Our Numbered Days
Page 4
“work.” Making glass is work. Driving a forklift
is work, as is procrastination, as is collecting coins
or lava or hamburgers, whichever they are.
Skyline with Cranes and Stormcloud
A broken clock is right twice a day, but there is no time
at which a broken windshield is useful. In my peripheral
vision, the cracks could be lightning, but Minneapolis
is not as interested in drama as I am. Somewhere, not here,
it is raining. It would be great if it would rain on me
because then there would be a reason I felt like garbage
right now. There’s always, of course, a reason, but it would be
nice to say It’s raining only on my head rather than
I have a chemical imbalance in my brain or I just remembered
that someone I love will die before I do. All of downtown
is underneath the sky. All of us stuck on the freeway
are underneath downtown and the sky. If you spend
long enough in one place you will eventually be hit
by lightning. Because it’s not real lightning
we’re discussing here, stay longer and you will
be hit twice. Never move, ever. You might go somewhere
there is no lightning. It might not rain there at all.
Our Numbered Days
Fun may often have little to no logical basis...
Wikipedia
I never did a day’s work in my life.
Thomas Edison
Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art.
Truman Capote
In the past, some of the songs that were the most fun, and the most entertaining and the most rocking, fell by the wayside because I was concerned with what I was going to say and how I was going to say it.
Bruce Springsteen
This suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
Oscar Wilde
Now I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap into the dark.
Thomas Hobbes
Mama, we came to dance.
Brian Fallon
Fun as meditation, meditation being
doing exactly what you want to do
at the exact moment you want
to do it. When I say “I am having fun”
I am also saying “I can’t imagine
being anywhere else.” So suck it,
depression. I don’t need you, I have
not needed you, and even when I don’t
mean it I will say I’m having fun
and I don’t want to be anywhere else.
I will wield my joy like a broadsword
or a fucking nerf gun. I will have
fun like my life depends on it
because it does.
On Sitting on My Ex-Girlfriend’s Porch, Listening to Her Play a Song about Me that I Know Her New Boyfriend Helped Her Write
Ok, babe, the fuck. I know you think
that art is all about openness
and total honesty, but honesty is like
an ugly puppy. I don’t want it.
I know I should but I don’t.
If you aren’t going to put down
the ukulele and say “Remember
when I broke your heart and then I wrote
this song? I’m so happy that’s in
the past. I’m so happy we’re married,”
don’t play the song. If you aren’t
going to be the person the song
says you are, someone who believes
in permanence and redemption
and America, someone who, like,
loved me once, don’t play the song.
I’m Sorry Your Kids Are Such Little Shits and that We Are in the Same Zen Garden
It’s unfortunate that your offspring
make people wish for a dystopian future
in which euthanasia is a universally
beloved form of birth control, but when
elderly women literally everywhere are better
parents than you, perhaps it’s time
to hang up the baby-making spurs. You are
to Japanese gardens what roosters are to the morning.
You are like golf: I hate you. I realize
that you have four children, all of whom
are particularly strong-willed, and that
you’re tired, and that you might not
get the support you need from your wife,
but dude, your kids are being dicks to each other
loudly within earshot of me, and I’m gonna
throw them in this koi pond. Did you know
that koi are predatory? They’re not, but I am smarter
than you, so let’s pretend I’m right.
The News Anchor Is Crying
Because I called in during a Q and A
segment and broke up with her on air.
Q: Is dating a news anchor the dangerous
and sexy fun you would imagine?
A: I never got to ride in a helicopter. A: I never
got to see horrific tiger accidents. A: She never
took me tanning or teeth-bleaching. She also
never said “I love you,” but that was probably
because A: she half-believes she is a robot
but with less emotional capacity, circuits
where the veins should be, or A: because the dark
is rising, or A: because her hair and thereby the timing
was never right, or A: because she actually didn’t
love me, because she probably didn’t, why
would she, but anyway, the news anchor is crying
and now she has to report on a shooting,
another shooting on the north side of town
and her hair is just right. The tears are just so.
Our Numbered Days
Depression is the inability to construct a future.
Rollo May
Sanity is a little box.
