Song from the Office of Ice
Playing with staplers
I wonder why
The violence had such a different quality;
It was not skinned knees
Or schoolyard brawls.
It was an infection
There is no other word.
I was curiously invaded
It was not just fists on face
Every movement was noted
Each word, each tic
Stored, responded, corrected, ignored
Consciously.
Born in battle
I am an army out of step
Some have won
Some are being drafted
Some play with toy guns
Some cry for an end to war.
My soul is tight, taut
Focused, hemmed
I am a burden of contradictions
I leave and wait
Speak in silence
Dance with darting eyes.
I am scripted
I am a great play
A manifesto of peace
A call to arms
I am actor, director
Critic and audience
Doors chained.
I am my own world
I paint my eyelids
Travel my dreams
Work, promote
And am promoted
Alone in my chair.
My receptionist is witty
You laugh and thumb magazines
Stare at the door of distant flashes
Watch the clock
Scratch your neck
Read my memos
Wait, frown, stir
And leave.
I see you
I have my eyes
I pipe music
Touch the screen
With wet fingers
But cannot rise.
You see
I think
Beyond this office
Lie pits of fleshy hate
Smoking piles of corpses
Brownshirts, holsters
Soldiers obsessed with feces
Who tape tales of their mother’s demise
And sing of the slaughter of peace.
I move in this office
It is glass, not heavy
I see dogs racing
Children swinging from bridges
Wives touching the cheeks of sleeping men
Old bands harrumphing in sunny gazebos
Students laughing at the folly of law
Ducks gathering at the feet of old women
The careless canvas of a sunset
The quiet beauty of the world.
I am wooed by all of it
I feel it
It calls, all of you call
All lines flash
You gather outside
With cakes and new clothes
Tapping on the glass and shielding your eyes.
I hear you.
I want you.
I strive for safety
Without security.
Keep the candles lit.
I am coming.
Revolt
I will speak of these revolutions
These rebellions of revolt
These saddest rejections…
Those who find themselves
Below the cusp of fortune
Must raise themselves
Or lower others.
Two cases
One justice
The unjust first:
The cause of our place
Is not history or circumstance
Necessity or efficiency
But isolated acts
Of willful oppression.
Justice has no court
No need of judges
Or knowledge of law
Justice is a tide
Stopped only by conscious dams.
Equality has no cost
It is not fed with excess
It is as equally repressed in a land of want
As a land of plenty
Goodwill is no luxury
It requires no wealth.
Rights are eternal
We need Nurenburgs
For dinosaurs
Who trod on mammals.
We did not fall
As leaves fall
We were gnawed from the branches
Flung into the gutter.
Autumn danced on our broken faces.
This is the new god
An echo of the eternal good of old
Which send the unbaptized Socrates to hell
Because he should have known better.
This is the new religion of persecution
Faith in Christ because of lions
This is the necessity of oppression
Faith in Eden, the triumph of Satan.
This is the new faith of self-hatred
No joy in the arrival of goodness
Only hate for the length of the journey.
This is the paralysis of imagination.
The world, a ship, plied harsh waters
Some rowed, some navigated
Some imagined the hoped-for lands.
A sudden beaching
Unguessed by most
Embraced by all
Gave rise to riots
Angry accusations
Flung sand
Recriminations
Cries of revenge
The religion of rowers.
At the time, understandable.
The rowers had hard hands
Hard hearts
And hated the drinking on deck
As they pressed their tongues to the cracks.
A generation later
Ridiculous
We fight over a past
We did not live.
Would not our fathers
Kneel before us
Take our soft hands
In their stony grip
And say:
What matter how we arrived?
We arrived!
Treasure this land!
Honour our sacrifice!
These hatreds push us all back to sea…
What do we reply?
Will we call their sacrifice oppression?
Will we mourn their position so much
We cannot enjoy their gift?
Thus the son of an Eastern barber
Sacrificed for
Sent to school
Rails against the possibility
Of education.
The hardest part of any revolution
Is knowing when to stop.
Now the case of justice:
Falling to sand
Tasting the solidity of earth
We turn and look at the charred ship
Where our mother’s cooked and swabbed
For swaggering captains.
