hips and brain
Like a looming question without answers
And where it all turned
I’ll never know
But the sun’s slow to raise her shoulders
And the water’s stagnant staring back at me askance
So I’ll stay here caught in this moment
A time when you are not only young
But kind honest and forgivable
—THIS COULD TAKE US ALL NIGHT LONG
Akimbo
She is my brother’s girl, both of them six years older, but tonight he’s drank too much again, passed out akimbo on top of a splintered coffee table, his knuckles torn and bloody.
She takes my hand. Hers feels warm, supple, the way I imagine a newborn seal might.
How she knows which room is mine, I can’t say, but it looks like a different space when the door opens: posters and baseball pennants pinned crooked on the wall, my football alarm clock glowing scarlet, appearing at once both comical and sinister.
As she nudges me on the mattress, vertigo wraps itself around every one of my nerves. I spin in jagged cones, yet I notice a water spot leaching sickly-yellow across the ceiling’s belly. I notice a spider nefariously knitting in a corner. I notice everything and nothing.
“I only have one rule:
To feel that I’m loved by you
and not raped for once”
—I LIKE THE WAY YOU CAN’T PIN DOWN THE SEA
How to Lose, or Not Lose, a Dog
Preferably in the mall, where a Good Samaritan will find her, scan the scarred and faded tag, then call you while you’re on your knees praying
In a park, with other dogs, all of them strays, even if for the moment, barking, yelping and hopping mad circles as a little girl clutches yours in her arms before saying Lucy? Why that’s the perfect name for a perfect dog. I love you, Lucy
During a family gathering, something chaotic and crowded, like Thanksgiving, Christmas or a 60th wedding anniversary, the littlest ones playing Hide-‘N-Seek, Lucy concealed too, sniffing and tail-wagging until, hours later, she’s discovered in the coat closet
On your lap, in the car, everything suddenly fried 120 degrees, her chest cracking every .8 seconds, Lucy staring out the window, no shaking this time, her watching the trees fly by as if they’re not even there
On a plastic-sheeted table or gurney, a tube stuck down her throat, kind women milling, asking if you want to say something, anything, before or after
In your office, in the bathroom, downstairs, on the stairs, by the lake, around the corner, at the door when you come through it, by the blueberry bushes where two white butterflies twirl, confused by the altered state of the air
On the couch each night, between your legs, rubbing her invisible belly as she curls and yawns, when you finally muster enough courage and anger to scream at the pillow, Goddamn it, where is she? What have you done with my girl?
—I’M ALL MESSED UP, I’M SO OUTTA LINE
good night moon good night father
while you snore I spend the night traversing your mouth like a derelict vagabond on occasion resting by a jagged molar noticing how your breath smells like turpentine and death noting how your tongue resembles a salmon-colored dragon its flame stilled for the evening slumbering sweating obscenely prepping itself for another day of blowtorch slaughter
--HOPE THEY NEVER END THIS SONG
Poetry Unbound / Padraig O Tuama, part 3, final
You is a fascinating word.
Perhaps the world needs stories of how pain can sometimes continue in order to help those who also carry pain.
Language is a form of longing.
It never occurred to me that poetry couldn’t address the life of politics; it never occurred to me that the dead had nothing to say about the living; it never occurred to me that poetry couldn’t be a call to live differently.
So, mourning is a way of life, not just something to be done, then buried and forgotten about.
One of the things I love—but also fear—about poetry is that it asks you to name deep truths.
These days, I tend to think of reconciliation as finding a way to live creatively with tensions that threaten to undo me.
When I write poems, I feel like they ask me questions, and there’s no room for deceit—of myself or others.
It’s an invitation to community ritual; to sit and reckon with what happened.
Poems that try to be about everything often end up being about nothing, but poems that pay attention to one thing can have so much more to say.
I realized, eventually, that I needed to reexamine what I understood the word priest to mean, not only as a noun, but as a verb.
Taking this poem into your body you must meet it with the pace of your own breath: a poem about prayer brings you into the economy of prayer.
Who doesn’t have a story about laughing at the wrong time; alone, or next to a friend whose silent laughter was contagious?
The point is the practice, the using of the body to turn towards something that sustains life.
Not all my prayers name the god they turn towards.
When was the day we were taught that gay boys are boys, too? When was the day we were taught that loving poetry was enough? When was the day we learnt that feeling desperately lonely, even when you’re ten, is okay? What’s the lesson for letting you know that looking at everyone else’s family and judging your own—feeling like they’re all together and you’re all apart—is okay?
We all feel left out in different ways, it seems.
Of the game Hide and Seek, the British child psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott wrote, “It is a joy to be hidden, and a disaster not to be found.”