Charles Manson
He went out alone, and an hour and half later returned to announce, “I’ve had eighteen straight whiskeys. I think that’s the record.”
on the death of Dylan Thomas
I feel certain that I’m going mad again. I feel we can’t go through another one of those terrible times. And I shan’t recover this time. I begin to hear voices.
Virginia Woolf
You are always ticking inside me.
Sierra DeMulder
It is often suggested that creativity and bipolar disorder are linked.
Wikipedia
I put my heart and soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process.
Van Gogh
The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.
Van Gogh
I am concerned
that if I begin taking
medication I will no longer
be able to write poems.
Here and Away
I’ve been hearing that the world is ending.
I’ve heard it so much these days
that I can either completely ignore it
or never leave my house again.
That is, if I actually left my house
for things that don’t directly enable
me to keep my house. See, I’ve been thinking
about driving nowhere. I’ve been thinking
about becoming a box inside a locked room
inside a dark house at the dark end of the street.
I wanna go away until I’m gone. It takes so much
less energy to not exist than it does to exist
and get burned. I’ve been burned so much
I’m not me anymore. I’m a stupid puppet version
of me. I’ve got strin
gs that lead to nowhere.
Nothing is pulling on me. I wish someone
would drag my hand out of hiding
and sign my name on the dotted line.
There are days when I cannot find the sun
even though it’s right outside my goddamn
window, when getting out of bed feels like the key
in the doomsday machine, so on those days,
this is what I tell myself: whatever
you are feeling right now, there is
a mathematical certainty that someone
is feeling that exact thing. This is not
to say you aren’t special. This is to say
thank god you aren’t special. I too
have kissed no one goodnight.
I have launched myself off tall places
and hoped no one would catch me.
I have ended relationships because suddenly
I was also exposed. But isolation is not safety,
it is death. If no one knows you’re alive,
you aren’t. If a tree falls in the forest
and no one’s around to hear it, it does
make a sound, but then that sound is gone.
I am not saying you will find the meaning of life
in other people. I am saying that other people
are the life to which you provide the meaning.
See, we are wrong when we say I think,
therefore I am. The more we say it,
the more it sounds like, “I think,
therefore I will be.” You cannot think yourself
into a full table. You cannot think and make
walls and a roof appear around you.
I have thought and thought myself into corners
made of words, nightmares, and what
has it gotten me but more thoughts,
a currency that only buys more currency.
So please, if you want to continue existing,
do something. Learn to make clouds with only
your breath. Build a house, even if every wall
leans to the left. Love it anyway, just like a season.
Just like a child. Love how you hate yourself sometimes,
because goddamn, at least there’s still something
to hate. It’s so easy to think and keep thinking
until you are the last person left on earth.
Until the entire world is no larger than the space
between your bed and the light switch,
but I hear the world is ending soon.
When we go, and we’re all going to go,
I will be part of it.
Our Numbered Days
Hope is the feeling we have that the feeling we have is not
permanent.
Mignon McLaughlin
Who hopes for what he already has?
Paul of Tarsus
The basis of optimism is sheer terror.
Oscar Wilde
He who has never hoped can never despair.
George Bernard Shaw
It’s ok. It’s ok. Come back to me. I’m not who I thought I’d be.
Kristian Hallbert
In reality, hope is the worst of all evils, because it prolongs
man’s torments.
Friedrich Nietzsche
If one has truly lost hope, one would not be on hand to say so.
Eric Bentley
There is nothing so well known as that we should not expect something for nothing—but we all do and call it Hope.
Edgar Howe
Hope is a thing I drag out of storage
when I am done thinking; hope answers
my phone; hope breaks my furniture
and helps me rebuild before the next
party; hope turns into more hope
unless it does not in which case
it turns into more or less less
than what I had hoped for; hope
sinks; hope drinks with me and against
me; hope is my ride home; hope is
asleep, I’m asleep, dear god, I can’t
stop sleeping.
Traffic, Lightning, Gutter
Let me tell you what it’s like
to ride a bicycle in a hurricane.
Let’s say the wind is blowing
east. You live to the east now.
Let’s say it’s hailing because it does,
as you know, do this in hurricanes.
