SICKNESS

 
Sickness is my secret place,
like this virus that keeps me indoors,
away from all others.
Sure there could be complications
but none of the heart, the head.
The chills inure me.
The headache hones my self-awareness.
And my stomach may roil
but interruptions don’t.

No point denying sickness.
Another virtue
when some unseemly microbe
wants temporary use of my body.
I’m flat out on the couch.
My brow sweats.
Three blankets flow like tide
up to my throat.
But I’m not worried.
No bills are in the room with me.
The phone’s not ringing
with someone who has great need of me.
At least, I won’t be answering it
if it does.

I’m taking pills.
I’m downing medicine.
I’m becoming more and more myself
with a cough and sniffle
underlining the fact.
And I’m drowsy (my personal favorite.)
Nothing can touch me
that isn’t inside of me.
Illness is more of a cubbyhole than writing.

Sure, in a day or two
this will all pass.
No more aches. No more mucus.
I’ll be back out into the world.
The word is “cured.”
The end of a medical condition.
Or a method of preserving dead meat.

 

THE OLD SCHOOL


What did they find when they dug up
the floorboards of the old high school
but promiscuity, adultery,
and even a pregnancy or two.

In the old store-room,
besides filthy couches and broken chairs,
there were twenty bullies, a hundred wimps,
and even two suicides.
Mice sure but also sadism.
And stagnant air to preserve the lot of them.

From the gym, men haul battered equipment.
Did interstate abortions and drinking sprees
really stumble off that wretched pommel horse?
And look at that greasy mat.
You could write your name with one finger
in all those alcoholics.

I'm a little in awe.
Heaped in a pile below my junior year
are blackboards, dusters, wife-beaters, drug abuse and incest.
A globe drops from a high place
explodes into splinters of Europe, Africa,
racism and dread.

They're going to tear the whole place down
and there's not much to salvage.
The old library bookshelf might have some use
but the soap opera?

The brand spanking new high school
opens in September.
And it is September.
So let the spanking begin!

Self-Inflicted


I love the scrape, the scar,
the damp rush of blood
the moment before
the skin breaks; when
my body and its disease
hold each other
like two people fucking
in the dark, pissing
in each other's mouths
to feel how much
we can dirty ourselves
but still come clean:

revel in not knowing
why it all makes sense
under the sheets
the way it never does
in daylight, when I pick
the stale scabs of evidence
from the pillow
in a worthless shame
I decry as discretion;
pad the red wounds dry
to scab another night
scraping myself down
to my favorite size.

Don’t apologize; never
explain. My body
is the only one who never
turns me down,
but I do it to be bloody,
I do it to be alive:
to spite the worthless shit
that says no
every day in the mirror.
Take a look at him;
he hasn’t a drop of shame
to spare. That’s why
I take him undercover;
to teach him a lesson
he’ll never forget.

Sketches Of Grief

my mother yelled at me for not ferrying
a pain to trace my grief on her body,

I was waiting in the wings for the night
to darken the skies, revering her thoughts

and then sketching different names
of grief on her body.

I wrote every line of torture on her skin,
chanting the elegies of my father into her eardrums.

I strive to fetch hope from the memories written on our wall,
but my eyes shift into a room of burnt onions,

and my tongue fled in search of voices
submerged into my father's throat.

every morning, I gulp down depression
from a cupful of tears, set down

and goggle my heart bleed gloomy verses
to the world.

yesterday, I trudge on the highway
and discerned someone,

saying;

you either shed your emotions in the air
& become a poet

or else you die a coward.

someday, you would hear the story
of a boy who moulded his emotions
into a poem,

& throw his heart into a flower pot.



Dark Days

when dark days creeps,
we saw a strand of hair
on our skin, dashing away.

we watched our bodies
become tissue papers,
our cracking lips
giving up to its doom,
as we felt the slight change
of beats in our hearts.

when the moon 
embraces the darkness,
stuck stars glitter no more,
as the songs of peace echo not,
and birds with broken wings
find not their way home.

Metamorphosis

The day I turned into you,     you saw me first.
You were there, breathing petals like lilies,     plucking stars
from my heart, to the earth on your palms.
I whisper to the wind      to whistle songs to you,  & 
you —a bright shard from the sun— eats up the darkness
on my tongue. I pray the hook in my throat  unfurls
Into lyrics     of old starlings   hymning your name.
I search your name in the sky of my heart,   & all I harvest is memories
of you as an angel,   &  I am incomprehensible 
for dishing void from my voice. 
Demons are fallen angels, &  oh!  what do we call fallen demons?
But you  are the clean waters,  shattering darkness
from my bones. & I moult from dirt    to your kisses 
wrapping my tongue with your molars,     making my 
breath as quiet as a sepulchre.