Tension is a glorious thing, provided tension is not killing you.
—HOLD ME CLOSER
Poetry Unbound / Padraig O Tuama, part two
I googled “what is a man?”
When I fell in love with Paul, I was overwhelmed with attention towards unexpected things. One morning I looked at the cups we’d drunk tea from the night before. I remember staring at them, thinking that I wanted to look at everything they meant. The cup he’d touched, had drunk from. I remember feeling foolish. Then I remember not caring. The point was love, and even a piece of pottery could hold it. I took a photo of the cups—I have it still.
Why doubts and loves? Why wouldn’t love be enough?
Because it has never been.
I was a lonely child, given to reading and daydreaming. I would read about people and dream about meeting them. I would watch people and dream about being their friend. It’s not a bad school for poetry, but it did make for some solitary years.
I understand the drama—and crisis—of imagining my own loneliness as unique. It was, it wasn’t. It is true, it isn’t all true. Everyone is alone, and everyone is alone in their own way. In this, we are together.
After the sudden death of an old friend, I found myself forgetting everything I’d known about grief.
Every time I’m on a bus—which is quite often—I have this ridiculous fantasy. “If this bus were to break down now, what would we all talk about?”
In reality, people would probably get on their phones, look up complaint forms, ask about toilets and make calls to explain they’d be late. In my fantasy, however, people turn to each other for conversation. “What’s a before-and-after moment of your life?” we would ask each other. And then we could listen.
Who decided the hierarchy of selves?
Listen, if you wish to feed the birds, then feed the birds; this, too, is an impulse of survival.
I started writing poems when I was eleven. For years, I carried these poems around with me like they were a secret scripture, stashed in my bag, hidden in the back of books. All those early poems are lost now. But they’re in my body—I remember the hunger that drove them, the things that made me need to write them.
What a gift, to have friends.
What is this word bless? It’s a word of kindness, a word of beatitude, a word of generous enfolding. Blessing, like time, goes in many directions.
No wonder he uses this form of fragments on the page—he’s telling us, in those gaps, that it’s difficult to hold it together. He’s right, it is.
As years went by, I realized that good literature lasts, not because it has one interpretation, but because successive generations of readers have given it careful attention, using their understanding, learning, imagination and lives. This kind of reading allows language to breathe, to be part of an evolving exchange.
It can be a difficult thing to reckon with your parents’ sex life, never mind the desire between one parent and someone else.
Have you ever heard an angel panic?
Poetry doesn’t attempt to resolve these strange arrangements. Poetry doesn’t say we have to choose between happiness and sadness, between grief and relief, between catharsis and solitude. Poetry knows there can always be more than one thing happening at a time.
I remember the strange feeling of beginning to see grown-ups as people and not just grown-ups. I realized that they had anxieties, and that they performed their anxieties, sometimes, in the way they interacted with me.
Wherever art comes from, it’s always bigger than its source.
When I was eight or nine, I begged my parents for a copy of the Bible as a Christmas present. They got me a paperback edition for children, with pictures. The first thing I did was to leaf through the pages, searching for a picture of the devil. There he was: sky-blue, with flames for eyes, the hooves of a goat and a pointed tail. I have that Bible still. It never occurred to me then to wonder why that was the first thing I looked for; childish fascination with the macabre perhaps. Older now, I have started to wonder.
I came upon this poem by Richard Georges when I googled “exorcism” and “poetry.”
When I was eighteen, I underwent three exorcisms, the aims of which were to hunt the gay demons in me.
Perhaps that’s one of the functions of art, to become something it could never have been, if only in the mind of the writer.
There were all kinds of things alive in me that I wished to be dead in me. I thought the solution would be to cease having those dreams. The dreams had other ideas.
We can be so close to each other and yet never fully understand each other.
A poem can tell you many things by only showing you a few.
I’ve written many angry poems over the years. They helped me a lot, by channeling all that energy into something creative. However, I rarely show them to anyone. After a few days—or weeks, or months—I return to them and realize how limited they were. So, I have deep admiration for any angry poems that make it to publication. An angry poem that’s gone from needing to be written to needing to be shared is a thing of power and magnificence.
All love has strangeness and space in it. All connections have distance. We cannot possess each other, even when we try.
The gorgeous power of that word; our.
It was song lyrics I really turned to for meaning in my teenage years. I knew all the words to all the songs on the few albums I owned. I was the kind of teenager who read the lyrics to the new album on the bus home from the city. And then, as I played the album for the first time, I’d read along again. I’d learn the names of the musicians and producers, and if there was a note from the artist in the liner notes I felt like I got my money’s worth. If there were no lyrics in the liner notes, I felt cheated, but not defeated—I made my own, complete with chord sheets.
I had so much time.