Did they have a choice?
Did the captains have a choice?
Some must cook
Some must lead
Who makes these decisions?
Can we point at a face?
We weep for their loss
For it could have been better
But in howls of hail
When the ship lurched
And children were thrown
For the sake of weight
Judgment was no joy.
On the beach we comfort each other
Amazed at the simple structure of sand
Let us clasp our hands
And plan our homes.
Death
I do not fear death.
Where I am, death is not.
Where death is, I will not be.
We shall never meet.
The Everyday Blade
How sad that it should come to this
Life an old coat
Worn not for warmth
Or cold
Just because…
Welcome to this little world
Shadows lean neither to dark or light
No obstacle, no illumination
No line divides this life.
Oh these old, weary habits
Sleepy soldiers guard no sunrise
Rusty rifles, cigarette stubble
The fear of war their only enemy.
In a fluid crypt of skin I wait
For orders?
I sigh as another pigeon flies free
Kicking no paper it rises to the dawn
A messenger of flight alone.
I live…
How little in the word;
Breath, movement, food.
I feed as parasites feed
On the stirrings of a larger life.
This life
How I anticipate it…
Fools wait for permission.
The wise forego forgiveness.
This strength
I stand on the platform
With a crayoned ticked
Weeds on the tracks
Schedule says train
Life says walk.
This weight
The brutal sins of others
In a bin, beneath corpses hushing me to sleep
I spy the clear stars of morning.
They whisper soft indifference:
Live
Live not
We shall burn.
I hold in my hand the everyday blade…
Shave carelessly
Eat poorly
Smoke relentlessly
Twist the wheel
Walk into traffic…
The everyday blade
Is a suicide of sighs
Of cares slipped and lost
Chances mislaid and scorned
A lonely funeral planned indifferently
No scorn in the gathering
No mourning save the loss of mourning
Still butterflies the only colours
In this museum.
This need:
Live as you respect!
How it fades in the whittle
Of the everyday blade
The indifferent blade of eternal life
A shaver of days
Slow spinner of smaller circles
Lazy limiter of larger leaps
The everyday blade is silent surrender
Resentful sloth
The iron chamber of sad habits…
Drop this blade!
Fly the dank cells of inaction!
And surrender to the living lashings
The new dawn of a distant death.
Reject small deaths
Accept one
And live!
Substitute
Hey
Remember the time
Years ago
When you pulled the wings off a fly?
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
The girl asked if she could keep your treasured pen
And you blushed and nodded.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
You threw the bird with the broken wing
To make the girl clap.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
You screamed at your mother
And she screamed back.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
You hoisted yourself
To a shield of muscle.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
Stung by the lashes of distant eyes
You wore strange suits to school.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
You showered wonderful words
On possible sex.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
When you paged and pulled
With all your might.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
You sat in stillness
Smiling at solitude.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
You embraced yourself
In an armchair of thought.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember the time
You wept in the arms
Of soft songs.
That was a substitute for love.
Remember these times
Remember them now
And remember this:
The only substitute
Is sorrow.
There is no substitute
For love.
Despair
Oh dear
I am afraid you have found me
A virgin in love with chaste candlelight;
Strong, dark, tender words;
White gloves on my cheek;
A red rose in my bound hair…
A protected virgin
A rhyme of possible passion.
Despite my whirling life
You have found me
And whisper kind words of resignation
With all the sympathy of a deathbed watcher.
Here, poor, wounded creature
You murmur
I bring the salve for all torture
The soft amputation of all sorrow
The generous nurse of nothing…
Look at this reality;
I cannot say I am unmoved
Twenty-eight years I have fled this yearning
I have expended myself, in art, in thought, in love
Like a soldier on leave from war
Arguing with the mouths of loading cannons.