That Famous Black Dog


Sadly, I have
to admit that
depression is
getting the better
of me.
Everything is really
hard work.
Just getting up,
and dressed tires
me out more than
an 8 hour shift at
work used to.

I've lost interest in
nearly everything.
I used to love playing guitar.
I was never very good,
but it was something I
enjoyed.
I haven't picked it up
for over a year.

The amount of poems
I've had published in
the last year,
I used to have that
many published each month.

I need help,
I know that.
I've known it
for a long time,
but now I've
reached enough
of a low point
to accept it.

Tomorrow morning,
I'll be phoning the
doctor's surgery.
Hopefully, I'll get
the help that I've
finally acknowledged that I need.

Homunculus

Cooking a scrawny, hairy newborn...
- What the fuck are you doing, cummer?

"We'll boil the nine devils out of him."
Nine precocious, duck-legged gnomes,
born by God-tempting practices of witchcraft.

This brat is not even mummified.
(parchment-coated, peeling, scaly-skinned) he is a
disgrace to the crib.
His shrewd, bow-legged hounds chase
and hunt the stray deers' akasha image.

Nine paces from the river, nine moons sit
above the motionless water.
Usurer, the sevenfold crouching creator rules
the real and the imagined world.

He deals zinc-clad cards
while fertile scribbles guard
the nine crystal-structured Villains.


(Translated by Gabor Gyukics)

Oh! My Dear Face
Oh! My Dear Face 
Never be upset 
I didn't come to pimples
I didn't come to dimples
Oh! My dear face 
Never be upset 
I didn't come to wrinkles 
I didn't come to mind rankles
Oh! My Dear Face 
Never be upset. 

To Boys Holding Hands.
Each time I want to say this
my mouth becomes lead.
I saw a boy
holding another boy.
To be another boy's lover here
is what might drain you of your breath.
I cannot say,
if to lock lips with a boy
is bad.
I cannot say,
if to lock soul with a boy
is a sin.
You might walk into your grave,
get lynched, stoned
& as you scream in pains
to be left alone,
your father might be
the one to cast the first stones.

The First Time

The first time that I
remember thinking
of suicide was in my
mid-twenties.

I remember being
around 18 years
old, and a friend
saying,
" If I killed myself,
that would show
them ! "

" Who ? " , I asked.

" All of them, the
teachers who put
me down at school.
Al of the girls who've
said no to me. "

I felt like I had to say,

" Most of them would
never hear about it,
anyway. "

So I did.

I don't think he liked
that.

But it's the truth.

I mean, killing yourself
just to prove some kind
of point seems idiotic.

And very self indulgent.

If you really, really, can't
take the pain, anymore,
then I don't honour you,
neither do I judge you.

Or me.

I prefer to believe that as life can always get worse, it can also get better. 

Midnight Blues


away from the bars for a while, swilling 
cheap wine that allows for trips 
down memory lane.  

saving money, trying to figure out the bleak future,  
a way to make it, somehow, alive out of the whole damn charade.  

as cruel mornings dawn, and drinks flow,  

the blues come back with an extra 
vengeance I haven’t seen in a while.  

bitterness returns, I see faults everywhere around me,  
on everyone, including myself, and there’s no light 
to illumine the crepuscular rooms of life.  

even in strip joints I fail to feel at home anymore; 
a constant reminder of how things were constantly 
looms over my head.  

dark rain floods the streets, the emptiness of the world  
engulfs me once more; exhausted, trying somehow to disappear. 

always remaining still, unable to react.  

more drinks are poured and downed. the dry bottles withhold 
no real answers. 

 


Late Night Embraces


she held me tight, when we were both high on high octane rotgut 
and fortified wine; “I love you” and I couldn’t mutter it back,  
my heart resided my throat blocking all words.  

going cold turkey and someone else held me tight, refusing me bourbon 
and junk (that had momentarily sent me to the Bar); she, too, said “I love you” 
and I had no voice to reciprocate.  

few years apart, the two long late-night embraces that kept me sane;  
one from my whiskey girl, the true love that was taken too soon from the  
merciless spike.  

the other, I did love, too; she couldn’t take the madness any longer. went  
through too much in too short a time, all the bourbon insanity I relish and in which 
I feel alive.  

too many other embraces came and went; none significant. 
temporary escapes from the mist, vain attempts to glimpse at the sun.  

more are to come and I know the ending; wordless poems on  
yellow napkins, while Wild Turkey and Four Roses water my withering heart.  

it’s all right. barflies will always be there, bars will never cease to exist.  
home, the corner booth of a dimlit joint 

and a broken down angel in whose embrace I’ll lose myself for a night.