The rain does surprisingly
fall in sheets. More like
snakes. More like ghosts
of snakes. Ghosts of snakes
that are running away from
you. It’s not that they don’t
love you, more that they too
are trying to get dry. Let me
tell you what it’s like to get
dry. You will feel like
you swam there through
Minneapolis or Detroit or
Bogota, whichever
is the place where right now
you sleep. You are a superhero
with a cape made of water. All doors
make all of us superheroes, but you
made that cape. You and the rain.
Enabling: a Love Song
for and after my grandmother
It’s called kissing the bottle
because of the way your lips move. I seem
to recall that your lips moved like that
on me once, but I doubt either of us
would remember now. Now, after
the years and what I’m sure must be
several houses full of glass. I bet you could
fill all the places we’ve lived together
with all the bottles we’ve emptied together.
Bob, I know you never much liked drink. I think
you only drank so I didn’t feel lonely
so you didn’t feel lonely. I’m lonely
now, Bob. How’s heaven, Bob? You must have
gone to heaven. You spent too much time
taking care of me to do anything
bad. Our children have to give me the wine now.
Our children, who you always kissed goodnight
with your mouth or whatever implements were
closer at hand. Bob, this Christmas all the other words
were gone but I could still say your name. Everyone noticed,
but no one would tell me where you’d gone. I knew
where you’d gone, but I still expected you to walk
in the door with Spotty, who I know is also dead,
but there are too many deaths now
to use them to accurately measure time. Bob,
I looked into Marilyn’s eyes and asked
a question. Every word was your name. Even if
I could have said anything else, I wouldn’t.
She wiped the mashed potatoes off my chin
and said “I know. We miss him too.” Bob, that’s it.
I miss you. I’d forgotten what it was like. Since
you came home from the ocean I’d never not been
near you. I may have been sad, but never lonely.
My liver should have taken me years ago. I should have
died before you. It’s your name I want
on my lips when I get there. I need to
ask everyone I meet where you’ve gone.
American Revolution Trail, Charlotte, North Carolina, Winter
It seems strange to call this winter
when this morning I walked across
frozen cheesefruit and left my jacket
in the car on the way to the Minneapolis
airport, wait, let me explain cheesefruit:
fruit that is awful and smells
like cheese, next question. So here’s what’s up
with Charlotte: downtown looks
like the Emerald City had a baby
with Heaven. White and silver, all of it,
and I’m sure that t
hey moved all
the homeless people somewhere, but I am
not from here and have the luxury, no,
privilege of not knowing that. I am just here
to perform poems for a bunch of college
students and the college is not asking me
to acknowledge anyone’s humanity, the college is not
asking me to know anything more than I already
know, I’m leaving tomorrow anyway, so I won’t.
It seems strange to call this winter when what I know
of winter is not white but grey. Strange when
everything here is beautiful and none of it’s home.
I feel like I’ve spent my whole life in transit. Strange
when I should want to, but I don’t want to, stop.
It Was the Day I First Fell out of a Window, or, It Was the Day we Vacuumed the Couch, or, It Was the Day We as a Family Took Spotty to the Veterinarian, or, It Was the Day, when Asked about Pizza, Everyone Said “Cheese,” or, It Was the Day We Were Going to Take Out the Christmas Tree, and then It Was the Evening We Were All Candles Floating in the Woods, or It Was the Evening before We All Dreamed of Rabbits Slowly Becoming Snow; If Alcoholism is the Mutual Friend that Will Eventually Introduce our Family to One Another, I Would Still Take into me that Iced Buzzsaw, Grandma, I Would Still Leave that Engine Running
after Hieu Minh Nguyen
Liminality
The best way to get to heaven is to take it with you.
Henry Drummond
Our headlights snake across
the West Texas highway.
Out here they’ve only got
two kinds of music on the radio:
Country and Western. Her hair
touches my shoulder in the wind.
The road signs say turn ahead.
We sing along to songs our parents
taught us. Turn ahead. Steep cliff.
Her finger is curled around my belt loop.
Steep cliff. Pay attention. The road
curves away from me, my voice crumples
as we clip the guardrail, our back
wheels lift skyward, the car spins,
flips, the sky and the river bed
fight for supremacy, our headlights
kick into space. All of our clothes
float around us. Her blouse
blossoms like a supernova,
the change in her cup holders
forms constellations glinting
in front of our eyes. We are astronauts