I have felt the death of creativity
The sudden darkening of future days
I flip the calendar
Today it says: you are an artist
I turn again; there is no page, no wall
Just a hole of empty dust
A hollow snake of silent rest…
In the belly of the snake is a strange inscription
By candlelight it can be read:
I was stillborn
My movements have been mere after-twitchings
I have fought this knowledge, this widening beast
I have thrown it beauty, passion and hard, hard sweat
They do not move it; they are plastic meats to a famished dog
Instead it lurches forward, shattering all careful gardens
Intent on its prey…
My God -- how I have fled, these many years
Friends, to whom worth is breath --
Listen to the savage indemnity of endless tribute
The kindest kiss of the harshest master:
Ahh, child…
You have worked hard
You are to be commended
As a cripple who twitches a toe
Yet in this bright athletic world
Do you wish to be a triumph of tremors?
Where is your pride?
This half-life of endless proof…
This eternal gasping for given air…
I am the smile of your pure soul
The smile which gently says:
Cease work!
You are not sentenced to live!
This only hotel is only a hotel;
If the maids are surly
The beds rocky
And the management pressing
Why -- leave!
There is no shame in spurning such hospitality…
Do you hear?
Do your eyes widen?
I understand; I have so much to live for
Yet you whose souls speak nothing of silence
Cannot hear the quiet truth of nothing.
Here -- I wish to be clear
Here is the story of all life:
Here is a silent crowd of waiting souls
In an anteroom, waiting for birth
Curious, they turn the pages of their possible lives
Perhaps they are impatient
Perhaps they flip to the index
And blink at the alphabet of abasement:
A is for agony
B is for brutality
C is for cowardice
D is for despair
E is for endless
F is for failure
G is for gloom
H is for humiliation
I is for ignominy
J is for jeering
K is for killed
L is for loathing
M is for mendacity
N is for never
O is for ordeal
P is for pain…
Can we see them shudder and slam these pages?
Can we hear their response to the question:
Will you live?
Can we hear their bitter refusal?
Even if they are told to turn to “T”
And there they read:
T is for talent…
Is it enough?
Pandora says no.
Listen -- if I make myself clear
This an allegory of every moment
This alphabet is the song of every breath:
Will you live?
That old, futile question:
What is the meaning of life?
Can we see the foolishness?
Life is a luxury
The icing of survival.
If you flourish
Life has meaning
If your world is mere survival
Life is meaningless.
So, you ask: what can rob life of luxury?
Why, are we not the endless echoes of our first hearings?
We are born as single seeds in a single garden
If we are sown with bitterness, despair, hatred, violence
Or merely unwatered with love
We become small shoots among towering vines
Parched for sunlight, draped in shadows
Every expansion a savage thrust
We lurk in jungles of endless struggle
Fighting both the choking vines
And our desire to give up the fight
Our lives become a strain of single will
Our pleasures the conquering of endless impossibilities
Our purpose not life, but survival…
In this agony of striving
Can it be seen how exhaustion can turn from a hated enemy
To a wise counselor
A gentle seducer of rest, rest, rest..?
So, you say, take this ease!
Rest, rest -- you have earned it!
Ahh -- this clarity is hard…
You see, we are not struggling
We are struggle.
The vines grow; we must always strive
We are watched by predators;
Rest is death…
The solution?
You say: there are no predators!
I reply: years ago, you were taught to read
You are not literate; you became literacy
You say there are no predators
I say you cannot look at the printed page
And not read words.
I cannot look at the printed world
And not read: predator
That is my literacy.
The only hope is the end of hope
The only solution a necessary hardness
The end of soft spite
Petty resentment
And the hateful cowardice of natural prey.
I fear predators
Thus fear
Is my predator.
Submerged
By the water’s edge
Of this pond, a hand-spread of tulips
Widens under a blue sky
Fields of flowers jostle in the distance
Looking to dip their feet
In painted water.
This is a still-life of life
A portrait of peace
Here, in this gallery
Your eyes
Drawn to the flowers
May wonder at the small square inscription:
I hurt myself…
Like the water
It is almost transparent
Underneath, if you look carefully
You may see a still victim of solitude
A sketched blue skull of sorrow
Paint on paint so skillful
It appears beneath the paint.
You wonder if it stares
It’s eyes seem quite gone
You are sure the painter, though young
Is dead
And all that is left
Is a tinted window
Facing black.
Quicksand is the Only Struggle
I have had it!
These deepening vales
Where nothing crunches underfoot
Are seeping past my chin.
