Tag: poetry

Home, Poetry, Things I Can

61. Things I Can Add: Music Room

smirkpretty

piano keys

The piano may join us
in this corner we call the dining nook
where our family that is two
keeps a bucket
filled with markers and pens
next to the salt
shaker. When we move again
the table and sofa
remaking our one room
into the many we covet
this becomes the sitting
place and the piano
will be doing that already.
It can stay. A song now
glitches on a hand-me-down
laptop. These machines age
in dog years. The choice
is between upgrading or losing
one lyric after another
to the exponential rise
of force X point O.

Option C is none here,
the above too poor an excuse
for music. It is hardly a maker, 1s and Os
whipping in packs along circuitry
delivering a canned calliope, midway
carousel operating
by remote.

I also want to be new
as if mounting the horse with fresh
paint might offer a ride somewhere
other than where I started
as if I am the lucky one. You are young
enough to believe capacitive touch
means building with light. Still at the table,
you are angry that screens are not invited here
and I lift my wrists in an extended rest, too few
fingers for the chord
my angers weave.

The piano may make us
play the old music
as if for the first time. One note
yours. One note, mine.

All together now.

Soon we will trade these keys for those,
string the hammered
steel tight across wooden belly and let heavy
dampered echoes reach
between us, press down,
tumbling our separate weights
into a sound only four hands
can make. Like us, the instrument
will have to share
this room of a dozen uses. It will join us
at our sharp corners.

You empty your glass. The wall here
is the color of leaves, or maybe one leaf
of blank sheet music. We each draw
a marker from the bucket. The first lines
decide everything.

 

Fitness, Poetry, Things I Can

54. Things I Can Pamper: This Flagging Frame

smirkpretty

It is 10 minutes past 10 on the first night of summer. The boy is asleep. The dryer bumps and tumbles, smoothing our wardrobe for the trip ahead.

The computer at work is powered off for the week. Tasks huddle in their restive limbo behind that dark office door.

Here, crumbs dust the counter.
Free weights squat in the corner.
A story cocoons between silent covers.

This body is so weary.

Rain came then went again. On the dark balcony, pepper leaves sip at the sky. Petals curl into sleep.

Tonight, for once,
I turn from the eternally unfinished
everything.

I turn off the light.

At long last, sleep draws closed the curtains
and tucks me into her blue
furred throat.
 

 

Choices, Poetry, Things I Can

50. Things I Can Flip: The Switch

smirkpretty

light switch

He says, me too.
When it’s bad, I think
if I could see the switch
that ends
everything
I’d be tempted
except it is too far
to reach,
even just there
across the room.

Thank god volition
is a casualty
of depression.

I say
When it’s bad, I think
if I could see the switch
that lifts me
up,
I’d ignore it.

In fact, I do.
Every day.
Every time.

Right now.

And suddenly I know it
the way a lost song
pours across the tongue,
this wave a fluorescence entirely
untwinned from the flickering bulbs
that share its name:
Light. It urges
shadow from corner
and washes it into a chiaroscuro
of truss and beam
which takes the weight
I carry. A simple trade:
one stone
for each step.

The switch is an utter failure
at playing hide-and-seek.
I close my eyes and count
to 20 and it says
I’m right here
So I press my hands into my face
and count past a hundred and it says
Still here
so I thread the blindfold
from eardrum to throat
and knot it twice
inside my skull
then begin to number
each tomb and each bone

and still it lays itself
across my feet and says
Here.

Right here.

It is inches
or less from my skin
no matter how I pivot, it stays.
It only asks I feel
for sash, pane
keys, chord
gust, leaf. Asks I open
voice,
thicket,
hasp,
wing.

The switch is a loaded spring
plugged everywhere
to everything.

When it’s bad,
a gesture
as tiny as a twitch
can make it good.

I guess I’m getting up,
I say. I’m ready to move.

He says
Me too.

Music, Things I Can

30. Things I Can Tap: The 4/4

smirkpretty

Even on a day that saps breath, beat
remains.
Night, home, a high whine
sears the deep ear. When veering toward bed
or bread or any
webbed polyfil
to muffle
the last throb of momentum, habit
is the last hope.
Turn towards
Calabria, thud and sway
into currents
already in motion,
churn flesh inside
out. Turn up
here like sleepwalking
to Messina, like emerging
at the first dawn.

—

Mindfulness, Poetry, Things I Can

6. Things I Can Manage: This

smirkpretty

Even if he nudges at every edge,
carrying his dinner to the counter to eat
alone, back turned,
before coming over to wreck the card game you’ve set up
then filling up a squirt gun you didn’t even know he owned
just so he can get you in the face
and grinning
as he says he’d like to kill you
for real
so he could get all your money
to buy himself an Xbox

Even it’s 9:54 pm and the bed contains
sketch paper, markers, silly putty, pokemon cards, library books,
and a kid not anywhere close to sleep

Even if you know the student
you dismissed from university today
and the other one with the conduct hearing tomorrow
are having much worse nights than you

Even if the dog keeps knocking her bone
under the couch and digging
at a bamboo floor
that might be the sole selling point
of this, the lone asset in an estate
from which he’d be lucky
to wring an Xbox

Even if you know the bone
is just a surrogate for the play
or walk she really needs
and your back creaks and your stomach churns
and you haven’t finished the letter to your grandmother
you started last week or called
to thank your girlfriend,
lover, or any of the circle
of angels who’ve kept you
off the cliff
for a decade
or two

Even if you don’t have one ounce
of energy left

You draw
a drop
from somewhere

Even if
thin air

and write

This:

Tonight, the sickle cuts a cool, slender tear
in the bruised night.

Later,
the boy in the back seat says
“I can see the full moon.”

This is the first time
in months
you know
what the sky holds.
The first time
you’ve remembered
to look.

“Isn’t it a crescent?” You ask.

His face fogs the glass.
“I can see the whole dark thing.”

You tell him the earth
casts shadows. “A little sun gets past,” you say.

It always does.

Even if we imagine ourselves so big.
Even if we forget to look up.
 

Poetry, Things I Can

5. Things I Can Describe: Depression Confines

smirkpretty

The opposite of depression is not happiness.
It isn’t pleasure
or energy, balance or peace.
No, not even peace
although it is tempting to scurry
there to escape
the dull clang
inside that may as well be
everywhere.

Trapped
in an MRI machine,
some patients experience such panic
they choose the tumor
instead. Imagine a knowledge
of that loathsome confinement
so intimate
its hug
becomes a welcome touch.

Try this:
Rise with this contraption
riveted to your skin. Shamble
through the day wide
awake. See only what the pinhole
lets in, taste through shavings
of pennies and polyethylene.
Hear voices
distorted to poison and reach
through jointed alloy to grip
or work or gather or play, pushing
hard to feel
even a remote approxmiation
of anything
as it truly is.

The opposite of depression is not mindfulness
or presence. It is not kindness or waking
from a bad dream
although it must seem like the sun
could at any minute pierce
the seams
and let outside in
if only there was
a sun.

 

Poetry

Licking

smirkpretty

He dips, smacks
fist against bag,
growl and clash,
Joe Strummer splits
seams, drop
ceiling shrieks
in protest against
shuddering brace and groaning
beam, crimson everlast
swinging, spine
hunched, gloves up, slits
for eyes, he spits
as bristling
lips clench
jagged like razors
ragged like teeth
wet with stink
slick heat
bell at 3
he scowls, steps
back, steeps
in his own steam, salt
licking his neck