Portfolio

The following are the edits I made for my portfolio from some of the writings below, some of which I feel are much improved.

Eulogy

Happiness and Sadness, when I finally hear the news,
(Which I’ve been expecting for awhile)
I won’t shed a tear or crack a smile.

What a maddening, unknowable pair you are.
You bought me shoes that never fit, and
when I asked you for a roadmap, you handed me a globe.

I woke up this morning with three broken knuckles
and a four-Advil headache;
it’s more than you’ve ever given me.

Where were you that weekend when I sat out on the porch,
muttering to myself and counting the rings
on the fallen trees in the backyard?

When you ask how I am, I say
“Perfectly well,” and though it’s not exactly a lie
I don’t believe it myself.

I’ve heard you used to be King and Queen
in a time when there were only
three primary colors in the world, but

these days, I leave your house hungry
and fluent in platitudes after all my visits,
which are becoming increasingly less frequent.

I never knew you, and I’ve made all the effort I could,
but there is nothing left to celebrate,
nothing there to mourn.

A Gift

To be loved, as I am,
(The same as you)
We inherit the unmarred love
That we were born into.

It descends like a dove,
A holy gift,
As I grasp at tar-filled straws,
Walk on painted stilts.

The mirror of your law
Reveals me damned.
So abide in me,
And take me as I am.

Glossolalia

I watch the froth at the bottom of my cup
vanish like dying faith,
fizzling with a sound so unlike
the primal yawp of the bursting bubbles
I used to blow as a child,
the defiant cackle of a renegade balloon
lost in the stratosphere,
or the hiss and pop that follows
the ignition of summer’s virgin firecracker.

The music of the world
grows fainter as I grow older.
When, perhaps, the sun and the earth
stop dancing in circles and steal a kiss,
I will hear the roar of ten thousand lives
extinguished in a fit of passion.

Independence

I’m reading some awful poetry
by a painter I admire,
something about zombies
and supermarkets,
a long-winded way of saying,
“Gee, the world is sure a pretty
fucked-up place.”

I wonder at art, why I bother
writing anything at all, awful or otherwise.
It’s the same reason a skater
carves figure-eights into the ice,
a symbol that’s come to signify the infinite,
a concept that has existed since before
words and pictures attempted
to stuff ideas into skintight suits.
Can what I call “creation” be nothing more
than a vain attempt to translate a text
that lies beyond the grasp of human comprehension?
Did Moses himself write the scriptures,
or did he just spend his life learning to speak
the language of a land caught fire?

With God keeping watch like a feudal lord,
not a single thought is mine to claim.
For every Isaac I’ve breathed into existence,
there awaits a mountaintop and a sharpened knife,
in a world where even
my blood sacrifices are refused.

I’m as needy as a cancer,
Invading, replicating,
deconstructing and destroying
the Truth that gives me life…
To prove what point?

I’m forever the youngest son, and
once again I’ve beaten my father in a game
of basketball that I know deep in my heart
he let me win. I smile
because I know it’s done in love,
but life was much more fun
when I was a better liar.

Passion

They say it burns, like fire,
but I have seen blazes
of all sizes and shapes, and
this isn’t like them at all,

the fat matchsticks we struck
against the soles of our boots.
We held them in our hands until we yelped,
threw them down on the dirt floor,
and crushed them into soot. Or that

one summer night on the porch
we lit our first cigars. I set my jaw
against the firebrand I held
in my clenched fist, feeling tough because
I earned a scar and hadn’t screamed.

It’s not like the campfire on the Gila,
where we would roast marshmallows
and toss the skittish salamanders we found
into the white heat, until their scales shriveled
and their eyes popped like roman candles, and

worst of all by far was the time you
seared your face in the bonfire you tried to vault.
Out on the mesa, under the ancient heat
of the stars, you were coked up and
I am still unable to look on what was lost.

Every prayer, every kiss,
Every stroke of the pen
stays the tipping hand
that dangles me above the flame.

Premarital Counseling

“Set aside time daily to touch base.”
Locked into our concentric elliptical orbits,
I constantly feel your pull
but try my hardest to avoid collision.
I get it, it’s like the woman says:

It’s the touch that matters.
But I’m thinking about the base.
Are there safe places to meet?
My meetings have always been car wrecks;
messy, unplanned, and impersonal, but

I forgot: we’re planets in this poem.
Self-destruction for me is recreational,
but I contain multitudes:
Sleepless nights on the mesa,
e-mails that were never returned,

the brownstone steps leading upwards
to a darkened bedroom. These are
the inhabitants of my green world,
and I must think of them also.
They are defenseless and mine to protect.

Their language is foreign to you,
but as you run your fingers over my scars
and name them, you understand without asking.
When she asks us to grade our sex life,
we exchange sly grins, and I think,

“I must be getting through to you somehow.”

Soapbox Moments

“Lift your head and look out the window
Stay that way for the rest of the day and watch the time go
Listen! The birds sing! Listen! The bells ring!
All the living are dead, and the dead are all living
The war is over and we are beginning...”

-Stars, “In Our Bedroom After the War”

When you accused Sea World of losing its integrity,
I laughed into your ear, soft and low like an almost ghost,
A widow-that-could-have-been on the morning after the war.

You thought I was mocking you, but I wasn’t (mostly).
You couldn’t know how much I like to watch you live,
your life laid out before you like a minefield

that you run through day after day, laughing as the earth
shudders and erupts behind you, hoping perhaps for the one
that takes pity on you and gives you sleep. It’s the way

you watch movies like each impending scene will
open its mouth and swallow you whole, as if the world
might finally make sense looking out from the depths of its belly.

I delight in the silly, girlish things that excite you, and I hang
on every note of the symphony you are conducting
with your flourishing hands. I can hear it

when you whisper in my ear, soft and low, saying something
about phony magicians and delicately carved salt-shakers.
They are words that keep my heart doing its thankless work,

knowing that someone still cares about the simple,
majestic arc of a breeching whale. I knew a boy once,
whom I thought dead, who used to pick onion grass

and play roller hockey and feed ants to antlions. Imagine my surprise
when later that afternoon I spied you dancing with him,
outside your bedroom window.

The Strange

I have stories for you,
which I have believed without seeing:

A man and woman fall in love,
overtaken by the Spirit that binds us all.
They feed each other with silver teaspoons
out of a brown leather bottle,
until they collapse in each other’s arms.
They will not stir until the end of the age.

Naked, bloody, covered in glass,
a woman returns to her husband.
While he was out, tending to his flock,
she was bound and dragged away.
When she crawls home,
he picks out the shards one at a time
and washes her in the river
that flows from his eyes.

A woman asks for food,
but she calls the God of Love
by the wrong name.
She starves,
along with her only child.

A Criminal dies on a cross,
whose only crime
is to be born whole
and love those who could not
love him in return.
He asks her,
“Why are you crying?”
She stops,
and learns to shrug her shoulders instead.

Which of these stories is strangest?
On my best behavior
I wish it were a little stranger to be cruel.