How strange
Just yesterday
It seems
I breathed the giddy air
Of frantic wisdom.
Cast in air too rare for despair
I surveyed the world
A soulless eagle of sight.
I rose past all wind
Tainted with the breath of others
I rose past habits, past cares
Past all I was before
Past the earth
Past gravity; I rose so far
I no longer rose
But was…
Hung in high purity
I saw beyond sight
Such dreams!
I became a sheer pane
Of pure thought.
Strange now, how this shedding of the mortal earth
Should so have blinded me!
I floated beyond height
And rising through the endless shades
Of a single colour
Found my sight obscured
By a lowering curtain
The draping skirts of soft death.
I rose past the dark hem
Unbound from all masts
Sung to by the siren of all-sight
I began to yearn for an end to eyes.
Looking back
I am shocked how close I came
Sinking in soft death
I finally woke and kicked
These folds freed only by circulation
The savage pinpricks of returning.
How I plummeted!
From so far, so high
That the spurned earth
Spurned impact
Parted like silk
And buried me in a far different womb
A savage cave of agony
Now, shuddering, gasping, groping
I see that the fear of pain
Was my only height.
Oh these faint dreams of solid earth!
How stillness taunts an endless pendulum!
Swing and bounce, roll and ripple…
I am a sculpture of wind
A fist of water
A breath of flesh…
What? I hear;
You say the strangeness of this fall
Is not that it occurred
But that it seems strange…
Come, you say
You are the thirty side of twenty-five
Will you be the still side of life
Before you recognize who you are?
How you mutter of strangeness!
As if dreaming of punch-card poetry
Unionized abandon
Regulated passion!
You wish to know who you are?
You are a radiating ricochet of reason
A precious portrait of perhaps
A swinging chandelier of certainty
A vertical river
A nursing mutterer of heretical truth
An explorer of everywhere
A nomad of nowhere
And all that is man, woman and child
Each alone, all together
A family, a party, a world
Of one.
There! -- I thank you
Am I satisfied?
By God, I had better be
For these words shall live far beyond me
And my epitaph, if I forget myself
Shall be:
How he whined
That he could wield
Such magic!
Hard Heart
What -- is this a fortress?
These shivering ramparts
Cries of defense and rampage
Archers, defenders
Knights and reporters
Look again
Break this tale:
They wear the same colours.
What -- is this a King?
Does he sit on mountains of good gold
Biting his nails for fear of thieves?
No -- he is an employer
He rents vagabonds.
Listen!
He cries
My heart is a hard scar!
Watch his hands
They are a magician’s
Sawing himself.
What -- is this a treaty?
A bargain of peace?
Squint at the print
Unless invaded…
A certain clause
When co-signed by the same hand.
Trust
Listen to the tale of the strangest beast
His eyes squinting with distance
His hide nothing but a cloak of scars
Listen to his circling, his testing, his never-ending quest for simple flesh…
Listen to his yearning!
The crackle of his hard beating heart
A static of intimacy
The waving of his soft antennae
A click of electric distance.
Come; we shall visit his lair
And see the writing on his walls:
Enough alone, enough alone…
He writes frantically; one hand cramped
The other erasing, sketching:
Love, love, love me…
Trace his voyages
They are epic
A spore in search of soft earth
He spins in an endless wind
Hurling speeches of solidity
At passing rooted hordes…
Regard his pursuer
The dark angel of trust
They dance oddly
Both trying to lead
The beast cries: let me trust!
The dark angel replies: first, trust!
How long can this last?
Who knows?
Both are patient…
Loved?
I was so wrong
I read of a boy who, though beaten
Grew from his harsh nest with bright feathers.
He is hard, impatient, intolerant, almost rude
But his cheeks are red; he slaps his thighs
And laughs at fools.
His blows were not his downfall
He was a rigged ship in the midst of storms
He moved in his flailing wind…
I was wrong because
I thought that the blows were all that tore my sails;
I was wrong because
I thought the wind was physical
Personal.
I was wrong because
I thought I was hated.
In talking, in listening, in speaking
I know I was not hated.
The prickly indifference of the hollow heart
That was the truest, harshest blow
Not hatred
Not violence
Not anger
Just the apathy of the dead
Striking with stinking hands.
I was not separate
Not judged
Nor found wanting in anything
But misery.
My crime was the crime of all youth;
Young hearts scald the walls of old fear
I was a forest besieged by a city
A wind enclosed in stone
A stream bottled in hot sand;
Not sheltered, but held
Not guided, but restrained
Not wanted, but kept
Not hated
Worse;
Not loved.
Still City
See the old teacher
Lost in lingo
Stale-eyed he scribbles
A cramped mage of matriculation…
This sorcerer of syllables
Lashes habit into cross-hatches
Stitches new beasts from old hides
And hears the small applause
For their tortured lurchings
A staccato tapping of too-many feet.
His purpose is applause
Originality his enemy
He has become a professor
He professes
Not believes.
See the old teacher
Grasping the widening handles
Of curious youth.
He starts in secret danger
This soft sophist of stagnation
He no longer travels; so
He must slam all opening suitcases
Rip tickets
And recite the dangers of foreign lands.
See this teacher
He has many brothers
In a still city besieged by doubt
They pass pamphlets of foreign foes
Knowing nothing of defense
They can only resist.
What lies beyond these rusted gates
These sewers of convoluted silence
These high walls of old habits
Out on the plains..?
Let us look.
We may mount these walls
By turning our heads
And see an equality of birds and herds
Twisting and diving, flying and falling
Through high streams of clear air;
The principles of flight their only destination
The method of wind their only flight.
In this clutter of certainty
This categorical chaos
There are no parasites
One mounts not others
But oneself.
The charged songs of solitude
Ring out from all heights;
There is no hierarchy
But the last melody.
This is the view the still city repels
The still city is not age
Sad children live there
And the waking old are sometimes flung from parapets
The key to the still city
Is privileged inactivity.
Rewarded for stillness
The inhabitants turn to dust
They fear strong wind
Fear the disintegration of movement
As a statue
Coaxed from its pedestal
Would fall and shatter.
Sister
Her silent caves
Are hung with dark portraits
Of old pain
Listen --
A drip of saltwater
Lost echoes of old cries
Blind hiding birds
Startled with broken wings
Beat and squawk in fear and rage.
Look --
This is a maze
Each cave a picture-book…
See --
Here sits a tiny girl
Caged in a chaos of empty hearts
Hands white on the cold bars
Her smile dissolving in snarls
She shields her small soul from all beatings
Takes it, blesses it
And casts it down
Down past memory
Past love, joy, hope
Past the harsh bedrock of pain
Down to a cave within a cave.
Three tears she drops before leaving
And vows to her soul: I will return…
It waits still.
See, here --
A party
A little girl
A desperate hope
An endless grasping of flying skirts
A wide smile, a silent plea
Small fists on torn fabric
A soft void of empty waiting.
At the party she stands
Her smile spread in selling:
Give me love
I will give you joy!
She watches and waits…
No takers.
Another view, older now --
A library, a book
Night, solitude
All gears fail
She sits holding, staring; the words flow and fade…
What distant slumber holds her captive?
She feels like a miner failing in bad air
Sagging and grasping at rock
Lost in a tired dream of tight distance
She falls in the soft fogs of an endless beach…
Here; see my sister --
See -- there is now a hardness
My sister must love.
Rejected, she must love rejection.
Here in the dark halls
Of a soft falling building
Sitting, her hand pressed to her heart
She feels the slow sagging of herself
The silent falling of endless distance
The enduring death of the unloved…
To my sister
This is still a foreign word:
Love!
Driven underground by a harsh sun
She sits in sealed caves.
Above, the world has changed
Children cry of the pleasure of life
Wild rains thunder over rising crops
Birds rise like diamonds flung in sunlight
Her beautiful lover cries for her
Her brother calls in love
We cry, we wonder:
Can she hear us?
Fear not, sister
We are patient in love.
Deep in her cave
My sister waits.
Listen, sister
Listen to the drumming love of our bright rain
Listen to the labour of all good people
Listen to us; we mine for your beauty.
Listen, sister
Return, sister
You are loved.
